Note:

Donald McKinley was born in 1932, in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. He studied at Wichita State University, Kansas, and at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. From 1958 to 1962, he worked as Chief Staff Designer at the W.H. Gunlock Chair Company in Wayland, New York, before he continued his studies at the Atheneum Art Museum in Helsinki, Finland, where he was a Fulbright Scholar. In 1964, McKinley received his Master of Industrial Design from Syracuse University, New York, where he continued on as an assistant professor, teaching Three-Dimensional Design.

McKinley and his wife, ceramicist, Ruth Gowdy McKinley, came to the new Sheridan College in Oakville, where he established the School of Crafts and Design and directed it for close to thirty years. He taught and inspired some of the leading Canadian furniture designers, including Michael Fortune, Peter Fleming, Paul Pep, Robert Diemert, and John Ireland. McKinley devoted all of his time and energy to teaching, putting in nearly one hundred hour weeks at the school, leaving very little time to complete a growing amount of commissions.

McKinley’s work was heavily influenced by the teachings of the Bauhaus School, that advocates for the interaction of art, craft, and architecture. McKinley’s works, such as his de-agitators, reflected this play between the three, through a solid sense of form and colour, which would “ultimately benefit larger society.”