CONTEMPORARY ART IN CONTEXT

ZACK BUCKMAN  
FOUNDER AND CREATIVE DIRECTOR OF FURRY PUPPET STUDIO

The puppets created by Buchman’s Furry Puppet Studio exist somewhere between sculpture, performance art, 3D printing, and fiber arts. The artists who work at Furry Puppet bring an equally diverse range of innovative techniques and perspectives to their projects. The team includes creative partner Yaron Farkush, master puppet-builder Maria Gurevich, mechanical engineer Tom Newby, and costume designer Polly Smith. Buchman explains that the group works well together because they all believe the puppet art form is truly exceptional. It can form an emotional connection that is largely absent from other art forms.

Having not attended college, Buchman developed an “outsider” perspective that helps make Furry Puppet Studio’s work so unique. The creative process often begins with simple scribbles or doodles in the margins of a sketchbook. The team considers what gives the drawing a special “essence.” There are then several passes as a sculpted foam mock-up. Buchman admits that no matter how much experience the team has, there are always magical moments when a puppet suddenly develops a personality.

For Buchman and his team, the details make the biggest difference in achieving a magical persona, with the eyes almost always going in last. Sometimes, a piece of fabric on a workbench can suggest a character before a finished sketch even exists. Then comes the drawing, carving, sewing, and costuming. A block of foam becomes a fact. Buchman believes that this strikingly physical process has evolved at a time when visual culture is moving in the opposite direction.

Buchman’s studio has produced puppets and marionettes for clients including Apple, Nike, Nintendo, and CNN. The studio’s uncanny knack for creating puppet personalities is on display in its brilliant celebrity caricatures, including the amazing duo of Andy Cohen and Anderson Cooper, as well as puppets of Missy Elliott and Pharrell Williams created for a music video that received praise from Rolling Stone as the “best music video” of 2015.

Puppets are traditionally used for entertainment and storytelling. Marionettes are puppets manipulated by strings attached to their arms, legs, and other body parts. Puppets and marionettes have been made throughout the world for centuries, serving a variety of cultural and artistic purposes.

In India, Kathputi puppets, developed in Rajasthan, were part of traveling shows used not only for entertainment but also to address social issues. In Vietnam, Mua Roi Nuoc (water puppets) are operated from behind a screen, often in water-filled stages that resemble flooded rice fields. They are lacquered to make them waterproof. In Indonesia, Wayang puppets act out stories, often drawing from Hindu epics. The Bunraku puppet theater, developed in the 1600s, features puppets that are worked by three performers dressed from head to toe in black. Bunraku stories were also adapted for Kabuki theater.

Some of the largest marionettes in the world belong to the French company Royal de Luxe. These enormous figures can reach 12 meters (40 feet) in height and are attached to wheeled scaffolding, with dozens of people manipulating the movements by pulling cables. These are just a few of the puppet traditions that continue to thrive today!

As a child, Zack Buchman says he was constantly assembling things into faces. Growing up watching Sesame Street and The Muppet Show, Jim Henson’s puppet characters were a major inspiration. He was also fascinated by pixelated computer games, which continue to influence him today. Narrative puppetry and computer games inspired an early interest in animation.

At age seventeen, he sold his first cartoon concept, which led to several award-winning animated shorts. Although animation encouraged his interest in developing characters, he craved the physical experience of being able to touch and connect with them. This led to an interest in puppet-making. At age nineteen, he moved to New York, where he established Furry Puppet Studio a few months later, around 2011.

Buchman’s approach to puppet design comes from an animator’s point of view, continually challenging the limits of what a puppet can do in an ongoing search for greater personality and accessibility. With Furry Puppet Studio’s success, Buchman established Uncute® in 2019, a nonprofit organization that makes plush toys and other products based on its popular Blobby comic. Profits from Uncute are donated to organizations and services supporting homeless and runaway youth, as well as youth in detention.

What are some of the biggest influences on your work, including other artists, events, or things outside of the arts?
ZB: Jim Henson and Sesame Street is an obvious one. Kermit started as an old coat that belonged to Jim Hensonʼs mother, with two ping-pong balls cut in half for the eyes. It was strange and physical and impossible to look away from. It really touches you. Thereʼs something very human about puppets. I notice faces everywhere I look. Itʼs almost as if my brain is programmed for it. Old buildings, crumpled paper, pretty much anywhere when I walk down the street. Sometimes a face sticks with me and becomes the beginning of a character.

How does an idea evolve from an initial sketch into a finished puppet?
ZB: It usually starts with a handful of us sketching ideas together, and sometimes with playing with materials. From there, we hand-carve a foam mock-up, and thatʼs when you can actually hold the character and turn it to see if it works from every angle. Two moments in the process that I often refer to as crucial: figuring out what the character actually is at the very start, and putting the eyes in and finalizing the last details near the end, when the whole thing suddenly clicks. All of the small details, like a tiny shift in the eyes, can completely change the character and how itʼs perceived.

Furry Puppet Studio is built on collaboration. What have you learned from creating puppets together as a team?
ZB: Weʼre a small in-house team in SoHo, plus specialists we bring in per project. What Iʼve learned is that it almost never goes in one clean line from designer to builder to engineer. Everyone works at the same time, and the mechanisms and more traditional building overlap the whole way through. Some of the most generous, talented people I know I’ve met through this work, and a lot of our favorite puppets would not have turned out the same without them.

What part of the puppet-making process is the most challenging, and what part do you enjoy the most?
ZB: The hardest part is knowing when to stop. It is easy to keep adding detail, but the strongest characters usually get there by leaving things out. Handing a finished puppet off for a shoot is hard too. I get too attached. What I enjoy most is the middle of a build, when the foam in your hands starts arguing with the sketch on the wall and the character wants to be something a little different than what you drew. The process never gets old. I am often surprised by how honestly exciting that process can be.

How do you make a puppet expressive and believable?
ZB: I look at the silhouette before anything else. The shape and the expression have to read clearly even if you let your eyes go out of focus. After that, it is mostly about keeping the core of the character strong and extra details minimal. The audience fills in a lot on their own. Overdesigning is often what makes a puppet feel stiff instead of alive.

How did you discover that puppetry could become a career, and what advice would you give to young artists interested in the field?
ZB: At twenty, I packed up for New York without much of a plan and no college behind me. Animation was the first thing I tried, and it did not stick, but puppets did. I learned by making things alongside people I admired.

My advice for young artists: Start now with whatever is around—a sock, an old shirt, your momʼs old coat. It worked for Kermit. Let the first ones be rough. The stakes are low, and you learn things with your hands that no tutorial can teach you.

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Written by Karl Cole, Art Historian and Curator of Images at Davis Publications. kcole@davisart.com