2005 Andrew Engleson:
"
After nearly two years with the lights out and the doors closed, Bellevue Arts Museum has reopened. Under the direction of nationally recognized craft authority Michael Monroe, the once-struggling institution aims to become the Northwest's center for craft, art, and design. To that end, the galleries have been relit, partitions built to section off interior spaces, and carpet added to soften the industrial feel of Stephen Holl's architectural design.
BAM's reinvention is a smart move, if not an altogether artistically satisfying one. The Northwest lacks a museum in the same cloth as the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery (where Monroe spent much of his previous career), New York's Museum of Art and Design, or the Mint Museum of Craft and Design in North Carolina. The Puget Sound region produces so much of what is loosely defined as "craft"—the University of Washington's ceramics program and the Pilchuck Glass School are just two examples—that BAM's new incarnation seems a good fit. It also reaches back to the roots of the Eastside museum, which grew out of the annual Bellevue Arts and Crafts Fair, now in its 59th year.
BAM has clearly found a mission, something it formerly lacked. "I'm not interested in making this a miniature Seattle Art Museum or Henry Art Gallery," Monroe said at the press opening. He also hinted the museum would like to start building a collection—something BAM has never had. This would be great news for local artists and ensure the support of local collectors.
Currently, three exhibits describe Monroe's vision: "The Artful Teapot," 250 clever teapots from the Gloria and Sonny Kamm collection (through Oct. 2); "The Artist Responds," a survey of ironwork by New York state's Albert Paley (through Sept. 25); and "Taking Shape," Pilchuck glass from the 1970s (through Jan. 29, 2006).
The teapot collection is impressive in its scope—everything from Michael Graves designs to whimsical pots woven from $5 bills. And Paley's work is very skilled—his tangled, organic designs take cues from art nouveau, but are contemporary and original. The Pilchuck exhibit assigns historical context to the wildly popular glass phenomenon.
But I just can't shake the feeling that BAM is offering Art Lite —"fun" art, safe art, art that doesn't make demands on viewers or elicit controversy.
Take Dale Chihuly (who has a new work in BAM's lobby) as an example. The man does beautiful work—his glass is intricate, energetic, and skilled. But the power of art is in its ability not only to please us but to challenge us, disturb us, or make us think twice. As Susan Sontag famously put it, good art makes us nervous. Rest assured—your nerves will be safe during a visit to BAM.
"Groundbreaking art doesn't have to be controversial," Monroe told me, and I think that sums up BAM's approach nicely. I suspect having worked at a Smithsonian gallery just steps from the White House has given Monroe expertise in showing high-quality art that offends no one.
This is not to say that craft can't meet the requirements of rich, satisfying art. Dan Webb does revolutionary things with wood, and local ceramic artists Patti Warashina, Saya Moriyasu, Jeffry Mitchell, and Charles Krafft are doing extremely creative, provocative stuff.
But I suspect Charles is one Krafft that won't be showing at BAM anytime soon. The artist's latest provocation is called "Disasterware," and in addition to the Delft-inspired hand grenades, pistols, and antitank missiles, it includes a teapot. It depicts the head of Adolf Hitler, below which is the inscription "Idaho: Famous Potatoes." I don't know about you, but that makes me nervous. Maybe this is a teapot you'll see at BAM in the near future. But I doubt it."
Engleson, A. "Teapot Home." June 22, 2005. Seattle Weekly. website accessed July 1, 2009. http://www.seattleweekly.com/2005-06-22/arts/teapot-home
"Solomon Fine Art Jeffrey Sarmiento's "In a Matter of Speaking" offers glass art that's a refreshing antidote to the decorative banalities of Seattle's glut of glass. In his first solo show, the work ranges from small to over 5 feet high, and incorporates a dense network of halftone screens and text. It's a cultural mélange, including text in Danish, which Sarmiento attempted to master during a recent Fulbright residency in Denmark, and images and text alluding to the artist's Filipino-American heritage. 215 First Ave., 206-297-1400. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.-Sat."
