1999 Frances Anderton:
"
WHEN Tom Wolfe wrote about this gambling oasis in the early 1960's, he reeled: ''Such colors! All the electrochemical pastels of the Florida littoral.'' Today he would be struck dumb by . . . such details! Las Vegas on the cusp of a new millennium is decked out with all the frills of the Renaissance.
As the garish neon signs of old give way to theme-park evocations of the Old World, Las Vegas is reveling in a grand new cityscape of aged walls, fake frescoes and acrylic ''marble.'' The casino owners here are America's new Medici, proud patrons of the flowering of a modern variant on old ornamental crafts.
To ceiling painters, ''Vegas is the Vatican of the 90's,'' said Karen Kristin, who owns Sky Art, an Englewood, Colo., company that painted the ersatz St. Mark's Square at the Venetian casino resort and the celestial vault that spans a canal there.
The casinos are drawing talent from all over the globe in crafts both old and new to make fake statuary (more than 10,000 pieces for the ''landmarks'' on the facade of the Paris casino complex), distress walls and concoct fancy plasterwork and ironwork. Like itinerant painters, sculptors and woodcarvers plying their trade in the courts of Europe, crafts workers have packed up their bags. All roads lead to Las Vegas.
''We had people calling from all over the world,'' said Dave Suder, the president of the West Coast division of KHS&S contractors, which oversaw the exterior decoration of the Paris. ''They didn't quite understand the project. They thought we were going to take real stone and carve real stone statues.'' Instead, the ones at the Paris are carved from Styrofoam or cast in molds.
The New York New York casino -- which opened in 1997 and is themed from the top of its one-third-size Chrysler Building to the tips of the distressed fake-copper toes on its Statue of Liberty -- set a benchmark for authenticity, but it was soon upstaged by the Euro-style competition: the Bellagio, the Paris and the Venetian. After New York New York opened, Sheldon Adelson, the owner of the Venetian, dismissed it as a fake. ''We are not going to build a faux Venice,'' he said. ''We are going to build what is essentially the real Venice.''
Val Thornton, of Bergman, Walls & Youngblood, the project architect on the Paris, said in a recent interview: ''You don't fool around with Paris. You do Paris, or you leave it alone.''
A slight overstatement, considering that what is being built is taking months rather than centuries, and is mostly decorative effect rather than art. But what is real is the level of talent that the casino owners are enlisting -- artists who have to contend with modern necessities in the way that no master of the Renaissance ever imagined: stringent fire regulations and code restrictions, steel substructures, and mechanical and electrical systems. And it must be remembered that Las Vegas, unlike ancient Rome, puts up its buildings not for posterity but until the next marketing gimmick.
''A lot of the projects have been pretty fun, but there're downsides to it as well,'' said Daniel Miller, a sculptor on several Las Vegas projects who said he had invented a machine to spray clay onto foam. ''Las Vegas in general is so hurried, you have to compromise on your artistic vision. It's about the art of compromise more than the art of sculpture.''
Karen Kristin has been painting cloud-dappled skies in Las Vegas since she created the heavens in the Cleopatra suite of Caesars Palace in 1988. ''I think they are like the new Catholics in a way,'' she said, referring to the casino owners who, like the popes of old in their zeal to top each other with each new extravagance, are raising the caliber and budget of theming.
Bill Mensching, the vice president of EverGreene Painting Studios of New York, does not quite concur with the Las Vegas-as-nouveau-Vatican analogy. ''Being Catholic, I'd have trouble saying that,'' he said. But he agreed that ''the casinos right now seem to be the major benefactors for studios like us.''
In the new casinos, noble materials are used in just a few places. The Bellagio, the Paris and the Venetian feature real marble in prominent public areas, and not all the interior plants are silk. The balconies and gates inside the Paris shopping mall are wrought iron. But for the most part, Las Vegas is a magnet for specialists in decorative effects, often using materials that are light, cheap and synthetic.
