Julia Weber
Staff Writer
When looking at Alicia Dietz’s resume, from her journalism and advertising degree to her U.S. Army career, woodworking might seem out of place. But to Dietz, woodworking has been a part of her life for as long as she remembers.
“It was a familiar material,” Dietz said. “That’s what my dad and grandfather had worked in.”
Woodworker, furniture maker and U.S. Army veteran Dietz will kick off the Chautauqua Visual Arts Lectures for the 2025 Summer Assembly at 6:30 p.m. tonight in Hultquist Center.
Dietz is an exhibiting artist in “Crafting Home,” a CVA exhibition curated by Associate Director of CVA Galleries Erika Diamond. “Crafting Home” is on view at Fowler-Kellogg Art Center now through Aug. 3.
Though she didn’t formally train in woodworking until after a 10-year career in the Army as an officer and Blackhawk helicopter maintenance test pilot, Dietz found relaxation in the morale, welfare and recreation facilities where she could engage in woodworking. Afterward, she continued on to Vermont Woodworking School, where she received two degrees in woodworking and furniture making.
Dietz holds a Master of Fine Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University and has had exhibitions across the country and abroad. She has taught at universities and art schools nationwide and runs Alicia Dietz Studios, her own furniture-making and home decor business.
Dietz’s lecture will focus on lessons imparted during her time serving in the Army and how she has applied them to her craft as a woodworker. She will discuss the trajectory of her practice and the importance of materiality in her work, as well as explain the similarities she sees between her time spent as a pilot and as an artist.
The materiality of her two primary mediums, wood and concrete, is a driving factor of her design choices and artistic practice. Dietz said that while function is always “top of mind,” she enjoys pushing the relationship between function and design to enhance a piece’s formal elements.
While Dietz’s initial interest in woodworking was born out of the familiarity and proximity of the material to her upbringing, she said she also finds the life cycle of trees very relatable and significant as a material.
“(A Tree) withstands turbulent winds and soul-crushing storms; it will bend but not break in so many situations where you think it would,” she said. “There’s something really romantic about that, and the fact of then taking a tree and giving it another life when it moves on to its next phase has always appealed to me in that cyclical way of life.”