Unknown. Seattle Weekly. July 13, 19, 2005. website accessed July 1, 2009. http://www.seattleweekly.com/2005-07-13/music/july-13-19-2005/2
2005 Kevin Murray:
"...Most of my reference to McElheny comes from the substantial catalogue to a retrospective at Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostella.[3] The exhibition contains a formidable range of work. It expresses not only technical excellence but also conceptual sophistication..
In the interview that has been published in the catalogue, McElheny does not disavow the craft basis of his work: 'The subject matter of my work assumes that the anonymous, artisanal, industrial activity of specific glass-factory cultures could be viewed as a complex, creative and meaning-generating activity.'[4] This seems an honest avowal of skill by contrast with the celebration of 'cleverness' by conceptual artists like Jeff Koons....
In the case of Maureen Williams, painterliness draws our attention to the differences between her work and painting. Rather than render the world on a flat linear plane, she adopts a cylindrical format. Williams claims that her choice is medium is more from a deficit on her part. She says:
I find it hard to paint two-dimensionally because I don't know what to do with the edges. I'm used to going around. When I hit the edge, I don't know how to deal with it.
While this might explain the choice to work on a circular medium, the choice of glass rather than ceramics or metal still remains a mystery....
All this leads me to the proposition that it is a glass artist like Maureen Williams who is the best bet for the continuity of painting as a contemporary romantic quest, rather than a nostalgic concern.
First, it meets the expectation of our eyes to ascribe value to radiant rather than reflective light. Second, it recovers the artistic meaning of that space by taking it into the round. The proliferation of screens in our own lives means that they are increasingly portals of distraction rather than windows of reflection.
Williams' journey as an artist harkens back to the romantic quests of painters to capture the essence of their world. By taking this journey into the radiant three-dimensional world of glass, she grants this quest a relevance that is otherwise missing. Glass is the future of painting.
Murray, Kevin. "Painterliness in contemporary glass art." Delivered as the Strattman lecture, Adelaide GAS Conference, 9 May 2005. (Murray's footnote 4: Josiah McElheny Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea; 18 April - 17 June 2002.) http://www.craftculture.org/archive/kmurray5.htm
Accessed March 27, 2009.
2005 Dr. Barton Weitz:
"The gallery owners feel the most-promising growth areas for crafts are designer jewelry, glass and ceramics. The least-promising merchandise categories are furniture, judaica, and kaleidoscopes. In terms of merchandise stocked, the most popular categories are glass, ceramics, designer and fine jewelry, and metal and wood art.
While designer jewelry, fine jewelry and glass are viewed as a growth area for all segments, there are a number of differences across the segments. For example, large retailers see more growth in metal art than smaller craft gallery owners, while small craft galleries see more growth in scopes and wood.
There are also some significant regional differences. Gallery owners in the Mid-Atlantic are less positive about the growth prospects for glass while the rest of the country believes it to be a
significant medium. Sales growth in furniture is strongest in the West and weakest in the Northeast and Southeast. The growth potential for wood is greatest in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic. Detailed information on the forecasts for different products by segments is shown in Table 1 (see page 20)."
"CRAFT RETAILER SURVEY" by Dr. Barton Weitz, Executive Director, David F. Miller Center for Retailing Education and Retailing. 2005. This report was prepared with the assistance of Robert Carr, MBA student, and Jun Xu, Ph.D. student in the Warrington College of Business Administration at the University of Florida. http://www.americancraft.com/BMAC/buyer/PDFs/PF06/CraftRetailerSurvey.pdf. Accessed April 16, 2009.
2005 Margot Osborne:
"I regard it as an unfortuante tendancy to elevate sculptural and conceptual approaches to the medium as being inherently more serious or of greater contemporary relevance, while denigrating the value of practices grounded in knowlege of materials and processes. There are differing aesthetic values in each approach...
It is possible to elucidate a poetics of glass, grounded in such abstract formal qualities as pattern, repetitive mark-making, the emotive charge of intense and saturated colour, tonal nuance created by layering, texture, rhythmic and organic linear movement, scale, and fine detail. The medium of glass as conceived by contemporary artists becomes a finely nuanced material language, which can be purely abstract, but which may also embody poetic resonances between mind and matter, between the materiality of glass and the immateriality of consciousness. While glass as an abstract medium lacks the full expressive, gestural scope of painting, it more than compensates through other qualities less available to painting-the transformative power of light, the range and sculptural plasticity of three-dimensional forms, the immersive allure of depth and internal form.
