2005 part two

2003 Asif Noorani:

"As compared to many other cities of the United States, Detroit doesn’t offer much by way of museums and art galleries, or at least that was how I was given to understand. So, when my host Talha Mirza who lives in Troy, a suburb of Detroit, mentioned about an art gallery specialising in glass art I was game immediately. But not until I entered the building did I know what was in store for me. The exquisite pieces on display were breathtakingly beautiful.

In our part of the world where painting has struggled, glass art is more or less non-existent, which is why the experience was all the more awesome. Glass artists, using different techniques from blowing to making moulds and firing the glass in a kiln, produce pieces, large and small, resplendent in colour and rich in motifs and designs. And I was lucky to see a feast of such artefacts as a hundred glass artists, from 16 different countries were participating in a contest at the art gallery. “The best of the best,” said the catalogue and one couldn’t challenge the claim.

Normally Habatat Galleries — there are two sister setups in Illinois and Florida —exhibit the works of two or three artists round the year but I was lucky to have been in Detroit when the 33rd International Glass Exhibition was on in the main gallery. One visit is just not enough for any one to have a good look at the entire collection. Young Corey Hampson who looks after the gallery, suggested that I come again for a longer visit so that I could see the exhibits in detail. His advice made sense and was worth following.

The 33rd Habatat Invitational International is billed as the largest glass art show in all private galleries in the world. Even when there is no exhibition the gallery is frequented by a number of art lovers. The gallery in Detroit also has a library, which is open to public.

The Habatat Galleries don’t normally get walk-in customers, as their clients are galleries, museums, corporate firms and individual collectors. Today the prices range from $1700 to $250,000, but in 1975 the most expensive art glass piece was priced at just $400. That was at the third Annual National Glass Invitation. The first, held in 1973, had 12 participating artists. That was an eventful year, for the Glass Art Magazine made its debut that year and no less importantly it was the same year when Pablo Picasso passed away at the age of 92. Ferdinand Hampson, who has been passionately in love with this intriguing genre of visual art, founded the first of the three Habatat galleries in Dearborn, in the outskirts of Detroit.

At this year’s exhibition the vase made by the Japanese glass artist Kimiaki Higuchi’s vase was among the most attractive pieces. Higuchi, as Corey Hampson (Ferdinand Hampson’s son) told me, usually designs vessels. She uses powdered glass and sifts them into a ceramic mould and then fires them in a kiln. “The raspberries that she grows in her backyard in Tokyo are turned into moulds. She fires the glass inside the mould in a kiln. This process is followed by the breaking of the mould once the kiln is back to room temperature. It’s fascinating to look at those pieces. Unfortunately, I don’t have those pieces here to show them to you,” exults Corey Hampson who is gradually taking over from his father who is more involved in the art and his mother Kathy Hampson, who looks after the business side. The younger Hampson studied in a business school and then took art classes. He also worked under two or three glass artists, which is why he is familiar with both the aesthetic and business aspects of the Habatat Galleries.

Dale Chihuly from Seattle was another top ranking glass artist to participate in the show. “He is a glass blower and is known for revolutionising glass movement in the world,” says Corey Hampson. Stanislaw Borowski from France, his namesake from Poland, Peter Hora from the Czech Republic, Ann Wolff from Sweden, Jose Chardet from Cuba, Danny Perkins from Germany and Toots Zynsky from Boston were some of the other highly gifted glass artists whose creations were on display at the exhibition.

Twenty best pieces were selected by the jury to send them for a short time display at the world renowned Dennos Museum at Traverse City in Michigan in October. The independent jury comprised Jutta Page, Curator of Glass at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio; Gerhardt Knodel, Director, Cranbook Academy of Art (he is himself an eminent artist); Eugenne Jenneman, Director Dnnos Museum at Traverse in Michigan and David McFadden, Chief Curator, American Museum of Art and Design in New York.

