1997 Patricia C. Phillips:
"UrbanGlass's new facilities in Brooklyn provide access to studios and equipment as well as educational opportunities for glass artists and artists wanting to learn glassworking techniques. UrbanGlass is dedicated to the creation and appreciation of art produced in glass. It supports this deceptively modest purpose with an ambitious and integrated range of programs and initiatives. The anchor of UrbanGlass is to provide access for artists to glass production and studio facilities. Artists reserve time to work on independent projects, to produce commissions, or to explore for the first time this ubiquitous, yet mysterious, material. The scale of projects ranges from beads and goblets to architectural elements and projects. In any given week, there are accomplished glassblowers working alongside artists who are just beginning to incorporate the material and new processes into their work.
Started in 1977 by Richard Yelle and Eric Erickson, the original artist-run facility was called the New York Experimental Glass Workshop. First located on Great Jones Street in New York City, it was the only art (rather than industrial) facility in the region to provide opportunities for artists to work with glass. After moving to a second site in lower Manhattan, new programs, increased use, and demands for space caused them once more to relocate the entire operation, to Brooklyn, in 1991. Now located in the former 1919 Beaux-Arts Strand Theater, the new 25,000-square-foot, three-story site is a spacious and captivating facility for its many programs and projects. Architect and glassblower Jeff Beers designed a minimal white grid in the interior that organizes the different production spaces of this glamorous and gritty building. The studio/production area includes spaces and equipment for glassblowing, hot casting, kiln casting, cold working, sandblasting, moldmaking, flat glass, neon, and lamp-working. This productive occupant seems at home in the majestic spaces of the early 20th- century theater.
John Perreault, executive director of UrbanGlass since 1995, has had a distinguished career as an art critic and curator, and the organization's programs have gained focus and scope from his background. Perreault is concurrently an advocate for traditional values and experimental initiatives. More importantly, he sees the inextricable relationship between the two.
In addition to artists' use of the facilities, UrbanGlass is one of the largest glass schools in the world. Offering courses throughout the year, it has an annual enrollment of 600 students. Classes include short-term, focused workshops, as well as semester-long classes. Courses for product design students from Parsons School of Design are offered during most terms. Like many art organizations, there is a growing emphasis on UrbanGlass's instructional and outreach programs that help emerging or established artists acquire skills or achieve an understanding of the many different technologies and typologies of glass production. Last summer, UrbanGlass featured an impressive scope of weekly classes and weekend and other intensive workshops in glassblowing, stained glass, beadmaking, hot casting, sculptural lampworking, and neon.
UrbanGlass has traditionally supported an annual series of artists' residencies (these are currently under review because of the costs involved). Barbara Broughel, the B Team, and others have been given space, materials, and technical support to produce new work. Several years ago, Eve Andrée Laramée did a residency at UrbanGlass. She used the residency to create an amalgamation of scientific apparatus, including beakers, flasks, and meandering tubes for her spectacularly profuse installation The Science of Approximation. Laramée's exhibition opened in January 1994 in the Robert Lehman Gallery at UrbanGlass. Recent exhibitions have included the work of Alan Glovsky, an exhibition curated by Alison Sky entitled "People in Glass Houses...," and the summer 1997 group exhibition "Glass Worlds," which included the recent work of artists currently teaching at UrbanGlass. This exhibition, in particular, represents the eclectic range of contemporary glass art.
The exhibition program is a vital dimension of the organization's mission. The 1,500-square-foot Lehman Gallery is a site to present new and old, national and international glass art. Its position adjacent to the production facility provides invaluable opportunities to observe the mysteries of making-to consider the dynamics of production processes, intention, function, and aesthetics.
UrbanGlass's other program, a quarterly publication, connects all of the organization's objectives and provides an international forum on glass art and craft. Glass: The UrbanGlass Art Quarterly, which is currently edited by Perreault, is a communicative, critical vehicle that reaches an audience of mainstream glass artists, other artists, curators, critics, and collectors.
Recently, Perreault has helped to found the New York Arts and Crafts Alliance. Including Greenwich House Pottery, the Sculpture Center School, the Crafts Students League at the YWCA, and, of course, UrbanGlass, this new confederation of art organizations is committed to a continuing education that provides opportunities for people of different artistic backgrounds to learn new skills and processes. It is an important "non-degree" alternative that is available to young artists as well as to people who have had minimal art instruction. In addition to the collaborative and creative prospects of this kind of cooperative, educational alliance, it is an economic imperative at a paradoxical moment when many art organizations face diminishing economies and increased demands. It is a promising model for specialized arts organizations to mix mediums, exchange ideas, and share resources.
