Eyes for Glass @ Bellevue Arts Museum, review

March 2010, ABJ Seattle Glass Online:

“You can either buy clothes or buy pictures.” -Gertrude Stein

Downstairs at the Bellevue Arts Museum, the people chose clothes; upstairs, pictures. Beth and Herbert Levine made and marketed women’s shoes; John and Joyce Price collected art. To read the review on toe-pumps and rhinestoned vamps please go to the Seattle Times. To read about the Price Collection, Eyes for Glass, continue below.

There are two main parts to the Price collection as it is arranged at the museum: Studio glass and Native Art. The accompanying brochure explains that the Price collection began with John Price’s childhood desire to collect the art of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec after seeing the movie Moulin Rouge. Several Toulouse-Lautrec lithographs from the 1890s are shown, alongside them are two vessels by Walter Lieberman that feature paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec on their surfaces, accompanied by one of Martin Luther King, Jr. Was Lieberman commissioned to do the series of vessels for Price or did Leiberman’s interest in influential artists coincide with Price‘s love of Toulouse-Lautrec?

Certain artists, such as Lieberman, appear more than others in the collection and make the viewer curious which themes appealed to the Price’s.  It wasn't just his portrayal of Toulouse-Lautrec that drew the collectors to him; Gregory Grenon and Jill Reynolds are both represented with multiple pieces, their painted-style, like Leiberman, standing apart from the Venetian vessels shown as singular examples by the artist (Dale Chihuly, William Morris, Benjamin Moore) and other forms of cast abstract sculpture.

Beginning in the 1970s, John Price began to collect glass from artists with a student/teacher/artist-in-resident connection to Pilchuck Glass School. As he explains in Wealth in 2006, “One of my main areas of expertise has been working with art dealers, and that’s absolutely key to putting together a significant collection…you can’t completely avoid [mistakes], but a good dealer will help you make sure you are acquiring original pieces.”

If collecting art is about establishing relationships with artists and art dealers, then showing the collection is partly about sharing this relationship with the viewer. The curator may be asking the viewer to simply enjoy the art on display, but one can't help but wonder about the personal events that shaped this collection.  What part did Joyce Price play in the collection, is one unanswered question.  But in this case the viewer is thwarted from looking for cues to the collector/artist story by the hollow quotes on art collecting on the walls:

“Collectors are happy people.” -Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe.

The second part of the Price collection on exhibit at BAM is an amazing assemblage of Native Art with the emphasis on glass. Joe David’s carvings and blown glass are shown in depth. His piece Whaler’s Spirit is a graceful form; it shows a killer whale carrying a clear glass skull atop its body. Preston Singletary’s sand-carved hats and many other sculptures are exhibited in a brightly lit gallery space, as opposed to how his work was shown recently in Tacoma at the Museum of Glass, and the pieces still feel powerful, and they still glow from within.

If there are artists in the exhibit [you can find a list here] that you have not yet had the chance to see in person, or if you are interested in the glass work of Native artists who are currently creating a ‘new tradition‘ as artist Ed Archie Noisecat says, Eyes for Glass is only $10, or $7 for students, at the Bellevue Arts Museum. The show runs until August 8, 2010.
 
Bibliography:
Unknown.  "Master Collectors" Wealth. p. 24, 2006, Accessed March 22, 2010.  http://www.northerntrust.com/wealth/06-spring/living.html