The opening of the show in April was widely attended by artists and art aficionados and well covered by the media. I was not fortunate enough to be a witness to that, nor lucky enough to be at the closing a month later when the prize winners, including the People’s Choice Award were to be announced.

Art students from the Centre of Creative Studies in Detroit and other art schools, not to speak of children from different schools, visit the Habatat gallery quite regularly.

In the sixties and the seventies, this old art form was largely confined to blowing, but in later years some of the artists began to use moulds. A much more difficult method is what is called Lamp-worked technique, where the artist works with a kind of welding torch that manipulates the glass. The fourth method is called slumping, where they heat the glass to as high a temperature as 2500 degrees Fahrenheit, and then let it cool to a certain temperature, when it is given a shape.

Corey Hampson claimed that packing pieces of glass is an art in itself. He seemed to be good at it because he has to send the pieces to different galleries, buyers and the artists themselves. To say that the pieces are fragile is to state the very obvious. And as for curating and holding the annual exhibitions he says that the most difficult job is to get the masterpieces from the artists, who are too busy doing their work and too committed.

“Do you and others involved in the exhibition develop ulcers?” I queried. “Even if we do, they are soon healed because the end result is always very satisfying and pleasing,” replied Corey Hampson, a quick-witted individual.

“Do you have nightmares of earthquakes hitting your gallery in Detroit or in Florida or Chicago?” I asked. “I would have, had my father set up a Habatat Gallery in the earthquake-prone state of California,” came the reply.

And as Corey escorted me to the exit, he said that the collection in the Habatat Galleries has traveled to nearly a hundred museums, art centres and galleries, within and outside the US. I wished the Hampsons could bring an exhibition to Pakistan as well."

Noorani, A. "Poetry in Glass."  Dawn, the Internet edition. July 16, 2004. Accessed April 25, 2010.  http://www.dawn.com/weekly/gallery/archive/050716/gallery3.htm
2005 Sheila Farr:

"Until he took up glass blowing later in life, Rodman Gilder Miller thought little about the work of his famous great-grandfather, Louis Comfort Tiffany.
Miller, 62, gave up a career as a cellular biologist and has been living in Seattle since 1989, making glass in his converted garage-studio near Fremont.
"I knew my great-grandfather was a famous artist, but I didn't really appreciate that," he said. "When I took up glass blowing, I began to read everything I could. It's been a great source of pride having that connection."
Miller will be present at Seattle Art Museum 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday to demonstrate and discuss his work.
Although his great-grandfather died before Miller was born, he heard stories about Tiffany from his mother.
"He was sort of an authoritarian. My mother talked about having to go see Grandpapa on Sundays. It was expected that everyone had to bow down to the king. Even as a 6- or 7-year-old she felt she had to pay homage to him," Miller said, about her visits to the luxurious 580-acre estate Laurelton Hall on Long Island.
"Then the kids had to go out and play in the fountains. [Tiffany's] idea of paradise was having nymphs in the water — preferably with wings — but grandchildren with no clothes on was the next best thing."
Miller says Tiffany's estate was badly handled and that little of his great grandfather's wealth or artworks were passed along to the family. Miller owns just two small souvenirs of Tiffany glass, a plate and a small goblet, both production ware.
But he has studied the Tiffany business and formed his own ideas about how Tiffany worked. "I think Tiffany had an eye for publicity and such," Miller said. "I don't think he actually did [much of the work] himself. He had people working on innovations. It seems unlikely he would have had the skills for some of it."

Farr, S. "A Tiffany great-grandson in Seattle carries on with glass."  The Seattle Times. October 9, 2005. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/entertainment/2002546721_tiffanyside09.html

