This chair cradles moms-to-be in maternity photos, frames Grammy-winning musicians beckoning from album covers, commemorates factory workers savoring a night out in glossy Polaroids. It has seated presidents and prisoners.
This chair — known as the rattan throne or the peacock — makes you sit up straight. It wants you to be seen.
Like wall art of Jesus, M.L.K. and J.F.K. and sofas zipped tight in plastic wrap, peacock chairs became hallmarks of Black American décor, starting in the late 1960s. The chair spoke to notions of identity and community that felt new and empowering at the time and were stoked by one of the most indelible photographs of the 20th century. In the photo published in 1968, Huey P. Newton, a co-founder of the Black Panther Party, beholds the viewer from a round-backed wicker chair with a rifle in one hand and a spear in the other.
Today, the chair kindles a shared instinct to cherish lives worth celebrating — of sharp-dressed grandparents and fly aunties, anniversaries and graduations — as old and new generations connect to it.
“The chair has become a keeper and witness to many of our most celebratory, intimate and joyful moments,” wrote Kiyanna Stewart, co-author of “BLK MKT VINTAGE: Reclaiming Objects and Curiosities That Tell Black Stories,” in an email. The collectibles store Ms. Stewart co-owns with her wife in Brooklyn gave the book its name and rents a variety of vintage peacock styles to stage, television and movie productions.
The peacock’s magic is in how it appears stately on its own without subsuming the identity of its subject. The bulbous back offers visual framing and physical support, flowing seamlessly into broad arms that embrace the sitter before tapering into an hourglass-shaped base. Ornament can come from contrasting colors in the strands or from symmetry in the framework. The density of the weave can make a chair appear delicate or beefy.
Many cultural groups make a chair part of their rites. An Israeli version of the hora folk dance, where honorees are hoisted high above the crowd in chairs, is often done at Jewish weddings and mitzvah ceremonies. There’s often a thronelike seat reserved for the guest of honor at a quinceañera, the coming-of-age gala that celebrates Latino girls (and increasingly in the United States, boys), as they turn 15.
But in Black social traditions, there’s no singular event for the chair, though it’s been a fixture in baby showers, prom celebrations and nightclub foyers. “I can put it in the middle of the street and people come to me asking if they can sit in it,” said Scheherazade Tillet, an artist who uses the chair in the girls’ leadership and visual arts trainings she co-founded in Chicago. As a prop in her portraiture classes, she observes that sitters seldom need coaching to look regal. “There’s something about it that allows them, without explanation, to naturally reflect self love and majesty.”
It also instantly signals community pride and dignity, especially among people who were moved by Newton’s photo. The funk maestro George Clinton recreated this scene when he wanted to summon ideas of solidarity and strength for the cover of Funkadelic’s 1979 album “Uncle Jam Wants You.” “Huey Newton in that chair or that chair period, you know, had culturally become kind of a leader’s throne or a sign of power, of unity,” he said in an interview.
On her “Formation” tour, in 2016, Beyoncé remixed the image onstage, seated on her pedestal, centered between two spears. The tour followed her performance of the “Formation” single at the Super Bowl where her backup dancers were dressed as Black Panthers.
Beyoncé’s throne was a stylized metallic version, but peacock chairs are generally made of wicker. The pliable material has been popular in the United States since the late 19th century, when people began to display it alongside furniture in the prevalent Rococo Revival style that imparted a European sense of grandeur. If the vine-like embellishments of Rococo Revival took inspiration from nature, wicker’s reedy textures were an earthy complement.
The desire for wicker was so great at the time that Samuel Colt diversified his firearms business by starting a furniture imprint, finding a lucrative new use for the French Osier Willow trees he’d planted on his Connecticut property to help mitigate flooding. Colt lured master crafters from Germany partly by creating well-appointed luxury housing on his manufacturing campus that emulated their native Swiss chalet style.
The design that would become the peacock chair had far less privileged beginnings. One of the earliest published glimpses of that distinctive bird-fanning-its-plumage silhouette comes from 1912, in photos of goods made by inmates of the Bilibid Prison in Manila.
Alejandro Acierto, an arts professor at Wayne State University, researched the peacock’s provenance during a crafts fellowship. While Manila was still a Spanish colony, he said, Bilibid’s crafts program offered an endemic practice that kept its population engaged. “It wasn’t about commerce or some reformist approach to job training,” said Mr. Acierto. “There’s a long tradition of basket-making and weaving among northern Filipinos and folks from the mountain regions.”
When the United States acquired the Philippines after the Spanish-American War in 1898, the “Manila chair” or “Bilibid chair,” as it was then called, became mass produced and widely sold. The sumptuous new shape was especially desirable to photographers, who already appreciated wicker for its ease of moving around the studio and heat dissipation, keeping portrait subjects less sweaty under the hot lights. Celebrities and presidents were captured in the peacock through the following decades, in images across news and entertainment media. The chair became a status symbol associated with luxury and leisure.
