The son of a mechanic, Doug Edge was gifted in math and mechanics and only discovered art serendipitously while studying at San Fernando Valley State College in Los Angeles. Soon after receiving his B.A. in art in 1965, he became involved in the Los Angeles art world, working at the Dwan Gallery and then Art Services, during which time he came to know Billy Al Bengston, Larry Bell, and many other young, Los Angeles-based artists. In the late 1960s, based on his idea of combining a common object and new materials with social commentary, Edge made a number of works of which Beaudry Chair is the first. As the artist later described the piece, “I was sitting in my studio in our grand old Victorian house, part of the late nineteenth-century middle-class Jewish neighborhood on the other side of Bunker Hill from downtown, when this epiphany happened. A Victorian chair that had come with the place caught my eye. I thought, why not make that chair in plastic. I took the chair apart, and had all the flat pieces cut out of Plexiglas, and had the legs turned on a metal lathe also out of plexiglass. I figured that the chair without a seat would not be usable to sit on and would, therefore, lose its function and would be just as absurd as the atom bomb that was silkscreened on the clear plastic back splat….The Beaudry Chair was named after the street where my studio was located and was the first of many common object pieces.”