2005 Tim Richardson:
"The recent history of sculpture placed in the garden as a stand-alone artistic statement in itself, rather than used as a component of a decorative or iconographic scheme (as it generally was in older traditions), has been chequered. Sculpture conceived as an expression of an artist's peculiar preoccupations and passions makes it in some ways unsuited to a garden or landscape, where the ambiguity, mutability and diffuseness of the outdoor setting can make object-based art seem ponderous. It seems that sculpture works best outdoors when conceived as part of a total design, rather than simply plonked down in a spot where it is deemed to improve the view or look well against a verdant backdrop.
The notion of the landscape as a kind of outdoor art gallery--a handy alternative to the white-cube model for large-scale work--gained credence through the twentieth century, where the challenge might have been to create places in which the landscape setting is seen to be as meaningful as the works it contains. That this has rarely been achieved is in part a reflection of curatorial priorities: it has been reasonable to assume that the sculpture is 'the work' and the landscape is the supporting scenery.
But there are always exceptions. Henry Moore produced pieces that seemed peculiarly well suited to outdoor settings, even where they were made without any particular site in mind, perhaps because of the rhythmic, almost topographical quality of his forms; and the move towards site-specific work from the 1960s--at places such as Grizedale Forest in Cumbria--added momentum to the idea of works of art that grew out of the sense of place as much as from the human mind.
More recently, the creators of experiential installations in out-of-gallery settings, perhaps fearing comparisons with gardening as a popular pastime, as embodied by Percy Thrower or Alan Titchmarsh, have not liked to acknowledge that their work often echoes sensations and techniques found in landscape and garden art. Land Art is perhaps the best known art/landscape 'crossover', but its relationship with landscape--alternately nurturing and aggressive--is also problematic: the dialectic of site and non-site articulated by its most active spokesman, Robert Smithson, seems actively to negate the idea of the integrity of particular places in favour of the traditional notion of control by the artist; in several cases, Land Art was simply object-based art writ extremely large by men (it was almost always men) with bulldozers.
A refreshing approach can be found at an exhibition of glass sculpture by Dale Chihuly at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, where the process of artistic creation seems to echo that of natural selection, lending the work a conceptual affinity with its botanical surroundings. The exhibition's focus is the Temperate House (designed by Decimus Burton, 1860-69), where Chihuly's vividly coloured, squirming and writhing concoctions reflect the fecundity and unpredictable variety of plants in the wild (Fig. 1). These are clearly man-made interventions, but the way they have been created--not as stand-alone pieces but in serial form as part of a continuous process of experimentation and variation--does seem to reflect the brutal integrity of nature in the raw.

The Temperate House contains examples of series developed by Chihuly since the 1970s, first at the Rhode Island School of Design and then at the Pilchuck School near Seattle. There are the clamshellshaped, multi-coloured 'macchia' (the name comes from the Italian for 'spotted'), formally arranged in tiers among pots of brugmansia, rather like the eighteenth-century display of auriculas in miniature theatres. There are globular, speckled 'floats'; 'baskets' based on Native American craftworks; and spear-like 'reeds' erupting from the dark earth in apparently organic groups, the bright lavenders, reds, blues and oranges of the glass catching the light as it dapples through a filigree of ferns and fronds, the smoothness of the glass contrasting with the often shaggy trunks of tree ferns. 'Ikebana' pieces--twin stems thrusting forth from 'vases' below--appear on black platforms amid the plants, while hovering above are some of Chihuly's most celebrated pieces: 'chandeliers' of glassy tentacles that look like extra-terrestrial octopi or exploding suns. It might seem surprising that the violence of the colouring and the disturbing level of mutation in these works makes them seem more rather than less natural. The groupings of pieces seem to surge and recede rhythmically in imitation of the vagaries of nature, an impression enhanced by the way the hothouse plants are beginning to grow through and around the sculptures.

The over-used idea of 'evolution' in an artist's practice is pertinent here because variation, repetition, death (in the sense of material failure) and selection are constant themes in Chihuly's work. The idea of a series being perfected or finished is anathema to him. As he has stated of his 'macchia' series: 'Like much of my work, the series inspired itself.'
The relaxation of the traditional strictures of artistic control--a by-product of the mutability of glass as a material and of Chihuly's unusual collaborative approach to work (he is a 'gaffer' to a team of blowers)--also gives rise to work analogous to the self-sustaining regimes of nature. As Chihuly says, 'I think a lot of it comes from the fact that we don't like to use a lot of tools, but [we use] natural elements to make the glass--fire, gravity, centrifugal force. As a result it begins to look like it was made by nature.'

