Please Be Seated

A man sits with his legs crossed in a rocking chair.
Two people sit in furry green bean bag chairs and kiss.
A woman wearing a wide-brimmed hat sits in a chair beside two empty chairs.
Two people sit on a futuristic teal bench, one with their arm around the other, and stare directly ahead smiling.
Two people sit on chairs in an empty space with white walls.
A man sits with his legs crossed in a rocking chair.
Two people sit in furry green bean bag chairs and kiss.
A woman wearing a wide-brimmed hat sits in a chair beside two empty chairs.
Two people sit on a futuristic teal bench, one with their arm around the other, and stare directly ahead smiling.
Two people sit on chairs in an empty space with white walls.

The MFA’s Please Be Seated program was born in 1975 from the vision of Jonathan Fairbanks, a former curator in what was then the Department of American Decorative Arts. With seed money from the National Endowment for the Arts and additional support from Ethan Allen Inc., the Deborah M. Noonan Foundation, and the Robert Lehman Foundation, Fairbanks commissioned living makers to create benches and chairs that served as gallery seating for MFA visitors and joined the Museum’s permanent collection as artworks in their own right. This innovative approach—the first of its kind in the United States—allowed audiences a closer relationship with the work of celebrated makers of their day, including Sam Maloof, George Nakashima, Jennie Alexander, George Sawyer, Wendell Castle, Tage Frid, and Boston’s own Judy Kensley McKie.

The program in part serves the MFA’s mission of creating an accessible space for visitors during Museum visits by addressing needs related to mobility, stamina, sight, and touch. Fairbanks’s idea had precedent in similar questions of access and visitor comfort raised by Benjamin Ives Gilman, an MFA administrator between 1893 and 1925. Gilman wrote an essay titled “Museum Fatigue” for The Scientific Monthly journal in 1916 and expanded on his ideal museum protocols in a book, published in 1918, which specifically mentions the need for seating within galleries.

Please Be Seated has flourished since its inception, generating 83 works by 42 different artists. In recent years the program has welcomed works from a wider range of makers across different intersections and approaches to craft. They include Finnegan Shannon, Tom Loeser, Martin Puryear and, most recently, Aspen Golann and Peter Galbert. The MFA’s continued commitment to Please Be Seated underscores the important place of contemporary craft at the MFA for both the collection and visitors alike.

Highlights

A blue bench written on with

All Please Be Seated Works

Long wooden bench with shovel handles of various sizes and colors acting as backrests and rising from the bench at different heights

Please Be Seated Works On View

Two slim wooden chairs stand side by side

Retired Please Be Seated Works

Dive Deeper

Explore posts by MFA staff and the wider community on Art for This Moment and The Revolution Reimagined, the MFA’s blogs, featuring works in the Please Be Seated program.

Meeting Bench

Four people sit on a dark green curved wooden bench in a corner of a room with blue and white walls.

Rudolph Robinson’s Bench

Two people on an orange and deep brown wooden bench in a brightly lit hallway.

Bardwell Settee

A visitor reads an object guide on a wooden bench in "Tender Loving Care"

Bench with Back

A slim walnut plank sits atop 21 bowed hickory dowels, which are affixed to a cross section of a dark walnut tree to form a bench. Four tapered walnut cylinders descend from the plank’s underside.