- April 30, 2026
- By Sala Levin ’10
The lightweight, molded plastic chairs that dot backyard barbecues, company picnics or family reunions have become part of the nearly invisible background of our lives. We drag them out of sheds or basements when needed, and when we’re done, we stack them up and store them away again for the next time we need some cheap extra seats.
Dan Ortiz Leizman MFA ’24, however, turns the function-over-form chairs into works (and instruments) of art. The UMD art instructor creates something fleeting—live music—out of these undegradable hunks of plastic by outfitting them with strings and playing songs on the resulting instruments.
This weekend, in collaboration with Wednesday Kim MFA ’24, they will present these monobloc harps (so called after the chair type) as part of Sound Scene, an interactive sound and multisensory arts festival at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum. (Ian McDermott, immersive media technician in UMD’s Immersive Media Design program, will provide technical and artistic support.)
“I hope that when people see that I turned a plastic lawn chair into a string instrument, they realize that musical instruments don’t have to be expensive objects that necessitate a classical training in order to engage in the wonderful thing that is making music,” said Leizman, whose work is supported by an Arts for All ArtsAMP grant.
They first conceived of monobloc harps during a residency last summer at the Cannery in Penobscot, Maine, a facility dedicated to sound art. Leizman had gone to the residency intending to make tactile speakers; they soon became fixated on the monobloc chairs in the Cannery’s studio, and wanted to learn more about them. Designed in 1946, the chairs have never been patented, lending to their international pervasiveness.
“I was like, ‘Ooh, postwar furniture, that’s interesting,’” said Leizman. “I got really obsessed with it, and started making animations of them, and going on Google Maps and finding them in Cuba and Greece and places that I have attachments to.”
Soon, Leizman—who plays guitar, piano and some cello—was taking apart a ukulele to see how the strings and tuners worked together. They began drilling holes in the chairs and experimenting with string placement using harp strings adjusting their locations in new chairs until the instruments started to sound how they wanted.
Leizman writes basic melodies for the six chair harps they’ve made so far, and largely improvises when playing them. The music is soft and slightly mournful, a delicate ode to what Leizman describes as their mission to find beauty in a crumbling world.
“I’ve found great autonomy in the practice of going for a walk, finding a chair in the trash, stringing it up with tuners and harp strings, and making something beautiful out of it,” they said. “Nobody can tell me I am playing it ‘wrong’ because it’s an object that has no dogma associated to it.”
On Leizman’s Instagram account, the chairs have reached a wide audience—their most viral video has been viewed over 800,000 times.
For some, the music of the monobloc harps is deeply moving. “I find poetry in the fact that those chairs that once told stories through the people who were sitting on them now do it through music,” wrote one commenter. “Why am I crying?” asked another. Some say that the instruments touch a nostalgic place in their hearts. “This feels to me like a sunset in a backyard, when summer is ending,” one person said. “This is what kindergarten felt like,” read another comment.
Julia Reising MFA ’27, Leizman’s friend and colleague, suggested that the juxtaposition between the hear-it-and-it’s-gone music and the permanence of the plastic chairs is part of what speaks to people. “Dan is playing with the idea that music is this really ephemeral thing that you can only experience in the moment, and these plastic chairs are going to exist forever,” she said. “The experience of being human falls somewhere in between those things.”
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Arts & Culture