By keeping its doors open and hosting such a variety of programs, UrbanGlass admirably fulfills its mission to support a national artist community, encourage public interest, and create a critical forum for both traditional and emerging glass arts. Citing the Arts & Crafts movement which balanced shifting equations of idealism and entrepreneurship, Perreault and his staff fully understand and embrace the challenges that face smaller art organizations. Providing a unique creative and critical service, the art and craft worlds are immeasurably enriched by UrbanGlass's activities and programs. If meaning often begins in the making, then art facilities such as UrbanGlass, where artists can investigate the rich traditions and untested potentials of particular materials, are invaluable creative resources.
Patricia C. Phillips is an independent critic and writer and dean of the School of Fine and Performing Arts at State University of New York, New Paltz."
Phillips, P. "Urban Glass."Sculpture October 1997 Vol.16 No.8. website accessed June 14, 2009. http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag97/urban/sm-urban.shtml
1997 Matthew Kangas:
"For once, glass art did not dominate [at the 1997 Art Fair/Seattle] as it usually does in Seattle and it was very beneficial for local glass artists to see their work in context with more materially substantial and intellectually challenging art. More glass ornament than sculpture, Axis (1996) by Ann Gardner (at Butters Gallery) was not really that much more blatantly decorative than Benglis's Santa Rosa. More problematic were the glass-flower bouquets by Flo Perkins at Elliott Brown Gallery. Painted glass assemblages by Therman Statom at Gail Severn Gallery seemed mass-produced despite their affected messiness and serious images-in contrast to the openly decorative vases and vessels by American and Italian artists at the region's top glass-art forum, William Traver Gallery of Seattle."
"Artfair/Seattle" by Kangas, M. Accessed March 30, 2009. Sculpture Magazine website.
http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag97/seattle/sm-seatl.shtml
1997 Mystic Sons of Morris Graves:
Advertisement in The Rocket, 1997."WINNER MIA DOVI SHOWS HER ENTHUSIASM FOR SMASHING A CHIHULY GLASS SCULPTURE LAST NIGHT AT THE LAVA LOUNGE IN SEATTLE'S BELLTOWN DISTRICT. THE MYSTIC SONS OF MORRIS GRAVES RAFFLED OFF THE CHANCE TO SMASH THE ARTWORK - DONATED ANONYMOUSLY TO BENEFIT THE SONS' NORTHWEST FINE ART SEARCH AND RESCUE TEAM. THE EVENT SPOOFS "LOW CULTURAL SELF-ESTEEM" AND PROVINCIAL THINKING."
"ONE LESS PIECE OF CHIHULY GLASS ART . . . " The Seattle Times (Seattle, WA). (August 8, 1997): B2. General OneFile. Gale. Seattle Public Library. 1 Apr. 2009. Gale Document Number:CJ64852517
1997 Robin Updike:
"Visual arts preview "Dale Chihuly: The George R. Stroemple Collection and Chihuly Over Venice," through Jan. 18 at the Portland Art Museum, 1219 S.W. Park Ave., Portland. Tickets are $11 for adults, $10 seniors and students, $6 children. Tickets are sold for a specific day and time; to ensure entry, purchase tickets in advance at 206-292-ARTS.
PORTLAND - George Stroemple doesn't seem like a man prone to obsessions. Friendly, plain-spoken, often wearing a broad grin, the 49-year-old Stroemple carries his burly, 6-foot-2-inch frame with the square-shouldered posture of the U.S. Marine he once was.
So at first it's difficult to figure just how the Portland businessman has come to own 500 artworks by Dale Chihuly. Stroemple owns more Chihulys than anyone else in the world, except for Chihuly himself. Since 1990, when Stroemple bought his first five Venetians - the flamboyant, highly ornate vessels covered in Technicolor flowers and vines that Chihuly started making in the early 1990s - Stroemple has been on a Chihuly buying binge. He has bought them dozens at a time. The result is that he now owns the most comprehensive, and certainly most interesting, collection of Chihuly glass art anywhere in the world.