After languishing during the Great Depression, wicker furniture became vogue again in the 1950s through the next two decades, owing to an affinity for tropical aesthetics in media and design, coinciding with the rise of chains like Cost Plus World Market and Pier 1 Imports.
In the same period came a torrent of traumatic civil rights clashes as states struggled with efforts to integrate schools and resolve cases of violence against Black people. In the fall of 1966, Newton and his college friend Bobby Seale created the Black Panther Party, taking a strength-in-numbers approach to confronting police brutality and forming a network of social services programs that spread to 48 states.
“The nature of the party was to defend ourselves against, initially, the police,” said Fredrika Newton. As the co-founder of a nonprofit organization named for her husband, Ms. Newton leads an effort to preserve Panthers history through a museum in Oakland and an archival collection housed at Stanford University.
A mainstay of the group’s savvy communications approach was its newspaper, which employed provocative prose and compelling imagery. The photo of Newton in the chair was taken by the photographer Blair Stapp and first appeared in an edition of The Black Panther before being enlarged into posters. Its caption is an ultimatum: “The racist dog policemen must withdraw immediately from our communities, cease their wanton murder and brutality and torture of black people, or face the wrath of the armed people.”
“It was really important to show strength and courage and leadership,” said Ms. Newton, 73, an Oakland, Calif., resident. “Huey was a symbol for all of that.” She continued, “I don’t think that he wanted to be an icon. I know that he would not have wanted the focus on himself in that way. He was probably a little embarrassed by it.”
As Newton’s image in the chair spread across the country, so did what Mr. Clinton calls a “Black awareness,” spurred by a heightened sense of agency and cultural freedom that was often expressed in personal style. “You started seeing dashikis and bow ties and shades and tams and Afros,” said Mr. Clinton, 83, who worked as a barber before his music career began to flourish. “Afros was the threat to my business. So I remember that look, both in admiration and the fact that I’m glad I ain’t doing hair no more.”
With peak visibility, by the 1970s and 1980s, the chair’s image shifted from reflecting far-off luxury to homegrown pride and accessible style.
“Here in New York, you could buy them in Woolworth’s and Sears,” for between $25 and $75, said Neffi Walker, owner of The Black Home stores and interior design studio. Ms. Walker, 50, developed an affinity for the chair after growing up with one in her childhood home in Harlem. Last year she posted a pre-order announcement for a streamlined, contemporary rendering of the peacock, made by Indonesian crafters, to her Instagram feed. Priced at $950, the inventory of 200 sold out within five days of the post, “before the shipment even got here,” she said.
If broad public enthusiasm had cooled by the 1990s, the chair continued to enthrall Amanda Wicks, 34, who was then a girl in St. Louis discovering glamorous pictures of her grandmother in it in nightclub scenes. She recalls it as “something I thought was beautiful, but also signified a good time.”
The amber chair she bought on Facebook Marketplace in 2020 for $500 now sits in the office of her Atlanta-area home in a tableau of Black art and cultural imagery: a newspaper vending box containing issues of The Black Panther; framed album covers including Michael Jackson’s “Thriller and Stevie Wonder’s “Hotter Than July”; Funko figurines of Aaliyah and Jean-Michel Basquiat; her mother’s landscape oil painting.
Whenever Ms. Wicks’ husband, William Ford, 39, sits in one of the two peacock chairs in their home, “I just feel like the coolest thing ever,” he said. “It’s kind of like part of your outfit.”
But flair comes at a price, Mr. Ford admits. “It is not comfortable at all.”
Cheyenne Concepcion, an artist and landscape architect, sought to make the chair more functional. “It is really upright and not very reclined,” she said. “You wouldn’t put it at the end of the dining table, right?” (The rock virtuoso Lenny Kravitz did this very thing, as seen in a recent Architectural Digest video tour of his Paris home.)
So in 2022, Ms. Conception released a reimagined peacock as part of a furniture collection that reconnects the chair to its Philippine origins and draws on her own Filipino American identity. She named her collection Reclaim, seeking to “tell this history, but also, you know, combine the tactility and logic of design with this conceptual, historical adventure behind this chair.”
Her version of the peacock is stronger, shorter, more comfortable and less fanciful than the conventional design, merging the organic look of Philippine buri — reed — with bold American metal. The hourglass shape is still present but subtle, in the angles of the chair’s back and legs.
“You’re lucky as a designer to have something where people already associate feelings and preferences and biases and already associate this object with power and presence,” said Ms. Concepcion. “When looking at my work, I hope that folks can learn about the history. Also I do hope that I’m carving out space, claiming space as a Filipino American designer.”
For all the history, family memories and aspirations Ms. Tillet sees in the chair, there remains a primary reason she uses it as a point of connection with the girls in her program.
“It is an ordinary thing that transcends its ordinary-ness, and it has the same effect on the people who sit in it.” In the peacock chair, she says, “the ordinary gets to be celebrated.”
James Thomas is a software engineer in the Interactive News department, a team that creates tools used by reporters and editors to produce Times journalism.
The post The Peacock Chair and the Black Experience appeared first on New York Times.