''We take foam, plastic, fiberglass, cast stone or glass-reinforced concrete and turn that into emotion,'' said Robert Hlusak, the executive design manager at Treadway Industries of Las Vegas, which made all the statuary, tracery and capitals of the fake Doges' Palace and other landmarks at the Venetian casino complex.
Such ornamentation is hardly high art. ''It's the equivalent of a set of showgirls molded in foam,'' said John Chase, author of the forthcoming ''Glitter Stucco and Dumpster Diving,'' a collection of essays on vernacular architecture. ''It's entertainment.''
As Robert Venturi, the architect and an author of ''Learning From Las Vegas,'' a 1972 celebration of the commercial Strip, put it, ''Historians aren't going to come back and put fragments in a high art museum, but they would put it in a craft museum.''
The casino crafting does have its defenders. Terry Dougall, a designer in Pasadena, Calif., whose Caesars Forum Shops mall is widely credited with raising the quality of theming, said, ''People may make fun of the faux marble in Las Vegas, but I can take you through Renaissance palaces and show you miles of faux marble.''
But what kind of art is it when even Robert Walker, a leading faux-finisher, calls the Las Vegas crafts boom ''not really creative''? With a few notable exceptions, like Dale Chihuly's glorious glass sculpture, ''Fiori di Como,'' in the lobby of the Bellagio -- which looks a bit like hundreds of multicolored sea anemones clinging to the ceiling -- most of the artwork is imitative rather than innovative.
EverGreene has created versions of paintings by Tiepolo and Veronese on the ceilings of the basilica-size hallways in the Venetian. This is not school of velvet art, however, or paint by numbers. The process is both complicated and alluring, involving layouts designed mainly on computer, transferred to canvases and then hand-painted in New York with acrylics. (Visually richer oil paint cannot be used, because all materials have to be fire-retardant.)
Sky Art, on the other hand, paints ceilings with spray guns and brushes. William Weidner, the president of Las Vegas Sands, which owns the Venetian, described his fascination at watching Karen Kristin, armed with walkie-talkie and laser pointer, shouting instructions to artisans perched on high movable platforms: ''I want wispy over there, lumpy over here. Deepen the sunset!''
Such a concentration of artists, Mr. Weidner declared with the ebullience typical of casino owners, just proves that these Las Vegas resorts are ''the W.P.A.'s of the 90's and the next century -- only this time, they are W.P.A.'s created by the private sector.''
There has been so much work in Las Vegas that it has even lured artisans like Erwin Antonitsch of European Design Iron. He left his native Austria with a journeyman's certificate in wrought-iron work, and eventually settled in Reno, Nev., where he forged the balconies and gates for the Paris casino. Another artist setting up shop in Las Vegas was Joan Morency of Color Alive, an ''aged wall'' specialist from Boston who made her local debut doing what she called ''10 days of cloud work'' at Caesars Magical Empire in 1996.
Mr. Venturi argues that one does not have to be original to be an artist. ''Michelangelo didn't invent new forms,'' he said. ''He just did them better. What visitors see in Las Vegas now is scenography that you walk through, a la Disneyland.'' It does involve ''a kind of artistry using iconography that maybe did not exist in the recent past,'' he added, ''but it is the art of stagecraft.''
It comes as no surprise, then, that many of the crafts specialists now working in Las Vegas acquired their skills in Hollywood and Disneyland. Mr. Dougall said he started working on the Caesars Forum Shops in the early 1990's, ''at the time Hollywood was in slump -- scenic artists started knocking on our doors.''
They have continued to come. But others arrive on the Strip equipped with degrees in fine art and find themselves awe-struck and energized, in spite of themselves. Marilyn Phillips, a sculptor, had never used Styrofoam until she came to Las Vegas but is now keen on it.
''It feels great,'' Ms. Phillips said as she put the finishing touches on a part-foam, part-clay column capital in the hangerlike studio of Treadway Industries. ''It's so fast, it's wonderful.''
