page_title: Al and Barbara Garvey
section_title: Woodworking
hierarchical_section_title: Al and Barbara Garvey / Art / Woodworking
caption_attribution_description: English: Al Garvey's first business flyer.
context_page_description: Al and Barbara Garvey are an American artist and tango dancing couple known for catalyzing hot tub culture in California in 1966. While living in Fairfax in Marin County, California, the Garveys built their own hot tub in which they could soak with friends. The practice spread into a cultural phenomenon throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
  The Garveys are both artists, with Al known as a painter, screen printer and woodworker. In 1972, Al was a founding member of the Baulines Craft Guild, a society of master artists willing to teach apprentices. His artistic doors and doorways have brought him praise. Barbara collaborated with Al on a screen printing commission titled We Are the Wall Itself in 1974. Barbara co-founded Folkwear Patterns with two other women in 1976, which continued as a pattern-making company under new ownership.
  In the 1990s, the Garveys began to teach tango dancing in the San Francisco Bay Area, after leading a resurgence of interest in tango dancing inspired by the musical Tango Argentino. In 2004, the Garveys moved to Puerto Vallarta in Mexico and continued to build a tango community and create art.
context_section_description: Al Garvey is a woodworker known for his doorways (doors and door frames), sold under his Door/Ways trademark. His work was described as "intricate and sensuous". He not only formed the wood of his doors but he fabricated the brass and bronze hardware. Al fashioned a Dutch door made of stained glass and a combination of Acacia koa and cedar driftwood; this was later shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in the 1999–2000 retrospective exhibit titled Far Out: Bay Area Design 1967–73, alongside other hippie-era artworks such as Janis Joplin's psychedelic Porsche 356.
  Al built himself an art studio at his house in Fairfax by reclaiming the old-growth redwood planks from a very large wine barrel that had been discarded next to a road in Sonoma. He said that the new studio smelled like wine for five years afterward. Inside the home, he built a fireplace of Mexican river stone with a relief sculpture above it that he made from fallen branches of Pacific madrone wood. The Garveys were influenced by Jean Varda, their Sausalito houseboat neighbor, who advocated an organic style of art that revealed "the hand of man."
  Al was a founding member of Arthur Carpenter's Bolinas Craft Guild in 1972, formed to connect apprentices with master craftsmen. Under the auspices of the guild, Al taught Germany-born sculptor Florian Roeper in 2003–2004 during a period when Roeper was working on various sculptures and Al was creating a notable door in the Mission district of San Francisco. When Al started woodworking, he took a long hiatus from painting.
caption: Al Garvey's business flyer for Door/Ways
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