Lockwood's Retired Chairs Get a Second Act

by DENISE WOLFE

For decades, the study chairs in Lockwood Library did exactly what they were built to do: they held up under all-nighters, group projects and generations of students cramming for finals. Over time, that heavy use had caught up with them. Imitation leather had cracked, legs had gone wobbly, screws had gone missing and hardened gum was under the seats. After years of wear and tear, the chairs couldn't hold up for students any longer.

As part of an effort to refresh Lockwood's spaces and better meet the needs of today's students, the Libraries began retiring the chairs, marking them for disposal and stacking them in the building's basement.

More than 60 chairs made the move from Lockwood to the Center for the Arts. Many were pressed straight into service furnishing classrooms and graduate studios. The rest sat in storage for nearly two years, weathered by temperature and moisture, until Whitney Kehl Chamberlain, the Department of Art's resource manager, landed on a new plan: turn them into art.

She had been looking for a home for exactly this kind of material.

"I've had this idea in my back pocket since we got the chairs," Chamberlain said. "We could do some art projects with them, since we weren't going to need them all for refreshing furniture in our spaces."

An open call went out in April 2026 to UB students, faculty, staff and community members. They were invited to transform the retired Lockwood chairs into original works of art.

"The aim was to engage makers across disciplines and the community, to transform one chair into many, multifaceted new creations," Chamberlain said.

That plan, One and Many Chairs: A Cradle-to-Grave Exhibition with the UB Department of Art, is now a fall 2026 exhibition in UB's Center for the Arts.

For the Libraries, seeing old furniture reused this way is a fitting outcome. Refreshing a space for current students doesn't always have to mean that old pieces disappear entirely. Sometimes they just move on to a new kind of usefulness.

One and Many Chairs is on view beginning Sept. 1, with an opening reception on Sept. 3 at 5 p.m. in the Department of Art's Lower Art Gallery, Room B45, Center for the Arts.