But walk through the Portland Art Museum's current show with Stroemple as guide, and his passion for collecting Chihuly glass sculpture becomes more understandable. Called "Dale Chihuly: The George R. Stroemple Collection and Chihuly Over Venice," the show is an extraordinary and often thrilling exhibition of 350 pieces from Stroemple's treasure trove, many of them on display for the first time. Many also are rare, highly unusual pieces that Chihuly made in collaboration with Lino Tagliapietra and Pino Signoretto, two Venetian master glass blowers who almost never work together.
Stroemple moves close to a piece called "Cobalt Blue Venetian No. 410," a 3-foot-tall, trumpet-shaped vessel of brilliant blue covered in a dizzying swirl of yellow, orange and chartreuse flowers, the kind of giddy posies that might pop up in Oz as Dorothy trips down the Yellow Brick Road. Though he bought the piece seven years ago, he is obviously still enchanted.
"Just look at that. Just the odds of this coming out of the annealer are one in a million," he said, referring to the great fragility of such pieces during the cooling-off process.
In a room full of outrageously tour de force vessels decorated with delightful (and anatomically correct) chubby putti, his voice lowers to a whisper. He stands in front of a shallow glass dish, adorned on its edges with golden leaves. It stands on three feet that look like gold-leafed lobster tails. Inside is a golden dragon with a fearless little putto in its jaws. The entire piece is chartreuse and gold. It suggests fabulous Venetian tables overflowing with wine and feast food.
"It's such an old Venetian shape," said Stroemple with the same kind of awe that some might use to describe moonlight on Yosemite's Half Dome. "But to put a dragon and putti in it. Only Dale would do that. It's just such a beautiful, beautiful thing."
Also on exhibit are 10 of the huge, so-called "chandeliers" that Chihuly has been making at various sites around the world since 1995. These are the wasp-nest-like assemblages that Chihuly hung last year around Venice as the culmination of his Chihuly Over Venice project, in which he and his Seattle team of glass blowers traveled to Finland, Ireland and Mexico to collaborate with local glass blowers. Chihuly owns the chandeliers. They already have been on exhibit at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Kansas City and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
The combined show is so large that the Portland Art Museum has cleared out all of its upstairs galleries to display it. Four of the 12- to 25-foot-long, thousand-pound chandeliers are hanging downstairs in the sculpture court like giant jeweled necklaces dangling seductively from the ceiling.
There are five more upstairs, including the maelstrom of clear glass that Chihuly installed in the Doge's Palace in Italy last year as part of an international glass exhibition. Thanks in part to PAM's elegant, minimalist installation and excellent lighting, most of the objects in this show look dazzling. Even people who usually pooh-pooh Chihuly exhibitions as garish displays of decorative eye-candy will likely be impressed.
PAM is billing the show as a blockbuster, charging a surcharge of $5 to its usual entry price of $6, and advising people to get tickets in advance. The museum hopes to attract some 100,000 visitors during the show's three-month run, which ends Jan. 18. The museum says the show will likely travel, though there are no firm commitments yet.
For a man whose savvy in international business has made him millions - Stroemple founded and runs Trans Pacific, a hardware and building-supply export business - his unbridled enthusiasm for his collection, and what he believes to be Chihuly's great gifts as an artist and innovator, is charming. He is boyishly excited about the show, even though he admits he was at first reluctant to exhibit his collection.
He has shown only a small portion of it before, but Stroemple's Chihuly collection seems like an obvious choice for a PAM show as he is a member of PAM's board of directors.
Kathryn Kanjo, PAM's curator of contemporary art, said the challenge was to figure out how to mount a show that wasn't just another Chihuly extravaganza, the sort of total environment makeover that Chihuly now favors in his museum shows and in the decorative projects he undertakes for Asian corporate clients. Despite grandiose, publicity-generating projects such as Chihuly Over Venice, much of Chihuly's income these days comes from designing immense installations of glass for hotels and office buildings in Asia, where his work is much admired.
"With George's collection we got a select group of Chihulys," said Kanjo. "George is a very intense and idiosyncratic collector. He goes about it with a connoisseur's eye. Part of his insight is that he catches Chihuly on the cusp of something new. I think that's what a lot of this show is about."
Indeed people who think they are familiar with Chihuly's oeuvre will find surprises in this show. For instance, though his languid "seaform" shapes are among his most popular and most exhibited, there are almost none in this show.