The Treadway design manager, Mr. Hlusak, said that finding the right artist or artisan for the right job is not always easy. ''You can't go to a university and say, 'Give me your three best foam sculptors,' '' he said. ''What you find is your three best sculptors in clay. There's a two-week-to-a-month learning curve, but if they have an eye, they become trained in a new medium, and you are training a new genre of artisans.''
Budgets for theme decor have been expanding in the 1990's. Mr. Weidner of Las Vegas Sands said that $100 million had been spent on ornamentation at the Venetian. Charles Silverman, the president of Yates-Silverman, a Las Vegas design company that did the interiors of the public spaces at the Paris and all the interiors at New York New York, said his company put in ''40,000 design hours on Paris, and 25,000 on the entire New York New York, including guest rooms.''
But can this continue? Can Las Vegas, Our Lady of the Slot Machines, nurture a new generation of crafts workers?
Mr. Dougall, who said that the market for theming may be leveling off, sees plenty of opportunities for top artisans in theme parks, shopping malls and the casinos now being built around the world.
Las Vegas's artisans have found work in private residences, too. One firm, Projex, is custom-decorating a $5 million Roman-style home in Miami. The owner called after seeing the firm's statuary in Caesars Forum Shops. Moonlights Molds of Southern California, which made bas-relief panels for Bellagio and Paris, is ornamenting a $30 million house in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. (The company also sells from a catalogue of rosettes, capitals and moldings in cast plaster, composites and fiberglass.)
And Karen Kristin recently finished painting a sky on the ceiling of the conference room in a private jet.
Casino chic: It may be coming to a home near you."
Anderton, F. "Put it on the ceiling and call it high art." The New York Times. October 14, 1999. acc. November 2, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/1999/10/14/garden/design-notebook-put-it-on-the-ceiling-and-call-it-high-art.html?pagewanted=all
“Within the craft traditions, glass is particularly fruitful area for examining the relationship of old and new, the artistic strategies that might be described as adoptive and adaptive. Glass has a history dating back five thousand years, yet artists have been using it for purely personal aesthetic purposes only since the early 1960s (with a few isolated earlier instances). Today’s glass artists are nearly all art-school trained, not products of the apprenticeship system that dates to the beginning of the craft. They know the history of both the fine arts and the decorative arts. They have mastered their material, learning by experimentation as well as by studying with the great European masters who keep alive the traditions of the craft. This exhibition [Clearly Inspired, Tampa Museum of Art] aims to examine how contemporary artists working within the glassmaking craft traditions are reinterpreting them, carrying on the time-honored practice of adoption and adaption that has defined art throughout the millennia. These glass artists have been inspired and influenced by the past. Sometimes they have been challenged by it, as Barry Sautner was when he set out to duplicate and then surpass the achievements of the Roman cage cup makers. Or they have appropriated the old techniques and appearance, as Dale Chihuly has used the Venetian style for his own personal expression.”
Chambers, K.S. "Introduction: Revival and Revolution" in Clearly Inspired: Contemporary Glass and Its Origins. Tampa Musuem of Art, Pomegranate, San Fransisco. 1999
1999 Eric Scigliano:
"The New Northwest's distinguishing feature isn't rain or money or coffee. It's Chihuly. Not "Dale Chihuly." Not "glass art by Dale Chihuly." Chihuly is all you need to say, whether you're talking about a particular glass piece ("a Chihuly") or evoking the movement, the institution, the aesthetic, and the regional identity epitomized by the Northwest's (and the glass world's) most famous artist. Not since Bernini decked Rome with fountains, or at least not since the Wyeths became Maine's official art family, has an artist so exemplified the spirit of a city or region--and it took three generations of Wyeths. Chihuly's work doesn't say anything outright about us, but he's the best mirror we've got for divining what we've come to today.
