This article is part of a series focusing on underrepresented craft histories, researched and written by the 2024 Craft Archive Fellows, and organized in collaboration with the Center for Craft.
Sweating and covered in specks of white paint, I set out to unravel and disassemble the tightly woven strands of rattan that were meticulously wrapped around the frame of a peacock chair. Amidst the tall unkempt grasses at the edge of the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution (RMSI) in Nashville, Tennessee, I pulled on the dried-out rattan strands while unprotected from the sweltering heat trapped near the Cumberland River basin. Visible bruises and scratches covered my arms. I stopped counting the bug bites after 10 minutes. Drips of sweat fell from my forehead. I eventually put my glasses in my back pocket after they kept slipping off my face. To say the performance was uncomfortable is an understatement. Quite simply, I was gross.
And yet, I was compelled to follow through with the chair’s disassembly — in part because of its entanglements with colonial carceral labor, American Victorian leisure, and the Black Power movement following the publication of the iconic image of Huey P. Newton seated in the chair in 1968. The performance, “Unraveling Imperialism” (2022), allowed me to excavate the peacock chair’s history. Embedded in it is a complex web of stories that reimagine the political potential and symbolic weight of a persistent yet unassuming remnant of American craft traditions.
Some weeks prior, I found the chair I tasked myself to disassemble discarded on a pile of accumulated trash and cut branches in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of Hadley Park on Nashville’s west side. While largely intact, it was covered with dirt and grime. Only portions of its construction had been damaged, like a couple of ornamental strands underneath the armrests and other pieces along the hourglass-shaped base. Additional hanging strands along the backside and under the seat had also broken, likely from their collision with the branches and trash beneath it. Despite its cosmetic defects, though, it was structurally sound.
During that initial encounter, I was compelled by how its abandonment seemed to reflect a loss of hope for the promises of the once-thriving Black neighborhood. Identified as trash, its presence highlighted a poignant moment in the neighborhood’s history when new wicker furniture styled with sad beige cushions on trending gray-toned porches replaced remnants of an economically vibrant Black community.
At that point, I had already been engrossed in a parallel project to understand how the Bilibid Prison in the Philippines — as well as the larger system of incarceration — shaped Pilipinx life inside and outside those prison walls during the American colonial occupation of 1898 to 1946. The discarded chair in Nashville was a descendant of the peacock chair, also called the “Bilibid Chair” or the “Manila Chair” alongside other pieces of wicker furnishings, that was part of a global trend toward the industrialization of leisure that drew in tourists from around the world at the turn of the 20th century. Tourists to the Bilibid Prison could visit the workshops and gaze upon numerous incarcerated people working in any of the eight Industrial departments where they made furniture, processed construction materials, crafted metal pieces for interiors and exteriors, embroidered clothing and fine lacework, and tailored garments for the prison population. Following their visit, tourists could order custom items from the sales catalog highlighting all the objects made by the prison’s incarcerated population.
First published by the Industrial Division of the Bureau of Prisons at Bilibid Prison in 1912 (with later versions released in 1917, 1924, and 1927), its pages underscored several strategies that enfolded American priorities of “benevolent assimilation” — or the notion that colonized Pilipinx subjects could only be fully assimilated into US culture, and therefore ready for self-sovereignty, through a steady, regimented embodiment of American cultural life via militarization. The Bilibid Prison, in turn, structured incarcerated life into the American ideals of civility. It purported to deploy rehabilitative programs through work, education, and bureaucratic self-regulation that it claimed would enable its incarcerated population to be prepared to “re-enter society on an independent self-respecting basis.”
As an extension of this larger American policy of benevolent assimilation, strategies to “reform” incarcerated people in the Philippines were intended to “prepare inmates for useful citizenship” through trade work and become productive, “civilized” members of society following their sentences. This approach persists today: Nearly 15 minutes from the site where I found the discarded chair sits a facility managed by the Tennessee Rehabilitative Initiative in Correction (TRICOR), a program dedicated to providing incarcerated people with “job training, program opportunities, and transitional services designed to assist offenders with a successful reintegration into society.” Local programs in Nashville prisons provide braille transcriptions (in the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution), run call centers through public and private partnerships (at the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center), and manufacture vehicle plates (in the TRICOR Logistic Center near the RMSI). Other facilities across the state manufacture textiles and packaging supplies, while incarcerated workers at the Turney Center Industrial Complex produce hardwood flooring through a public-private partnership providing companies with labor in a right-to-work state.