Instead there are some rare works such as a group of 44 cylinders that Chihuly made in 1975, just before the car accident in which he lost the use of his left eye. Made at the Rhode Island School of Design with assistance from artists Seaver Leslie and Flora Mace, the group is known as the "Irish Cylinders." That's because the modest-sized objects - many are 8 to 12 inches tall - are illustrated with drawings and text from Irish folk tales and passages from James Joyce's "Ulysses."
Wrapping drawing transfers and text into the layers of glass was a highly experimental technique in those early days of the studio glass movement. And the charm of these cylinders is partly in realizing how far the studio glass movement, and Chihuly's aesthetic, has advanced in the subsequent 22 years. Stroemple said he wanted the cylinders, which are mostly milky opaque shades of white and green, from the moment he saw them clustered under a table in Chihuly's storehouse in Tacoma. Chihuly at first didn't want to sell them.
"They were literally the last things he blew," said Stroemple. After the car accident, Chihuly was no longer able to gauge depth perception and that makes it impossible for him to do the physical, potentially dangerous work required in glass-blowing, which involves plunging molten balls of glass into blazing furnaces with precision and speed.
"To have made all those cylinders in three or four days was a Herculean task,' said Stroemple. "Dale didn't want to let them go but then he realized that if he let me have them, they'd all stay together."
Stroemple clearly sees himself as an archivist when it comes to Chihuly. He says he normally has only 15 or 20 pieces of his Chihuly collection on display at his home. Many of the pieces now on exhibit haven't been unpacked since he bought them. But, despite appearances, amassing works simply for the sake of collecting isn't his style. He's a smart, informed collector who researches before he buys. He seems to know every piece in the collection and can explain exactly why he bought it.
An Ohio native who moved to Oregon with his family when he was 9, Stroemple says he collected bugs and creepy-crawly things as a kid. As a Marine in Viet Nam during the war, he saved his money and brought back antique Japanese porcelains. Later, while studying international business at Oregon State University, he played rugby, hung out with the jocks and bought artworks - by then he was into 19th-century American genre painting - whenever he could scrape together the money. He still occasionally buys paintings by contemporary artists, including Alexis Rockman, and has a sizable collection of glass sculpture by Bill Morris.
But in the late '80s he turned his attention toward glass. The go-go art market had made prices for contemporary art too high, in his opinion, and with his businessman's logic, he decided to look for an art medium that was, in business terms, undervalued. He spent three years studying the history of glass art before he decided that glass sculpture was worth collecting and that Chihuly was an innovator.
So fascinated is Stroemple by Chihuly and the team-work process that for a while in the early '90s he made it his habit to get up at 3:30 a.m. and drive from Portland to Seattle to be in Chihuly's Lake Union hot shop when the morning's first blow started at 6:30 a.m.
That doesn't mean Stroemple likes everything Chihuly makes. He's not interested in having a wall of Chihuly glass in his home, as some Northwest collectors do. And he hasn't bought any of the "macchia" created since the mid-'80s. Stroemple believes Chihuly's macchia - the basket-shaped, densely colored sculptures that resemble Native American baskets - lost brilliance and singularity once artist Bill Morris was no longer working as Chihuly's head gaffer.
The 51 macchia included in the PAM show all date from the early '80s, and many are lovely. Also included in the show are about 200 small (8-15 inch tall) and large (up to 3-foot) art-deco-inspired Venetians. And there are 30 works on paper from Stroemple's collections.
On display for the first time are the three so-called "stoppers", which are three-foot-tall, amber confections of putti and dragons perched on laundry-tub-sized glass bulbs. The humor here is that that they are the "stoppers" for gargantuan perfume bottles.
Some 19th-century glass innovators, including Rene Lalique, were known for making extravagant perfume bottles.
Stroemple doesn't plan to buy one of the big chandeliers that were hung in Venice, though he does own what the most spectacular group of chandelier-like works Chihuly has made, a quintet of five amber and golden chandeliers started last year in Murano, Italy, and completed in Seattle.
The five pieces, which are a bravura finale for the PAM exhibition, look like gorgeous clumps of gold kelp, each mass sprouting a milky "pod" decorated with perfect eels, blowfish, octopus, sharks, crabs, mermaids and Poseidon blowing his conch horn. Singoretto, a master at making the Noah's ark of sea life, made the creatures, and Tagiapietra blew the opaque pods. Chihuly's Boathouse team fashioned the sinewy tendrils later.
