Wendy Maruyama

Conceptually her work deals with social practices such as her Japanese-American heritage, feminism, and wildlife endangerment in Africa.

[3] Maruyama served as the head of the Furniture Design department at San Diego State University for 25 years.

In 1980, she was one of the first women, and the first deaf student to complete an MFA at the Rochester Institute of Technology's School for American Crafts in New York.

[3][4][5] Maruyama taught at the Appalachian Center for Crafts in Smithville, Tennessee, from 1980 to 1985, and served as head of the woodworking and furniture design program from 1982 to 1985.

Her earliest works in the 1970s were very typical of the style of that time, in which she used visible cabinetmaking skills, compound bent lamination, celebration of complex wood grains and types.

These women responded to the marginalization felt by a male-dominated field by making work that used complex joinery, bent lamination, and technical processes.

[6] Maruyama felt restricted by this type of highly technical furniture, and set out to make more expressive works during her time studying at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

[7] Maruyama had held a studio space in the Glashaus in Barrio Logan in San Diego for many years, until 2017 when the building was sold and renovated.

[9] Her work, Patterned Credenza, was acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of the Renwick Gallery's 50th Anniversary Campaign.

This work draws attention to the wrongful slaughter of elephants and rhinoceroses for the harvest of their tusks for the $10 billion annual ivory industry.

These pieces include documentary photographs of Dorothy Lange and Tōyō Miyatake alongside barbed wire, tar paper, and domestic objects.

Their purpose is to display the sheer mass of those displaced as well as to evoke a sense of humiliation endured by the Japanese internees.