Mark Lindquist

Who is Mark Lindquist?

Mark Lindquist is an American sculptor in wood, artist, author, and photographer. Lindquist is a major figure in the redirection and resurgence of woodturning in the United States beginning in the early 1970s. His communication of his ideas through teaching, writing, and exhibiting, has resulted in many of his pioneering aesthetics and techniques becoming common practice. In the exhibition catalog for a 1995 retrospective of Lindquist's works at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, his contributions to woodturning and wood sculpture are described as "so profound and far-reaching that they have reconstituted the field". He has often been credited with being the first turner to synthesize the disparate and diverse influences of the craft field with that of the fine arts world.

Among his notable early achievements are the introduction of the aesthetic of Asian ceramics into American woodturning and, along with his father, the notable wood turning pioneer Mel Lindquist, the development of new tools and techniques that expanded the vocabulary of woodturning, and the pioneering of the use of spalted wood.