As well as the obvious appeal of placing glass sculptures inside large glass buildings, the Kew setting emerges as appropriate to Chihuly's work in other ways (he has already exhibited at a number of botanical institutions in the USA). Few of the pieces are based on specific botanical forms, but there is no shortage of bulbous gourds, curly tendrils and arching stalks. Light transforms the colour of glass as it does petals and foliage, and the frozen fluidity of blown glass captures something of the organic dynamism of plant life. It also complements the moist, mulchy atmosphere of the greenhouse.
The most dramatic intervention of all is outside, where Chihuly has strewn a large number of floats, called Walla Wallas, across the surface of the lake in front of the Palm House (Fig. 2), whose entrance is flanked by a pair of tall red and orange 'towers'. The floats appear to have erupted from a boat on the other side of the lake (an echo of the mock battleships of Renaissance gardens?), and if one views the ensemble from here, beneath the branches of a large Taxodium distichum, the piece takes on the character of a large-scale folly, in keeping with William Chambers's eighteenth-century additions to Kew's landscape. Chihuly has recently started exploring the idea of full-scale 'gardens' of glass pieces, which is an intriguing prospect; the Kew exhibition may come to be seen as an important staging post in that development."

Richardson, Tim. "Writhing, bulging, burgeoning, blossoming: Dale Chihuly's spectacular glass sculptures have happily taken root at Kew Gardens.(Exhibitions)." Apollo. Sept. 1, 2005. Retrieved November 05, 2009 from accessmylibrary: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-12009453_ITM

2005 Tara Cady Sartorius:
""I started blowing glass and discovered that I liked tall and thin forms, and my pieces have gradually gotten that way. When I make drawings, that's the way they come out: tall and thin. It can take me several years before I am able to make what I have drawn. My eye has evolved too. Looking at slides of my early work, I remember that at the time I thought my vessels were perfect. Now I look at this work and I see that I'm much better today at what I do."
--Dante Marioni. Retrieved from Marioni's resume at the Bullseye Connection Gallery Web site: www.bullseyeconnectiongallery.com.
One of the strongest forms, in terms of physical structure, is the triangle. Aesthetically, three elements in an artistic composition also make strong visual sense. To your left are three glass vessels all connected as one work of art. It is not that each one isn't strong on its own; it's just that the work as a whole is stronger with the three together.
Each form was carefully crafted from blown glass by artist Dante Marioni (b. 1964) and this arrangement could only be possible after his ability to create each vessel form had been perfected. He worked out his designs and techniques over the course of several years, and only then was he able to use his skill to create three different vessels all connected through color, scale and upright posture.
The title, New Blue Trio with Red, both identifies the work and carries multiple meanings. It is one trio--one collection of three forms--and this arrangement is similar to other trios (he also makes pairs) that comprise a strong part of his signature works. So what is new? Probably the blue. Marioni is particular about his color. He tends toward solid colors, and usually ones that are somewhat electric in nature. The blue in this trio is new because it is cool and understated, perhaps having slight amounts of green and black added to darken it.

All three forms speak of function, but they are not functional, except in an eye-pleasing aesthetic sense. A pitcher, a goblet and a flask are all things that could be useful in the real world if only they weren't so oversized. Marioni has deliberately increased the scale of his work, as much as proof of his own technical abilities as to highlight the graceful refined lines of the forms themselves. These objects are more about beauty than utility. They are stately and elegant, but not useful in a strictly practical sense.

Owning a work by Dante Marioni implies at least some exposure to art history: they evoke ancient Greek, Roman and Etruscan forms. Marioni, who is well aware of his artistic sources, purposely selected these forms and modified them to suit his own aesthetic. He exaggerates the scale and adds detail ornament (high lighting the foot, lip and handles, for example, with a contrasting color) on the pieces, and usually makes them in only two colors.