Contemplating the contemporary practices of US incarceration alongside the Philippine colonial context, it’s clear that the rhetoric of “job preparedness” and reformism is a longstanding hallmark of American industrial carceral labor. In a speech at the 1916 American Prison Association conference, Director of Prisons in Manila Waller H. Dade underscored the narrative of benevolent assimilation upheld by the larger system of colonial incarceration. Dade outlined that those imprisoned for longer sentences (initially as cadena perpetua, or “forever in chains”) would be assigned to their respective industrial labor posts within four months after admittance. Some would continue to work for a minimum of seven years before they could be transferred to a less stringent facility. Those “privileged” enough to graduate to the Iwahig Penal Colony to serve out the rest of their sentences were still tasked with cultivating, farming, and splitting the share of the crops they grew. While at Iwahig, they would not be subjected to the same panoptical surveillance patterns for which the Bilibid was known.
Though the living conditions were purportedly better, a 1914 article in the Bureau of Education’s Philippine Craftsman publication researcher O. Garfield Jones describes that “the foreman is quite disgusted when a good machinist is sent to Iwahig, where he does nothing but plow and hoe weeds.” Jones’s disdain for Iwahig, even when it was in many ways better for incarcerated people, was further clarified when he suspected that departments would “suffer in [their] efficiency from the fact that the best workmen are constantly being pardoned, dismissed by expiration of term of sentence, or sent to Iwahig as a reward for good conduct.” Still, Jones acknowledged that prisons were more effective in training colonial subjects, proclaiming the “Bilibid Prison is nearer the pedagogical ideal than the ordinary school.”
Jones was likely referring to a central component of the various rehabilitation programs in the Philippines: the Industrial Division, which trained and instructed nearly 95% of its population serving long-term sentences to manufacture numerous goods and to service the vast infrastructural needs of the prison’s daily operations. Occupying the west side of the Bilibid’s 27-acre footprint, the Industrial Division was formally established in 1907 following an order from the Secretary of Public Instruction seeking to expand the “trinket and cheap furniture work of the prisoners under the Spanish regime” that had remained part of incarcerated life between 1903 and 1905, according to Jones. While he was careful to specify how the value of goods produced was in line with the broader project of benevolent assimilation, he reported that the prison’s output helped produce roughly ₱100,000 of goods per year for the government, roughly $44,000 then or $1,418,700 in 2025.
Second in profits only to the machine shop that serviced automobiles and built transport carts, the Industrial Division dedicated to manufacturing numerous pieces of furniture from rattan and bamboo supplies employed the most workers in the prison, and the “Bilibid” Chair continued to reign supreme across all editions of the prison sales catalog’s reprinting.
First pictured in a photograph in the 1912 catalog of a dog lounging on the chair on a brightly lit tropical porch, the description of the Bilibid Chair proclaimed it as “perhaps the best known article manufactured in Bilibid Prison” where “hundreds of them have been shipped to various parts of the world, and their popularity is still increasing.” In later printings of the catalog, the chair is moved closer to the front, suggesting its dominance on the sales floor and overall increased popularity as an icon of leisure. Decorative arts historian Emily A. Morris noted their prominence as part of the Philippine Pavilion at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, writing in a 2012 paper that the chairs “met the praises of an enthusiastic American audience” and established a precedent as the “ultimate seats for celebrities who posed for publicity photographs throughout the twentieth century.”
Back in the 1960s, following the expansion of the city Interstate system, demographics and the characteristic signatures of North Nashville drastically shifted following a decades-long process of gentrification. With large development firms snatching properties in the area, established Black neighbors and their communities were displaced from spaces they made home. In a region that shares a rich history with the city’s historically Black colleges, including Tennessee State University (TSU), Fisk University, and Meharry Medical College, I was struck by how that once-recognizable symbol of Black Power had simply been discarded to the side of the road: on vacant land once occupied, blocks from TSU, and waiting to be developed. Yet apart from its haggard and used appearance, it was apparent that it had been a well-loved object though no longer useful.
Notably, the Bilibid chair’s elevated reputation and prominence in the cultural sphere followed the publication of a portrait of Black Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton in a 1967 issue of the organization’s bi-weekly newsletter. While its visible resurgence in the ’60s established the peacock chair as an icon of strength and sophistication, the chair had sustained its status as a symbol of luxury and wealth since as early as the mid-19th century — one that afforded its users a distinct register of leisure and decorative flair. Born from a desire for an imagined tropical proximity and the lightweight versatility as an indoor/outdoor decorative feature, the wicker furniture of late 19th-century stylings had steadily become a fixture of White American Victorian life that captivated middle-class Americans invested in vacation and travel. As curator Jeremy E. Adamson noted in his 1993 book American Wicker: Woven Furniture from 1850 to 1930, “Wicker had been firmly associated with the leisure and ease of country living,” which fashioned its design as “definitive vacation furniture.” For Adamson, wicker’s association with leisured life made it a ubiquitous feature of American middle-class furnishings, urban hotel stylings, and remote wilderness resort spaces that offered year-round relaxed looks. Noting its presence in the Bilibid’s catalog, I can only imagine how visitors to the prison fetishized the so-called “American Tropics” by acquiring products made in the Pacific colony.
