High, potty, birthing, rocking, desk, wheel, electric, lawn: What do these words have in common? Each can precede the word “chair” and significantly alter its meaning. At the Museum of Everyday Life, you can contemplate all of them, and it’s more fun than you might expect.
An extensive collection of found and donated items populates “Deep Seated: chairs and the stories they tell,” the current exhibit at the Glover gallery-in-a-barn. Like 14 annual shows before it, this year’s iteration examines its chosen quotidian subject via history, philosophy, anthropology and a dash of wit. Alongside every object is explanatory wall text, and reading it is indispensable. Skip the labels, and “Deep Seated” is just an interesting bunch of things upon which one can sit.
The descriptions, written by museum owner Clare Dolan, are both edifying and entertaining. Who isn’t delighted to know, for example, that “Specialized seats to facilitate elimination have existed since around 2500 BCE”? Or that the earliest known use of “throne” to mean toilet appears in James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses? Acquiring such facts can make anyone a more scintillating dinner guest.
Just inside the gallery, which is a repurposed milking parlor, a poster introduces the exhibit. The creation and evolution of the chair, Dolan observes, derives from two human desires: to rest while remaining upright and to elevate oneself off the ground. And so, she deduces, “the story of the chair is in part a story about power.” She muses on what it means to elevate one person over others and how the “continued marriage of chairs and privilege” led to the use of “chair” to mean leader, head of the board, boss. In related wordplay, having a “seat at the table” implies inclusion.
If the earliest chairs were elitist, physical accommodations for human posteriors certainly made a beeline to ubiquity. Now, it’s difficult to imagine a circumstance in which we can’t sit down, and the museum’s exhibit reflects this.
What first greets the visitor is an armless wooden rocking chair. It seems basic until you realize the seat, which resembles a square piecrust, was woven with thick strips of maple. This antique was discovered “somewhere in New England” by furniture maker Për Courtney, who declared the weaving “a fabulous feat.”
If the earliest chairs were elitist, physical accommodations for human posteriors certainly made a beeline to ubiquity.
Nearby is a heftier Mission-style rocker with a broad seat, armrests and long, curved runner rails; its provenance is unknown. It is dedicated to Dolan’s late father, Thomas, whom she describes as the museum’s “philosopher at large.” The elder Dolan had a theory that rocking chairs absorb the experiences and histories of those who rock in them. The lullabies sung, books read, conversations and contemplations “sink deeply into its surface and are stored there,” his daughter writes. “A person with the proper sensitivities and training can ‘read’ these stored experiences through several hours of focused rocking.”
Some chairs were developed for the administration of services, such as dental work, hair drying and barbering. The examples here do not advocate for going back in time. A metal Ries dental chair from the early 20th century is intimidating: “Its stark simplicity and clamp-like headrest suggest punishment more than medical care,” the text reads. Still, this was an advancement: “Early dental procedures were carried out with the patient seated on the ground, their head firmly gripped between the dentist’s knees.” Even dentophobes have to admit that high-tech modern chairs are pretty cushy.
There are more chairs that serve a practical need: a wheelchair, a classic desk chair with swivel wheels, lightweight lawn chairs that fold up for easy transport. Non-farmers might not recognize the selection of old-fashioned milking stools — especially the handy strap-on variety with a spring under the seat, which allowed a milker to essentially bounce from cow to cow.
A Bamileke stool, from western Cameroon, is more artful and imbued with patrimonial power. Originally used for royalty to sit during ceremonies, the carved-wood chair “depicts ancestors and their intermediaries, including spiders, as well as buffalo, elephants, leopards, and turtles,” the text reads. In this example, a turtle supports a disc-shaped seat. It could have been borrowed from an African history museum, although one can also imagine a lineage-free Wayfair reproduction.
An evocative installation in “Deep Seated” reminds us that simply not yielding one’s place is a powerful act of resistance. In 1955, when a Black woman named Rosa Parks declined to vacate her bus seat for a white rider in Montgomery, Ala., it sparked a 381-day citywide bus boycott. At the Museum of Everyday Life, a copy of Parks’ 1992 memoir occupies a vintage bus seat; on the wall above is a reproduction of the call to action and a large photograph of Parks being fingerprinted for “boycotting without a just or legal excuse.”
Wall text adds this: “Throughout all of the years that Black Americans fought for the end to segregation, chairs, stools, and benches existed as sites of political contestation, across which Black power was manifested in acts of radical sitting.”
In contrast, a living room-like installation promotes taking it easy with a recliner, a beanbag chair and a velveteen chaise longue. Wall text informs us that the La-Z-Boy, invented in 1928, was originally intended for outdoor repose. Now, the deluxe overstuffed model with cupholders and a massage function is the epitome of American, well, laziness. On view at the museum is an economy recliner purchased for a mere $359.89 at Buck’s Furniture in Wolcott, “during the store’s infamous and controversial ‘Dumb Daughter Sale.’” The store closed in 2014. The chair, which Dolan purchased for her elderly father, proved to be uncomfortable and ended up in the garage.
Midcentury furniture designers Charles and Ray Eames are represented in the exhibit with a white molded-fiberglass chair — a design that became commonplace in classrooms across the country. From the same era, Eero Saarinen’s Tulip Chair replaces what he considered “the slum of legs” with a central pedestal. The sample here is white with an orange cushion.
“Deep Seated” does not avoid the tough subject of capital punishment — the sitting-down-to-die variety — though its facsimile of an electric chair is doll-size. You can imagine Wednesday Addams carrying out executions with this thing — though, on second thought, she probably preferred the guillotine. The museum notes that chairs used for punishment likely date back to the Middle Ages, but the contemporary electric chair was developed in the late 1880s. Thomas Edison, a proponent of direct current, was a fan. But alternating current won the day, wall text informs, and “the electric chair has gone on to execute more than 4,300 people.” Five of the 27 U.S. states that permit capital punishment still allow “the chair.”
Outside the gallery, several gaily painted “mosaic chairs” have a Vermonty story. Once fixtures on the lawn of East Hardwick resident Meredith Holch, they “likely supported the butts of almost every one of Meredith’s diverse community of friends.” The chairs survived the floods of 2023 and 2024. When Holch died in 2025, family members rescued them “from the perils of nature and the loneliness of the now empty house” and donated them to the museum. Visitors are welcome to sit a spell. ➆
“Deep Seated: chairs and the stories they tell,” open daily through May 2027 at the Museum of Everyday Life in Glover.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Butts in Seats | “Deep Seated” at Glover’s Museum of Everyday Life examines the chair and its meanings”
This article appears in August 12 • 2026.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