Whereas the ancient cultures in the Mediterranean areas painted highly sophisticated figurative images in black and red clay slip (liquid colored clay) on the surfaces of their works, Marioni is primarily concerned with form, and the space around his forms. The large pieces, often 40 inches high, with their simplified color schemes draw more attention to their formal qualities.
Dante Marioni was born in Mill Valley, Calif., just north of San Francisco. Dante's father, Paul, was a glass artist and took young Dante with him to craft fairs and his glassmaking studio. His father began teaching at Seattle's Pilchuck Glass School in 1974, just three years after its founding by Dale Chihuly and Anne and John Hauberg. Evidently Paul found the Seattle artistic environment nurturing enough for his entire family, so when Dante was 15 they moved to the hub of the 20th-century American Art Glass movement. To this day Seattle continues to be haven for a thriving glass community.
Leonardo da Vinci is often quoted as having said, "Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master." If true, then Marioni is rich indeed! It was at Pilchuck that 18-year-old Dante Marioni met glassblower Benjamin Moore. Moore's process and artistic sensibilities spoke to many of Dante's unanswered questions about art making and glass blowing in particular.

Prior to meeting Moore, Marioni had seen many glass blowers create works he considered of low aesthetic value. "When I started working in glass at age 15, I had no interest in being an artist or a craftsperson. But then I saw Ben Moore work. For the first time, I saw someone make something round, on center, and perfect." *

Moore's refined work inspired Marioni to see the value in pursuing a career in glass. The decisive moment, however, came about a year later when Marioni saw the Italian glass master, Lino Tagliapietra, at work. At that point Marioni says, "there was no turning back." * He was hooked.
After studying with both Moore and Tagliapietra, Marioni worked on his own, perfecting his sWle and technique. As he became better and better, he then became a teacher working alongside both his mentors. He is now, at least, considered by the art world to be an equal with his teachers. Marioni is represented in many major American museums (the prestigious Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery, for one) and has won numerous awards, including his 1988 Young Americans award from the American Craft Museum in New York, N.Y.

Marioni has taught all over the United States (including Pilchuck, Penland in North Carolina and Haystack in New Hampshire) and internationally in Japan. He has been featured in major craft and glass-oriented magazines, including American Craft, Craft Arts and Smithsonian.
Still considered a young artist (he's now in his 40s), Marioni will be one to watch for future endeavors. His future looks as bright as the striking red accents on his New Blue Trio."

Sartorius, Tara Cady. "Triplets, trios & triumvirates." Arts & Activities. January 1, 2005. Retrieved November 05, 2009 from accessmylibrary: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-18396878_ITM

2005 Leah Erickson:
"In the eyes of John de Wit a vessel is not simply defined—it can be a created object rooted in aesthetic traditions just as much as it can be the byproduct of chance juxtapositions or relationships found in nature. Through de Wit’s varied bodies of work, the literal and metaphorical connotations of the vessel overlap to form conceptually and stylistically unique glass art.

Synthesizing influences from Venetian glassblowing, Expressionistic painting, Japanese and Korean ceramic design, John de Wit presents works that are a meeting of painting and sculpture. While he revels in the fluid expression made possible by his chosen medium, de Wit’s work distances itself from the fragility and untouchable nature often associated with glass art. For de Wit, each piece unapologetically proclaims its presence as an object to be interacted with and experienced, not simply to be admired from a distance.

Throughout his career, and in his many varied bodies of work, de Wit maintains the visual intrigue and outright physicality of his works through an approbation of the uncommon. Demonstrating de Wit’s unique interpretation of the vessel are his scepters, which combine a myriad of textures and colors in the form of mighty mock-ceremonious objects. Far from being presented as items of preciosity, one is tempted to seize these scepters from the wall in some triumphant proclamation—the unique combination of textural accents on each brilliantly colored staff appeals to each individual’s imagined fantasy of grandeur.

