Tage frid was a Danish-born woodworker, Frid had an inestimable influence on the development of the studio furniture movement in the United States. “Without a doubt, Frid represents the single greatest influence on American woodworking education today,” writes Michael A. Stone, author of Contemporary American Woodworkers. According to the famed woodworker, Jere Osgood, “It’s reached a point where most of the people teaching in wood programs on the East Coast are either students of Frid or students of his students. We in turn pass on his ideas, consciously and unconsciously, to our own students.”

• Born: 1915
• Died: 2004
• Hometown: Copenhagen, DK

About Tage Frid

Frid’s students include noted American studio furniture makers such as Hank Gilpin, Jere Osgood, Alphonse Mattia, William Keyser, John Dunnigan, and Rosanne Somerson.

Son of a silversmith, at the age of 13 Tage Frid started a five-year furniture apprenticeship in Copenhagen, followed by work in cabinet shops. He worked for nearly a decade at the Royal Danish Cabinetmakers, after which he spent time in Iceland. He immigrated to the United States in 1948, recruited by Aileen Osborn Webb of the American Craft Council to head the program in woodworking of the School for American Craftsmen in Alfred, New York. He moved with this program to the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1950. In 1962 he became professor of Woodworking and Furniture Design at the Rhode Island School of Design, retiring in 1985.

From 1948-52, Frid was represented at Webb’s ground-breaking America House gallery in NYC, and in 1952 he opened Shop One in Rochester, NY with John Prip and Frans Wildenhain. There he showed work that was made in his own studio, “Donovan and Frid.”
Frid was an editor of Fine Woodworking magazine from its inception in 1975 to his death in 2004 and is best known for his three-volume work, Tage Frid Teaches Woodworking.