This is an installment of the Artgus Artist Spotlight, an ongoing series presented by the Arts & Culture section, intended to highlight the artistic talents of the wider Wesleyan community. To nominate a student artist for a profile, go to tinyurl.com/3ttmszh4. In this Artist Spotlight, Contributing Writer Molly Connolly-Ungar spoke with Dotan Appelbaum ’22 about his work as a furniture maker. 

Dotan Appelbaum is a senior from Minneapolis. In his spare time, he designs and creates furniture. You can see his work on his Instagram @dotanappel. He recently won two awards in furniture making, one (Best in Show) at the Innovation and Design Competition held by the International Society for Furniture and Design and one from the Fresh Wood Woodworking competition. The Argus sat down with him to talk furniture, Judaism, and pets. 

The Argus: Hi! Could you start with an overview of your furniture, assuming I am a fool who knows nothing?

Dotan Appelbaum: I make handcrafted fine furniture that I design myself. I’ve made a variety of different types of furniture, but the two threads are a little bit of what I call “neo art deco” furniture design—home furniture stuff. And then I’ve done a lot of Judaica Furniture. I made a piece that I call the Abulafia lectern, which is a synagogue lectern, a bimah, inspired by a medieval Iberian synagogue. I just made a Torah Ark for the Wesleyan Jewish Community that’s in the Bayit now. That was actually a two-and-a-half-year project. I designed a Hanukkiah that I imagine will be a product at some point. 

A: When you graduate, are you hoping to go into furniture making?

DA: I think it’s definitely a possibility. I also am an artist aside from furniture; I’m majoring in Studio Art and doing a thesis in painting with sculpture as well. The way I think about it, I have art and I have furniture and those are going to be things that I do throughout my life. And I’m going to have a serious practice of both of them, but what I do to pay the bills is gonna depend on what opportunities come up. But I think I have this foundation of things that I’ve already designed that I can make, things that I’ve made that I want to sell. 

A: So how did you first get into making furniture?

DA: It started at summer camp when I was 11. The summer camp that I went to has a small woodshop and it’s always been one of the really popular parts of camp because of the power tools and saws, and everything. So everyone wants to do it as soon as they’re able to. I signed up for it when I was 11…but then I wasn’t super into it for most of my time as a camper except for my last summer, and then I decided I wanted to come back on that staff a few years later and I took a shop class in high school. But I didn’t really have any formal serious training. Then I went back on staff and it sort of snowballed from there. I found a woodshop back in Minneapolis so when I went home I could work on stuff. At the time, whatever I was doing, I was teaching myself, so I was doing projects based on what it was I wanted to learn. That became part of my art here. 

And then last year, I decided to take the year off. I spent nine months at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship in Maine, doing their nine-month comprehensive, which is their longest program for teaching furniture making. It kind of covers all the areas. A bunch of different projects. 

A: Time for an important question. What do you think is the best, and what’s the worst piece of furniture on campus?

DA: Oh, wow.

A: Take some time to think about it.

DA: Wow. [We sit in contemplative silence for a few moments] Okay. I got it. I think the worst piece of furniture is the dining room chairs that they put at the tables in every wood-frame house.

A: Okay.

DA: And the reason why: Theoretically, it’s not a controversial chair. It’s a mass-produced chair. But what bothers me most about it is that I have never seen one that isn’t falling apart in some way. All of the joints are coming unglued. Something about the construction, about the manufacturer, is just so poor that none of them have held up. If you publish this, if you put this in print, I challenge someone to find me a chair that isn’t broken in some way. 

The best piece of furniture…. There’s not a lot of crafted furniture on campus, but I can also look at mass-produced furniture for its design and stuff, and I think there’s this chair, this desk chair, that I have seen in the class that I have in Hall-Atwater…. It has the round tabletop thing. The reason I like it is because the seatback, I think it’s plastic or aluminum maybe, and it’s got these multi-axis curves to it, it’s like a frame, that then has some sort of—I don’t know if it’s a textile, it’s definitely synthetic—something stretched over it, but because of how the frame is curved in multiple different ways, the fabric stretches in this really interesting and ergonomic way that I think is very good. 

A: What are some of the other challenges for you of making your art, whether it’s furniture or other kinds of art?

DA: I think doubt is an element of it, that’s especially easy to feel when you’re making furniture. The process is so different in that with art generally, except for a lot of the stuff that I do actually, there’s room for change through the process. There’s room for adjustment. But with furniture and with woodworking and art that uses furniture processes, you have to have a design, you have to have a process, there’s an order of operations. [Chair of Art and Art History] Tula [Telfair], my thesis advisor, says a painting should be beautiful at every part of the process. I think it’s a little different with furniture. There are gonna be ugly parts of it, and you’re the only one who can see past that. It takes a while to get to where it looks like it’s supposed to look, and you have to be able to see past it. 