...like the scent of a complex perfume, it is a synthesis of the primal and the sophisticated..."
Osborne, Margot. "Towards a poetics of glass" Chapter 2. Australian Glass Today. 2005. Wakefield Press. Kent Town, South Australia.
2005 ArtKnowledgeNews.com:
 "CORNING, N.Y.- The Rockwell Museum of Western Art will present, as one of four special exhibitions this year, Fusing Traditions: Transformations in Glass by Native American Artists. Complementing the Rockwell Museum's broad permanent collection of Native American art, this exhibition introduces the first generation of Native American studio glass artists. These eighteen artists fuse cultural heritage and individual creativity into dazzling new glass forms. This traveling exhibition features thirty-seven artworks and was organized by the Museum of Craft & Folk Art (MOCFA) in San Francisco, California. Meet the Artists: Fusing Traditions recognizes an important artistic movement that began in the 1970s when Tony Jojola (Isleta Pueblo) first experimented in glass at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Most recently, Preston Singletary (Tlingit) realized his dream when a cedar totem pole with glass and neon components was raised at the Pilchuck Glass School in celebration of the school's thirtieth anniversary. Influenced by their experience at the glass school, master carvers Joe David (Nuu-cha-nulth), John Hagen (Alaskan Native), and Wayne Price (Tlingit), began to experiment with glass in their subsequent art. This artistic exchange demonstrates the strength of the ties between the Pilchuck Glass School and the vigor of the Native American artists who have studied there. The movement continues, as both Jojola and Singletary teach Native students in Seattle and Taos. Two of Singletary's students are represented in the exhibition. The artwork of Robert Tannahill (Mohawk/Metis) and Brian Barber (Pawnee) have broken with the functional and decorative origins of glass to create enigmatic and authoritative forms based in their cultural traditions. Both artists are working in a cultural realm where the visible is not always legible to the uninitiated, yet even the culturally initiated will find these figures in glass startlingly new. In Fusing Traditions, cultural art forms - beadwork, pottery, masks, spindle whorls, dance wands, and hats - are reinvigorated and re-imagined. Preston Singletary and Susan Point (Coast Salish) use the strong Northwest Coast imagery of their cultures to create revolutionary new glass forms in sand blasted and carved glass. Tony Jojola transforms pottery shapes into light-filled blown glass vessels. Drawing from American popular culture, Marcus Amerman's (Choctaw) glass-bead art relocates Native American art in the twenty-first century. The exhibition also includes the artwork of Larry Ahvakana (Inupiaq), Michael Carius (Siberian Y’upic), Conrad House (Navajo), Clarissa Hudson (Tlingit), Ramson Lomatewama (Hopi), Ed Archie NoiseCat (Salish), Marvin Oliver (Quinalt), Shaun Peterson (Salish), and C. S. Tarpley (Choctaw). The neon artwork of David Svenson, a non-Native American, is featured in this exhibition at the request of his students who honor him. He has been an influential teacher at the Pilchuck Glass School for many of the Native artists."ArtKnowledgeNews.com. Author/Editor Unknown. May 10, 2005. "Fusing Traditions: Transformations in Glass." website accessed May 10, 2005. http://artknowledgenews.com/node/422 |
2005 Paula Weideger:
"Chartreuse and turquoise tendrils, like the multicoloured mane of a colossal, punk Rapunzel, twist down from high above the information desk at London's Victoria & Albert museum. Eight metres long and weighing 1,724kg, this baroque blown glass and steel extravaganza is by Dale Chihuly, the most famous artist working with blown glass today.
The chandelier (lit from outside not within) is on long-term loan from Chihuly who had an exhibition at the V&A in 1999. On first sight it is a shock. This is not only because the flamboyant piece is such a contrast to the placid, not to say staid, decor of the domed entrance hall; Chihuly's work can take some getting used to.
"Every time he starts a new series, everybody hates it," says Doug Anderson, who with his wife Dale has been collecting Chihuly and other glass artists since the late 1970s.