A little background, with apologies to anyone who lives here and already knows it all. Dale Chihuly is the artist/celebrity who gets most of the credit for elevating glass blowing from one more craft to a bona fide--and wildly popular and lucrative--art form. He grew up in Tacoma, Seattle's soporific little-sister city, and headed first back East, and then to Venice, to study in the emerging studio glass movement. In 1972, on a tree farm north of Seattle, he founded the Pilchuck Glass School, which made that movement an institution even as he turned it into an industry.
Try as we may, we can't escape the glass Chihuly makes (or rather, has others make): the lurid "Venetians," writhing "sea forms," and extravagant, candleless "chandeliers" resembling giant wasps' nests or clusters of water-filled condoms. The loftiest galleries and living rooms out here have their Chihuly bowls; the crasser tourist galleries stock copycats. To gain "Seattle credibility," the apartment set in the sitcom Frasier sprouted one. No new cultural palace or festival shopping experience is complete without a Chihuly (click here if you think I'm exaggerating). Seattle's new symphony hall boasts two Chihuly chandeliers.
Chihuly himself is just as much a fixture as his Chihulys, especially in of the Seattle Times' gossip column. (Sample: "While a tour of the [Chihuly] studio is standard for celebrities, Bono did it one better. He tried his hand ... at glass blowing.") The Seattle Opera commissioned a set (in Mylar) from Chihuly. Only Leonardo da Vinci and King Tut have topped the attendance record set by Chihuly at the Seattle Art Museum. The first project Paul Allen picked for his new film company was a study of artists' inspirations, including ... you guessed it. But the ultimate confirmation of Chihuly's stature is the lottery hometown artists stage to mock Seattle's star-struck provincialism and celebrity fawning: The winner gets to "smash a Chihuly."
But Seattle still lags behind its erstwhile rival Tacoma in Chihuly-mania. For Tacoma, glass is a last chance at world stature. Its grandest landmark, the Neo-Baroque Union Station, has been renovated and reopened as a Chihuly showcase, with the mother of all chandeliers in its atrium and more big pieces scattered around. This is just the warm-up to the International Glass Museum (originally the "Chihuly Glass Center") being built on Tacoma's waterfront, reached by a 474-foot "Chihuly Bridge of Glass." Tacoma's captains of industry and finance all ponied up for it. As one of them told the Times, "Every downtown needs a niche."
Chihuly is the natural choice for Tacoma and not just because he's a native son. His is the perfect art for boosters, wannabes, new money, and self-conscious arrivistes. In other words, perfect for the precociously wealthy, culturally callow New Northwest. Glass has the museum seal of approval, but it's supremely and (as practiced by Chihuly) almost purely decorative--blissfully unburdened with threatening, ambiguous, or other meanings. "You don't have to be smart or art-historically sophisticated to understand these," a Chihuly's assistant explains in one of several documentaries on him by Seattle's public TV station. "They're merely beautiful." Forget Sister Wendy and her gloomy paintings; glass, shimmering and vacant, is the ideal TV art, a match for Riverdance and the tenors.
But beautiful Chihulys are just part of the Chihuly phenomenon. Chihuly himself is the main show. With his rampant curls, bluff growl, black eye patch, and bright-colored pirate shirts and scarves, he's the perfect foil to geek chic, a year-round version of the "Seafair Pirates" who frolic at our big summer parade--the artist for the new buccaneer capitalism, the jester who amuses (but never challenges) the geeks. He reprises the Renaissance role of artist as courtier, standing like a third senator onstage when President Clinton visits, partying on Paul Allen's yacht with Robin Williams, Candice Bergen and, of course, Bill and Melinda Gates. This year, when Gates hosted his annual CEO Summit, the world's most celebrated gathering of tycoons, who provided the entertainment? The Vienna Philharmonic and, with "an exhibition of glass-blowing art," Dale Chihuly.