A: Any preference for wood type?

DA: Yeah, I mean I have certain ones that I like more than others. I’m always happy with cherry and walnut. Last year, I was working a lot with ebonized oak, which is where you take oak and apply iron acetate which is just steel wool dissolved in vinegar, and that causes a reaction with that tannic acid inside of the wood and turns it a deep, jet black. 

A: That’s amazing!

DA: Yeah, it’s really cool. And I was pairing that with honey locust—okay, honey locust is my favorite wood. It’s super abundant on the east coast, the trees are everywhere, there are a lot of honey locust trees on campus, actually, but it’s super rare in the lumber industry for some reason. And this is weird. There are certain trees, certain lumber species, that people use for woodworking, for furniture, and there are certain ones that just aren’t in the market, for whatever reason…. At big lumber yards, if they do have it, it costs a lot of money because of how rare it is. Or if you get it from someone who cut a tree down, they sell it for super cheap because it’s not precious or anything. I was able to get a lot of honey-locust last year and I discovered that if you heat it up—and my preferred method is to put it in the oven, actually—it brings out these purple tones in the wood. It’s already got a pink-orange quality to it, but something happens when you heat it up, something about the oils in the wood, I think, it turns purple. I just discovered that by chance, but I’ve been doing that a lot.

A: You were talking about how you made the ark and the lectern. Is a lot of your work influenced by your Judaism?

DA: A lot of it is. I think there’s an element of like, “I can’t escape that,” as far as design inspiration goes, but it all comes from somewhere. The three big Judaica things that I’ve done were the Ark, which was a matter of like, “Oh, I’m an amateur woodworker, I really like this community, I want to do something for this community, let’s go ahead with the project to make a new Torah Ark for the Wesleyan Jewish Community.” And this was before I actually had really learned furniture making, although I finished it after the nine-month comprehensive. So there’s that. For the lectern, I was really lost at the beginning of that project segment. It was the curves segment, and so it’s like “make…anything…with curves in it.”

A: Broad. 

DA: Really broad. For the first few days of designing, nothing was working for me. I could not make the designs that I was trying to work with be successful in any way. So I went back to this synagogue that I learned about in an art history class a few years ago, and I started looking at that and looking at the architecture and the carvings on the walls and the style there and everything and thought like, “What would happen if I took that and used it as inspiration for a piece of furniture?” And that’s how that happened. 

A: Do you have a favorite piece you’ve made?

DA: I think it’s the lectern. It’s definitely the lectern. I put so much time into it. My estimate is 250 to 300 hours over an eight- to nine-week period. As far as the design process goes, I went so deep into the inspiration and the thoughtful nature of the design in a way I hadn’t with other pieces. I’ve been showing it off.

A: Excellent, as you should.

DA: Yeah, I submitted it to two competitions and I won awards in both of them. 

A: Was that really cool, to be able to go and have your piece shown off?

DA: It was super super cool. A lot of people were talking to me about it, and asking me questions, and congratulating me, which was really really nice. It was a surprise—I saw the competition beforehand and I was really nervous. I was like, ‘No, I’m not gonna win,’ so it was super cool to actually win that competition.

A: Final question. Because it’s a profile, and I think this should be asked in any profile…. Do you have cats?

DA: I don’t have cats. 

A: Do you have any other pets?

DA: I do, I have a gecko. 

A: A gecko?

DA: A leopard gecko.

A: Oh, I’m so glad I asked. Please tell me about the leopard gecko!

DA: I got him at the end of spring 2020. It was the beginning of COVID-19, and you know how loneliness was at that time.

A: Mhmm.

DA: I’m just at home, all day, doing online classes, and I wanted to get a pet. I looked at all these different pets I could possibly get, and I settled on a leopard gecko and then I got so impatient. That was such a quick, impulsive decision, especially considering that they live for 27 years.

A: Oh, my god.

DA: So I made a big commitment! He’s part of my life. But I actually—in the middle of my last Zoom class for a sociology class—I turned off my camera, switched to my phone, drove to the reptile store while listening in on this class…. And then I went in and purchased a gecko.

A: That’s fantastic.

DA: Yeah.

A: What’s the gecko’s name?

DA: His name is Tibni. 

A: That’s adorable!

DA: I found it by searching obscure biblical names.

A: Is he with you?

DA: No comment.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Molly Connolly-Ungar can be reached at mconnollyung@wesleyan.edu