Dale Anderson says: "During the 1970s people were being so creative. I would walk into a gallery and see the work of four or five terrific glass artists and I'd buy from all of them." She hasn't stopped buying since. "I have absolutely no self control," she laughs.
Doug Anderson's most recent project has been overseeing publication of the University of Pennsylvania's Sculpture, Glass and American Museums, a sumptuously illustrated survey of the contemporary glass holdings in 26 US galleries. International in scope, it includes such top artists as William Morris, Colin Reid, Mary Ann "Toots" Zynsky, Lino Tagliapietra, Dante Marioni and the late Stanislav Libensk,ý who collaborated with his wife Jaroslava Brychtovà. It is a fine introduction to the field.
The Andersons have not limited their collecting to Chihuly (or to glass) but it is obvious they have a soft spot for his work. They have been friends with him for more than 20 years and are trustees of Pilchuck in Seattle, his glass-blowing school.
"Chihuly's absolutely a genius, a visionary," Dale Anderson enthuses. "He is the engine that drove the art glass movement." Her husband, whose passion may be as great, spotlights a different aspect of the artist's character. "He is a brilliant marketer. Whatever he had done, he would have succeeded."
A brief look at Chihuly's current European activities suggests the Andersons are not exaggerating wildly.
The Marlborough Gallery, his dealer, is about to open a selling exhibition in Monaco having just closed one in London. A major Chihuly piece is on view in Lucerne. At the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, a vast indoor/outdoor installation includes 25 pieces in the Temperate Zone House alone.
Chihuly Studio, from which his multiple editions, unique pieces and large-scale installations emerge, employs 90 people from glass blowers to archivists.
To say they are highly professional is an understatement. A call to his publicist requesting an interview with the artist was swiftly followed by the arrival of lavishly illustrated books about Chihuly, a handsomely boxed set of DVDs and a date for a telephone chat.
"Are you a captain of industry?" I ask Chihuly when I catch up with him in Las Vegas.
He laughs. "I am lucky to have a lot of good people that work with me," he acknowledges. "They are very careful not to have to make me deal with a lot of stuff I don't enjoy."
From Chicago to Jerusalem, Chihuly's large, imaginative outdoor installations have been a hit. Kew reports visitor numbers are up by a third since Gardens of Glass opened in May.
"I am still very interested in glass houses and spectacular gardens," he tells me when I ask about future projects, although he is not ready to give details of where the next ones will be.
Many artists, among them Robert Rauschenberg and Marc Quinn, have used glass without being able to work it themselves. But Chihuly, whose work is glass, stopped blowing it himself.
After losing the use of his left eye in a car crash in 1976 and then dislocating a shoulder while surfing, he found pieces blown by his team from his designs went very well. "I was so impressed by what Billy Morris produced that from that point on I never blew glass very much."
Today Billy is famous glass artist William Morris, whose prices rival Chihuly's. And highly prized pieces of contemporary glass can fetch six-figure sums.
Next month, Philadelphia's National Liberty museum is de-accessioning a piece by Libensk/Brychtovà, with a starting bid of $600,000. But what will it actually realise?
It is here, in the lush tall grass of what is called the secondary market, that a loud hissing sound can be heard.
Arlene Silvers, president of the Coalition of Collectors and Artists at the Liberty museum, ignores it. "Anybody who has a Libensk right this second could triple what they paid," she insists. The museum has high expectations for its forthcoming benefit auction of 300 pieces of contemporary glass art.
But James Zemaitis, head of the 20th century design department at Sotheby's in New York, is listening to the hissing. "I include glass in my sales only if a gun is pointed at my head," he says.
"Everything we sell in contemporary design is keeping pace with the contemporary art market. Glass is going the other way," he asserts. "If you bought a chair by Ron Arad in 1992, I could probably quadruple its price. If you bought a piece of glass for $25,000 that same year, you would probably get $4,000-$5,000 now."
"James is so naughty," retorts Dan Klein. "He really knows nothing about the market."
This is strong stuffcoming from the man who taught Zemaitis and whom Zemaitis calls "the reigning contemporary glass auction specialist over the last 30 years".
Now retired, Klein, acollector and author, hasnot stopped loving contemporary glass. "The one quality glass has that no other material has is an inner light. Those who know how to work with that light are creating a new language in sculpture."