Not that he blows glass himself, though he still says things like this, from the 1994 book Chihuly Baskets: "Glass blowing is a very spontaneous medium, and its suits me. ... I've been at it for thirty years and am as infatuated as when I blew my first bubble." Chihuly hasn't actually blown since 1976, when an auto accident cost him an eye and his depth perception--and made his career. He acquired the trademark dashing eye patch, without which he'd be just another chubby little guy with frizzy hair. And he hired other people, including top Italian masters, to blow more glass than he could alone--enough to make him the Christo of glass, decking Northwest streams and (you've gotta admire the chutzpah) Venetian canals with bright globes and tubes.
The Eye-Patched One has gone far, and so has this town. How far? Consider the other time, 50 years ago, that Seattle had a distinctive, defining artistic tradition--and not one but two celebrity artists. Morris Graves, Mark Tobey, and others in the generation later dubbed "Northwest visionaries" drank deep of both the drizzly, mossy natural scene and of Asian art and philosophy. Tobey sketched spinach hawkers and bums at the downtown Pike Place Public Market and was sometimes mistaken for one. Graves hid out in the deep woods. Tobey painted calligraphic "white paintings" and Graves bodhisattva birds, in delicate gouache and pastel--media notably unsuited to large atriums. Today these seem as quaint as hand-bound books or handwritten letters.
Chihuly 
Like Seattle's software, bookselling, and coffee tycoons, Chihuly has triumphed by marketing and branding the hell out of his product, elevating it to something at once precious and ubiquitous. The Northwest trick is not so much to create something out of nothing as making something very large out of something small, and then repeating the process. A hundred million PCs, a billion "personalized" book and CD sales, a zillion cups of coffee ... or hundreds of chandeliers made of brittle blades of glass. Which is, after all, just melted silicon."
Scigliano, J. "Heart of Glass." Slate Magazine. June 10, 1999. website accessed June 2, 2009. http://www.slate.com/id/30161/
"For most of his career, Isleta artist Tony Jojola has walked a lonely path.
"When it came to Indian artists working in blown glass, I used to be the only one out there," he said.
But today, more than two decades after his graduation from the College of Santa Fe, Jojola isn't just watching other Native American glass artists develop, he's teaching them how it's done.
Jojola, whose one-artist exhibition of fine art glass opens Friday at Santa Fe's Columbine Gallery, has long made traditional Native American art forms such as Pueblo pottery, basketry and weavings. While that artistic direction continues, what also occupies much of his time these days is his commitment to teaching at-risk and minority youth about the challenge of creating fine art glass.
That's why, when his exhibition opens at Columbine Gallery on Friday, Jojola will make room for a dozen glass works of art blown by students of the Taos branch of the Hilltop Artists in Residence program, which is based in Tacoma, Wash.
Since opening its New Mexico facility earlier this year in a Taos industrial park, Hilltop has worked with youths from the local school district as well as Taos Pueblo's schools. Jojola is the Taos program's head of instruction.
Best known in art circles for his close association with America's foremost glass artist, Dale Chihuly, Jojola labored for years as one of Chihuly's part-time studio assistants.
In 1996 he was presented with an opportunity to become a key part of an art education project targeted toward at-risk youth in Tacoma, which is Chihuly's hometown.
That project, which has not only received Chihuly's blessing but also his constant attention in the form of creative and hands-on oversight of its operations, is the Hilltop Artists in Residence program. It's located in Tacoma's Hilltop neighborhood on the grounds of an aging middle school.
As lead instructor of the program's glass blowing project, Jojola said he worked primarily with African American, Asian and Hispanic youths.
"When I started a career as a glass artist, I'd dream about what I'd be doing in my future," said Jojola during an interview in the Hilltop Artists in Residence Taos studios. "But now, it's my life that's a dream, and I'm sleeping better each night."
Along with director Kathy Kaperick, who also relocated to Taos from Hilltop's Tacoma facility as program director of the New Mexico program, Jojola has set out on a mission he characterized as "exhausting, but rewarding."
"What we're all about is working with high-risk kids and teaching them to work with us in glass blowing as a way to get them interested in finishing their education and maybe exploring the possibilities of a career in art," he said. "This is a medium that teaches responsibility, teamwork and focus. And if you don't work by its rules, it quickly becomes a very dangerous activity.