Newton’s portrait, on the other hand, exuded a characteristic of opulence and strength, established partly by photographer Blair Stapp’s transformation of the chair into the throne of Black Power. Recontextualized in the space of Black Liberation, Newton returns our gaze — while holding a shotgun in one hand and a spear in the other — in an unmistakable gesture of confrontation with white supremacist reticence. (One might also read this image in the context of recently evacuated DEI programs and the strategic disassembly of human rights under the pen of the new US administration.) With his right foot placed just in front of the other, Newton’s posture alludes to a movement forward that embodies the threat towards “the racist dog policemen” who must “cease their wont[o]n murder and brutality and torture of black people, or face the wrath of the armed people,” as the poster text below the image reads. Unlike other portraits of celebrities seated in similar chairs decades prior — where the chair played a supporting role to the star subject seated within it — Newton’s portrait took on new symbolic proportions that imagined the chair and his figure as emblematic of the broader project of Black Defense. Seated in the Bilibid chair that enveloped and extended his whole body, Stapps’s photograph subtly reinforced the shape of a closed, raised fist held upright — the bodily gesture of resistance that emerged from radical political labor movements of the early 20th century and became a symbol of Black Power.
In my reading of Newton’s portrait, I’m struck by how it also avenges one of the first published images of a figure seated in a peacock chair over 50 years earlier: a 1914 photograph of an incarcerated Pilipina woman, dressed in a horizontal black-and-white-striped prison uniform seated with her child at the Bilibid. Unnamed and ill-described, the seated mother’s printed image and adjoining caption in the El Paso Herald continued the established rhetoric of leisure and power when it described her as “enthroned in a majestic peacock chair.” Centering the chair and not the subject seated upon it, the Herald’s caption extends the symbol of luxury despite the title of the article: “Jail Bird In A Peacock Chair.” The original photograph, taken by military photographer Charles E. Doty, places the mother in front of a Bilibid Prison wall, later edited out for publication. The stripes of her uniform mimic the striped patterning of the chair’s inner rim. What I imagine was a light breeze obscured the number she was given to identify her, seen painted or sewn just above the hem of the dress by her feet and on her chest where her child is positioned. Her returned gaze registers her exhaustion; she couldn’t enjoy the comforts of leisure (the caption below the Herald’s reprinting indicated she was “serving a life term for the murder of her husband”). It was in this image that the American symbol of rest and opulence was threatened and ripe for reimagination by Newton’s portrait a mere half-century later.
Metaphorically, then, my desire to move that abandoned chair in Nashville from the mound of discarded debris was more than a salvage. It was an effort to meditate on the confluences of colonial carceral labor and the devaluation of Black Power’s political possibility via gentrification in a portion of the city that was experiencing an incredible socioeconomic shift. Minimal-chic, boho aesthetics typical of wealthier buyers newer to the neighborhood illuminated the historical legacy of woven wicker furniture as a stylish signifier of opulence and time wealth. And while the peacock chair’s endurance as an icon of power and poise remains distinct from the exaggerated soft curves of contemporary wicker made prominent on nearby neighbors’ porches, its signature design exuded a dramatic flair that has become increasingly rare in the era of “minimalist aesthetic” stylings.
Still, the peacock chair continues to populate search queries on Facebook Marketplace as a desirable rental item for bachelorette and birthday parties, fashion shoots, and other social gatherings where pictures will be taken. Despite its significance as a symbol of Black Power established during the ’60s, the chair’s image — and the people that surround themselves with it — has remained an icon of wealth, leisure, and perceived proximity to the tropical landscapes of Oceania. Seen laid sideways amidst discarded waste, the chair became a strategy for me to study its layered meanings, literally deconstruct them, and later, transform it into a device to manage the constellation of thought across my artistic and scholarly projects.
But I want to return to the notion of value evoked by Newton’s portrait and by the circumstance of the abandoned chair in Hadley Park. While standing in as an ostensibly fallen symbol of power and strength, the chair’s interwoven histories evoke its ability to illuminate the individuality of its sitter. It displays their entitlement to wealth, luxury, importance, or all of the above. Framed by the flourishing back of the chair, an encounter with someone perched upon it is to approach them upon their throne.
And while there’s a longer and different conversation about who is entitled to those sensations of royalty, I’m curious about what the chair does that isolates the sitter from other members of their community. For me, to disassemble and ultimately destroy the chair was a gesture to question the iconoclasm of individuals who wish to not only take credit for but also embody the actualization of political ideals. If the Bilibid chair wraps its sitter in a way that glorifies the individual, what collective form of seating could we imagine instead? In a moment of increased anxieties about fascism and authoritarianism, when lives hang in precarious balance under the pen of executive orders, perhaps we ought to speculate on other forms of seating that embrace collective and community participation. How might we move past having a seat at the table to sharing the seat with others?
A complex web of stories encourages us to reimagine the political weight of an unassuming remnant of craft tradition, born of incarcerated labor in the Philippines.