He concedes contemporary glass is "a fledgling market with no place in an auction house" but predicts "it will become huge". He points out that pieces by early glass artists Gallé, Tiffany and Lalique were "completely despised in the 1940s and 1950s. Now they can cost millions".
So what is a potential collector to do? Doug Anderson answers without hesitation. "Go with your gut. If you like what you're looking at, buy it."
Paula Weideger is author of "Venetian Dreaming: Finding a foothold in an enchanted city" (Simon & Schuster)."
Weideger, P. "Journey to the heart of glass." Financial Times. August 13, 2005. website accessed June 8, 2009. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e65b6fa4-0b95-11da-9939-00000e2511c8.html?nclick_check=1
"
The exhibition was funded in part by the San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture and the County of San Diego Community Enhancement Program.
The exhibition featured sculptures fashioned from glass, wood, paper and bamboo.
When Kazuo Kadonaga started to make art seriously in 1971, he first chose to work with wood. He had been familiar with this material since childhood because his family ran a lumber mill. Kadonaga devoted his efforts to creating a system that would reveal the material composition of wood. He did not choose special varieties of wood but worked with kinds used in everyday life. He began by slicing squared-off logs with a veneer slicer, the same machine used to make thin sheets of wood for plywood production. He then stacked these thin slices to recreate the original form of the squared-off log. After natural drying, the wood began to warp, revealing its invisible material properties as outward changes in form.
In his paper works, Kadonaga makes a stack of many pieces of handmade paper and puts it under a press while it is still drying. He then separates the sheets on one side. The contrast between the thin sheets on one side — what is ordinarily thought of as the natural form of paper — and the block of paper that remains compressed on the other side is an effective demonstration of the physical qualities of paper. The parts of the sheets that have been peeled apart swell naturally because of the resilience of the fibers. These paper works also show the composition of the material in a clearly visible way.
Also on view were three large glass sculptures. After the raw materials of ordinary plate glass are melted in a furnace, a fixed amount of melted glass flows continuously from a narrow spout into an annealing oven below it over a period of 48 hours. The sculptural form is created by gravity and the viscosity of the melted glass. In the annealing oven, the temperature is gradually reduced to prevent cracks in the mass of glass. It is necessary to wait 100 days before the work can be removed from the oven. This demanding process requires large-scale facilities. It is entirely controlled by computer, and human workers only take part by putting the raw materials into the furnace and checking the temperature.
The finished mass of glass immediately reveals the material properties of glass to the viewer. In these works, Kadonaga reveals the physical nature of glass as such, including its internal characteristics. They are markedly different from previous abstract glass sculpture.
The exhibition included a group of fifty 15-foot lengths of honey-colored bamboo, propped against a wall. Their color, produced by kiln drying, is another example of Kazuo Kadonaga's interest in the natural transformation of materials with which he works.
A ten-minute, videotape “Kazuo Kadonaga, Glass Piece no. 4,” showing the making of his distinctive sculpture, played during the run of the exhibition.
Throughout my career as an artist I have been more interested in exploring the inherent qualities of materials found in everyday life and developing systems that transform these materials naturally, rather than self-consciously creating beautiful 'art' objects.
– Kazuo Kadonaga
2005 National Endowment for the Arts:
"Pilchuck Glass School
Seattle, WA
$35,000
To support a summer artist residency program. Artists will be provided with resources, facilities, and technical assistance to experiment with new work in glass.
Pittsburgh Glass Center Inc.
Pittsburgh, PA
$25,000
To support a summer residency program to bring glass artists and students from across the country to Pittsburgh for exploration in glass making. Artists will be provided with resources, facilities, and technical assistance.
Glass Art Society, Inc.
Seattle, WA
$15,000
To support production of the Glass Art Society Journal, documenting events, exhibitions, and proceedings of the organization's annual conference to be held in Adelaide, Australia. The journal is edited by Suzanne Frantz, a Fulbright Scholar and former curator of 20th century glass at the Corning Museum."
National Endowment for the Arts FY 2005 Visual Arts Grants. website accessed June 19, 2009. http://www.nea.gov/grants/recent/disciplines/Visualarts/05visual.html
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