"For kids who think they're hot stuff, getting around this sort of hot stuff is a fast way to learn lessons about trust, self-worth and respect."
Jojola said the program's long-range goal is to build a facility on Taos Pueblo land. That structure, planned to be 15,000 square feet, would be used for glass art instruction and exhibition.
Tony Jojola exhibition of glass art
WHEN: Friday through Aug. 30; Opening reception 5 to 7 p.m. Friday
WHERE: Columbine Gallery, 211 Old Santa Fe Trail (inside Hotel Loretto)
HOW MUCH: Free"
Villani, J. "Native American artist crafts glass career for self, others." The Alburquerque Journal. July 25, 1999.
1999 Keith Raethner:
"In his mind's eye, Isleta Pueblo sculptor Tony Jojola already can see the forms: water jugs, seed jars, decorative pots of every design and description, all blessed by the same sacred element as clay-fire-but made of a substance that radiates the sun-glass. Lloyd Kiva New (Cherokee) believes a studio glass center and glass-blowing project now taking form at Taos Pueblo will evolve into "one of the most significant Native American art movements since beadwork in the 1700s and metal-smithing and the use of silver in the 1850s."
In his mind's eye, Isleta Pueblo sculptor Tony Jojola already can see the forms: water jugs, seed jars, decorative pots of every design and description, all blessed by the same sacred element as clay-fire-but made of a substance that radiates the sun-glass. Lloyd Kiva New (Cherokee), the former Institute of American Indian Arts president who established a glass-blowing program at the Santa Fe school in the 1970s, sees more. He believes a studio glass center and glass-blowing project now taking form at Taos Pueblo will evolve into "one of the most significant Native American art movements since beadwork in the 1700s and metal-smithing and the use of silver in the 1850s."
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"There's a revolution happening on the pueblo," Jojola adds. "What we're really starting at Taos is a national Native American glass-art movement."
It took twelve months and countless tribal council meetings to take the revolution at Taos Pueblo beyond mere talk. Last summer, the council made an agreement with the Hilltop Artists in Residence of Tacoma, Washington, to build a 15,000- square-foot studio glass center, production shop, exhibition space and plaza on two acres of reservation land. The center will serve the entire pueblo community-children, adults and elders. Artwork made by the tribe will be sold and marketed nationwide. A percentage of sales will go to the artists. The rest will go to a special fund for community programs, from organic agriculture to preserving the Tiwa language.
But the Hilltop program at Taos is more than a revolution. The program promises to inspire a whole new generation of young Pueblo artists, some of whom are at risk of failing school or, worse, getting involved in crime.
The $1.5 million project broke ground last October and is scheduled for completion sometime in late summer. It is the first joint venture in the history of the Taos tribe, according to former Governor Ruben Romero, under whose administration the enterprise took root. "The program is a chance to give our (people) a place to make something and make something of themselves," Romero says.
The project's goal of helping at-risk youth is, like the glass-blowing component, modeled on the Hilltop program. Kathy Kaperick, with the materials and counsel of master glass artist Dale Chihuly, started the Hilltop Artists program in 1994 behind Jason Lee Middle School in Tacoma's Hilltop district. The goal was education, a way to get disadvantaged and disenfranchised youth, primarily African-American, back in school. The hook was glass.
The project took off like Michael Jordan's vertical leap. The Hilltop's "at-risk" youth turned into risk-takers. Out of 2,500-degree furnaces came glowing art formed and reformed by kids otherwise headed for Tacoma's detention centers. "All kind of kids coexist in the hot shop," says James Kinnard, a student teacher in the Tacoma program who has since been nominated to the national Academy of Achieve-ment for high-school students. "Can't say where I'd be without it, but I'm pretty sure I'd be gettin' there in something stolen."
