LOS ANGELES — Early in 2020, Ryan Preciado was approached by a friend who wanted to recreate a dining set for a house designed by Modernist architect Rudolph Schindler in the 1930s. Preciado was trained as a carpenter, but his artwork, which has appeared in the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. biennial, is known for the ways it fuses sculpture and functional object — like a cabinet inspired by papal headgear. He wasn’t particularly compelled by the idea of churning out a reproduction. “I’m not,” he explained via telephone, “in the business of replicating someone else’s work.”
But his friend, journalist Andrew Romano, who owns Schindler’s Walker House in LA’s Silver Lake neighborhood, sent Preciado the research he’d done on the dining set, which appears in early photographs by Julius Shulman of the home. Preciado remembers Romano telling him: “This dining set, you might find it interesting.”
The design was indeed unusual: A sleek, Modernist table and its accompanying chairs appear to defy gravity, resting on slender bases that resemble inverted Ts. Moreover, they were crafted with Russian Ash, a fine grain hardwood, rather than the inexpensive plywood that was more typical of Schindler. When the world went into quarantine due to COVID-19, Preciado found himself examining the materials more closely. There he found a couple of references to a carpenter named Manuel Sandoval — and, he said, “I couldn’t get him out of my head.”
Preciado, who is of Mexican and Chumash descent, was curious to know more about this Latin American artisan, but there was precious little to go on. Romano had previously turned up some basic details to write a 2014 blog post about the Beverly Hills office of mid-century graphic designer Alvin Lustig, which featured mahogany cabinetry by Sandoval. The carpenter was Nicaraguan and he’d been part of the 1932 founding class at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Fellowship in Wisconsin. Sandoval is also mentioned in passing in Meryl Secrest’s 1998 biography of Wright, which notes that the young man had been interested in studying architecture, but Wright — renowned for exploiting the labor of his apprentices — preferred to keep him in the woodshop.
Preciado soon became low-key obsessed with the story of Sandoval — an obsession that resulted in his first solo museum show, So Near, So Far: Ryan Preciado – Manuel Sandoval, on view at the Palm Springs Art Museum through April 13. Through objects and ephemera — some of it connected to Sandoval, some inspired by him — Preciado pays tribute to a man whose name had been largely lost to history, but whose work nonetheless quietly materializes in architectural monographs and museum collections. For Preciado, “It’s about shining a light on lost labor.”
Sandoval was born in Nicaragua in 1898 and immigrated to the United States sometime around 1917. He had learned cabinetry from his father, and in 1932, after seeing Wright give a lecture in Chicago, he sent the architect a telegram: “EAGER TO JOIN COLONY AM EXPERT CARPENTER … HAVE STUDIED ARCHITECTURE AT HOME.” This immediately drew Wright’s attention, who invited Sandoval to Taliesin and put him to work creating benches and chairs for the playhouse, where fellows would gather to watch movies. Sandoval later executed woodwork on key projects for Wright, including an elegant wood-paneled office for department store scion Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. (now in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London), along with the furniture and fixtures for the V.C. Morris Gift Shop in San Francisco. In the late 1930s, Sandoval moved to Los Angeles, where he worked for a number of clients, including Schindler.
So Near, So Far includes rare original pieces by Sandoval, such as a striking drop-front desk from 1938 that incorporates elaborate carvings of flowers and birds in the Mayan Revival style, as well as a dining chair from another Schindler project. Particularly fascinating is the show’s ephemera, which features searing written exchanges between Wright and his acolyte, with Wright trying to renege on Sandoval’s fees. “I say you owe us at least what you can do to get the work properly finished and some help up here to make what cash we have lost on you look like a good investment in a good friend,” wrote Wright condescendingly in a missive from 1937. “But maybe that isn’t the way things work in Latin America.”
Most poignant, however, are the works that Preciado has made in Sandoval’s honor. Among them are several stools loosely inspired by the design of the V.C. Morris Gift Shop — both Wright’s architecture and Sandoval’s fixtures. (Imagine a wooden cube with arched cutouts that cradles a cushion in the same way a ring supports a diamond.) I also found myself moved by a small, trapezoidal box made of cherry and alder, titled “Atentamente” (2024), that conjures some Sandoval lore. “There’s a story that Frank Lloyd Wright leaves a pencil with Sandoval and Sandoval is so in love with the idea of Frank Lloyd Wright that he keeps the pencil and creates a beautiful little box lined with velvet to keep it,” explained Preciado. “We did our best to find the box or photos of the box, but we couldn’t find anything, so I reimagined it.”
The exhibition’s curator, Robert J. Kett, spent quality time in the Schindler and Wright archives, attempting to unearth any scraps related to Sandoval. But archives often bear the biases of their creators, leaving out what, at a given moment in time, might have been considered unimportant. “With marginalized figures in the archive, it’s so frustrating,” said Kett. “We can’t speak to or show things that don’t exist.” But unlike an archivist, an artist is free to imagine what might have been. “Ryan,” added Kett, “has this capacity as an artist to create objects that hold presence for that absence.”
During the early pandemic, Preciado’s fascination with Sandoval ultimately led him to recreate the Walker House dining set for Romano — and that, too, is on view in the show. It was no easy task, he noted. “The base of the chair and the table, it curves down like an I-beam. To get that curve was pretty daunting.” In reverse engineering the design, it was as if Preciado and Sandoval were communicating through space and time in the language of materials instead of words. “In that isolating time,” said Preciado, “I was alone with his presence.”
Now, that presence has greater definition. In addition to the exhibition, a new book gathers documents and photographs, as well as the objects presented in the show. At the opening, Preciado expressed a deep satisfaction to hear “so many people talking and saying Manuel’s name out loud.” Manuel Sandoval was forgotten once; it seems unlikely to happen again.