The piece, called "Laguna Murano Chandelier," is spectacular by any definition. It evokes all the over-the-top technical expertise of the historic Venetian glass industry, and, also, the lavish, pleasure-loving aesthetic of Venice in the centuries when it known as the Serene Republic, the queen of the seas.
Stroemple claims he can't draw, can hardly write his name legibly, and has no artistic talent himself. But, he says, "I've always been very visual. What I like, in any art, is the attention to detail. I respect the time and energy and talent that comes into making something beautiful, whether it's a painting or a bronze. From the paintings, to the bronzes, to the glass, what they have in common is that they're all beautiful objects.""
1997 Michael Brennan:
"I walked into the gallery wondering if Wilmarth's work would still move me. I saw Wilmarth's last show at Janis in a rush, two years ago, during the final few minutes of closing day. I remember seeing the art historian Dore Ashton there. She had once written an interesting essay about the influence of Stephane Mallarme's poetry on Wilmarth's work. She was looking a little lost that day, ambling about the reception counter by herself.
Another lady, with a heavily made-up face, followed me into the elevator as the door was closing. Foundation Lady, said aloud and undirected, "Oh God, in the `60s everybody went Minimal. Minimal, Minimal, Minimal," she said, while fly-casting her monkey-paw hand back and forth above her shoulder. Then, looking at me with her chewy mascara eyelashes stuck above the cut crystal edge of her fancy eyeglasses, she said, "I mean, how long can you look at it, it's not like Michelangelo or anything." That's not the point, I thought to myself in the tinny silence. If anything, Wilmarth's work was always more humanist than Minimalist, and I was waiting for her final refrain, "Nothing modern moves me."
This current show at Sidney Janis is a classic 57th Street estate show. A strange mix of early and late work, the show presents 35 pieces in all, ranging from student efforts from his years at Cooper Union to watercolors on paper, maquettes for larger pieces, painted reliefs and super-clean Park Place Gallery-era sculpture. It's all odds and ends, exactly the kind of unedited free-for-all show no artist ever allows while alive. Of course, that's what makes this show very interesting, and seem more creative in a sense than the previous posthumous shows of Wilmarth's work held, for example, at Hirschl & Adler Modern. It's also a curious complement to the carefully installed mini-retrospective that Wilmarth had at MoMA back in 1989. This show presents the long stretch of a developing artist rather than a pruned and packaged segment of the best collected work. Which is good because Wilmarth's art matured at an early age, so to see something not fully formed in his case makes it appear all the more unfamiliar and insightful.
The installation is crammed but lively, which helps, considering the serious and sometimes morose nature of Wilmarth's work. Missing are many of the classic Wilmarth sculptures, like those from the Gnomon or Clearings series, which are usually composed of large sheets of green cast glass etched with hydroflouric acid and set away from upright planes of steel. These works appear haunted, always. I think some of them, like New Ninth, are the most moving sculptures ever made. Wilmarth's late work, such as Self Portrait With Sliding Light, 1987, which is included in this show, and the painting Toast strike similar chords, but in a more overtly symbolic way.
In My Old Books Closed... the glass physically represents a head, or a skull, but Wilmarth still manages to maintain the figure's ephemerality by frosting the glass with acid, and thereby transforming the material into something that might appear like a frozen corona of the soul. This show also includes whimsical works such as the flip Tic-Tac-Toe floor piece called Gye's Arcade, and the very early, tinkered Invitation. It is extremely interesting to watch Wilmarth's work as it develops from early assemblage through `60s-style constructivism to an atmospheric Minimalism, ultimately leading towards a more personal and gasping expressionism. Wilmarth was influenced by Brancusi, Matisse and Roebling, and like the reinforced cable Roebling invented, Wilmarth spun an art of stunning beauty and durability. I like the way Wilmarth's mentor, the sculptor Tony Smith, put it:
- "For sculpture Chris Wilmarth has practically invented an entirely new material -- glass. What has heretofore existed in other contexts as a substitute for nothing, he has made palpable. In the fact that each piece is unique and elegant, he manifests the true mark of poetic genius."
Christopher Wilmarth at Janis Gallery, Mar. 18-Apr. 19, 1997, 110 W. 57th St., New York, NY 10019.
MICHAEL BRENNAN is a New York painter who writes on art."
Brennan, M. "Christopher Wilmarth at Janis." ~March 1997. Artnet Magazine. website accessed May 16, 2009. http://www.artnet.com/magazine_pre2000/reviews/brennan/brennan5-29-97.asp
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