In five years, the Hilltop program has become a national model. In Tacoma, the hot shop serves hundreds of youths through classes thirteen hours a day, five days a week. Exhibitions of student work are organized several times a year and always sell out, bringing significant earned income into the program. Commissions for art from local businesses, another source of revenue, continue to grow. Both the CBS and the Bravo television networks have produced documentaries on the Hilltop program and Home Box Office has a project in the works.
"Forty percent of what happens (in the hot shop) is glass, 60 percent is social work," Jojola says. "The kids require attention because they never got it anywhere else-but it works. Every day, they're more engaged."
Taos Pueblo, nestled in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico, is far removed from Tacoma's inner city. Yet, the same problems exist on the reservation, population 2,000. Drugs, gangs, lack of opportunity and general apathy are acknowledged facts on the reservation. Unemployment is nearly 80 percent.
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"There is an element of the glass project that Western profiteers may not understand," former tribal Secretary Richard Deertrack adds. "The money isn't our first interest. The preservation and advancement of our culture and its artistic traditions is our first priority."
Until last year, glass-blowing was foreign to the Taos tribe, whose artistic tradition is grounded in drum-making and micaceous pottery. Indeed, glass-blowing is little known among Native artists. Jojola, senior instructor of the Hilltop Artists program in Tacoma, has sculpted glass for more than twenty years, initially under Chihuly, honorary co-chairman and spiritual emissary of the Taos project. But the total number of Native artists working in the medium can be counted on one hand.
The "studio glass" movement in America took form in 1962, when Harvey Littleton and Dominick Labino devised a small portable furnace and a batch formula for melting glass at a lower temperature. Glass-blowing was freed from the limits of factory production and, suddenly, the seductive properties of glass-transparency, color, liquidity and general luminosity-were exploited to their maximum artistic effect.
In 1966, Tacoma-born Chihuly was a Fulbright fellow studying at the Venini glass factory in Italy. He assimilated the Venetians' secrets about glass into programs at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he taught, and the Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington, which he founded with Native American art collectors John Hauberg and Anne Gould Hauberg in 1971. Nearly thirty years later, Kiva New calls Chihuly "the reigning maestro of modern glass."
The same summer that Chihuly started Pilchuck, his colleague Jamie Carpenter began collecting Northwest Coast baskets. Later, when the two were visiting the Washington State Historical Museum in Tacoma, they chanced upon a collection of Native baskets on the third floor. A seed was planted for Chihuly and in turn a handful of Native artists were captivated by the maestro's imaginative possibilities for glass.
Jojola, 40, left Isleta Pueblo to study with Chihuly at the IAIA and to apprentice under him at Pilchuck. Thirty-four-year-old Preston Singletary, whose grandmother was full-blooded Tlingit from southeastern Alaska, also joined Chihuly at Pilchuck and at The Boathouse, Chihuly's glass-blowing studio at Lake Union in Seattle.
Singletary draws from the traditional symbols of Northwest Native culture for his sculpture. His favorite form, the Tlingit rain hat, is a delicate but durable balance of traditional design and modern expression.
Singletary has answered several times the claim that glass-blowing flies in the face of Native artistic traditions. He sees the medium as "a progression of those traditions."
"Any artist," Singletary says, "makes his own individual assessment of the object he's working with, and the idea, I think, is more important than the medium. Glass-blowing will be a tremendous inspiration to Native American artists because the process itself is so dynamic and creative, so full of immediate possibilities. The spontaneity and energy of the moment and the rhythm of working as a team, which glass-blowing requires, is enormously exciting."
Similarly, Taos Pueblo leaders see glass-blowing as an expansion of Native cultural traditions. "Fire is a crucial element in glass-blowing, and it's [fire] always been an essential element in our tradition," Deertrack says. "People are taught to fear it, but fire has always been our friend."
Deertrack and his fellow tribal council members didn't buy into the Hilltop program without assurances. They needed to be convinced that the Hilltop model in Tacoma had value as an artistic venture and as a social healer.
Taos is arguably the most traditional of nineteen Pueblo tribes in the Southwest. Electricity and running water have come to the reservation, but not into the original North Pueblo and South Pueblo structures. Many of the tribe's most important decisions are made in kivas up to 800 years old. Members of the governor's and war chief's offices are appointed by caciques, or religious leaders. The same rules of order apply for the fiscales, who attend to the affairs of the Roman Catholic Church on the reservation.
Convincing the tribal council of the social and artistic potential of the glass-blowing project was difficult. Tribal councils at Taos Pueblo had heard many proposals-joint-venture schemes for organic fertilizers and a motorcycle maintenance program, to name just a couple. To make matters more fragile, there is no word in Tiwa for what the Hilltop group was proposing. The closest to "glass-blowing" that tribal council members could come to in their own language was "blowing bottles."
Undaunted, Kaperick, a 41-year-old Anglo woman, went before the full council with a proposal in April 1998. It was June before she was invited back. But on June 10, the council passed a resolution establishing "a glass (art) venture to train and direct tribal youth and adults in the production and marketing of blown glass and related glass products."
Instructors and senior students in the Tacoma program will travel to Taos to help Jojola teach glass-blowing to the tribe. In turn, Taos Pueblo youth, parents and elders will be selected for residencies in Tacoma to learn the exacting art of glass-blowing.
Construction of the project's glass-blowing studio at the pueblo is slated for late spring, but the cultural exchange between Tacoma and Taos already has begun. Last November, at the invitation of the Hilltop group, twenty members of the Taos tribe, ages 8 to 82, went to Tacoma and Seattle for a five-day crash course. They visited Chihuly's studio in Seattle, where they tried glass-blowing for the first time. Then they toured the Hilltop hot shop in Tacoma, where they saw the program in full production and blew more glass.
Shortly after the group tour, Jojola took 18-year-old Ryan Romero to Tacoma. He is the first of the Taos tribe to train at the Hilltop. "Now the project is real in the eyes of the Pueblo people," Kaperick says. "They can trust it."
"I can tell the project will soar because the beginnings are so positive," says Kiva New, who went on the Tacoma trip. "There's a spirituality on both sides. That means everything to the Taos people."
Chihuly especially recognizes the cultural bond between Tacoma and Taos and the larger implications for the Pueblo community. "Glass-blowing is an art form that works as a team," he says. "At Taos Pueblo, you have a community whose whole tradition is teamwork."
Kaperick and the Hilltop team in Taos didn't wait for the permanent glass studio to be built in order to get the project up and running at the pueblo. This March, Kaperick and the Hilltop team in Taos plan to install on the reservation a "portable" hot shop-including a molten-glass furnace, two glory holes (reheating chambers), and one annealing oven-so that the glass-blowing wouldn't have to wait for the permanent facility to be built. Discussions between the Hilltop group and administrators at the Native American Preparatory School in Santa Fe also have begun to establish an exchange program that would bring NAPS students to the Taos studio for residencies to supplement their studies.
"I think the glass-blowing project in Taos is going to be an incredible opportunity to introduce Native Americans to an art form that will spark their imagination and provide a medium of expression to strengthen, not weaken, their traditions," says Singletary "As a Native American, I can't wait to see what new ideas come out of the program and turn heads in the art world."
Singletary and Jojola, who met at Pilchuck in 1984, used to work together at Benjamin Moore Glass Art Inc. studio in Seattle. They also collaborated on a Chihuly team that assisted Italian glass master Lino Tagliapietra. Now that the Hilltop project has come to the mountaintop at Taos, Singletary is champing at the bit to visit the pueblo to share his work with other Native American artists.
Says Singletary, "I welcome the opportunity to share what I've learned, especially knowing what may come of it." "Raethner, K. "Through a glass brightly." Native Peoples Magazine. May 1, 1999. website accessed May 30, 2009. http://www.nativepeoples.com/article/articles/146/1/Through-A-Glass-Brightly/Page1.html/print/146
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