The scepters have been an important part of de Wit’s artistic project for more than a decade—he remains interested in the combination of diverse stylistic elements as a kind of ever-evolving visual language. More than simply aesthetic experimentation, however, the essential element for de Wit is that, “they represent an emblem of use, domestic and otherwise. A vessel that remains as an object, transparent until a very real and compelling use comes to mind. They are cups, they are tools, they represent, they are resolute.”

In contrast to the clear implied use of the scepter pieces, de Wit accesses the many permutations of the vessel form in a playful transgression of the hazy line between pure aesthetics and the distinctly useful object. While much of his vessel work remains recognizable in shape, de Wit pushes the viewer to reassess their assumptions of the vessel through dramatic surface treatments. The gestural surface painting that gives each piece its character is more than simply decoration, however. Bold colors applied liberally to the surface of each work capture an expressive energy that is heightened as their forms expand and distort with the growth of the vessel in progress. De Wit additionally incorporates blown and sculpted objects to many of his works that are part of, yet distinct from the decoration of each vessel. Our relation to these plucky creatures is dynamic as the mind must often reconcile an object that seems to have organically grown several protrusions on its surface.

A grouping of de Wit’s newest vessels is informed by a fascination with the variety of tolerant relationships found in nature, such as the way cocoons, insect egg cases and larvae are often discovered attached to some other leaf, pine cone, or log. He says, “One can say that the original vessel form disappears to allow the inclusion of the attached form, in nature’s context, a vessel.” These objects seen hanging and growing from the vessels are forms de Wit has rehearsed before, but the realization of parallel phenomena in nature has shed new light on the creation of many of these works.

Working with glass since the late 1970s, John de Wit has established his artistic presence through gallery representation across North America. His work is featured in several well-established public and corporate collections, including the Microsoft and Boeing collections in Washington and the di Rosa Preserve in California. His sculpture has been the focus of articles in national publications Glasswork Magazine, Glass Art Magazine, American Craft, and the French Revue Céramique & Verre. "

Erickson, L. "John de Wit" 2005. accessed November 5, 2009. http://www.johndewit.com/essay.html

2005 Michael Workman:

"New friends, old allies and an unceasing flow of curious lookers, serious collectors and all kinds in-between animate this year’s installment of SOFA NEW YORK. It’s a good looking show and well-attended, by any consensus. Again at the Seventh Regiment Armory here on Park Avenue and 67th Street, glass glistens and gallerists beam. Examples of every assorted material are in evidence: clay, steel, fiber. What makes it so exciting is the ability of anyone to wander these aisles and find something to their liking: an object, an embodied idea. Something to make their home more beautiful, their leisure time reflection more illuminating, their experience of art steeped in a finer degree of things that are well-made and that surprise, mesmerize, tantalize. New this year we have a number of New York’s own contemporary galleries, including Dean Project, whose focus includes work from emerging artists, with glass, ceramics and furniture, the Danish Galerie Grønlund with “Nineties generation” glass and Tokyo Art Projects/Mika Gallery, with moving images, photography, ceramics and sculpture. Returning are such long-time staples of SOFA NEW YORK as Heller Gallery with their sculptural glass, often scientific and vaguely extraterrestrial in appearance, and Garth Clark Gallery, whose magnificent stable includes such work as Beth Cavener Stichter’s “Strange Attraction,” a menacing bunny rabbit of stoneware with porcelain slip, straight out of a darker version of Wonderland.
Touring the floor reveals a range of spectacular finds in an environment whose excitement prove difficult to match. Patrons of all backgrounds wander in and out the aisles, many in the newest fashions of the season amongst soldiers from the regiment in their camo uniforms and polished black boots, an appropriate social cross-sampling of the times. Why have they come? Work, play, serious appreciation. Investment in art, a sign of how little matters the money against the relative value of the art on display. If we highlight a few pieces from a few galleries, it may further help to contextualize the sheer influence of such works on those who seek them out, on the homes they make, their collections, on the art of our moment. At Nancy Margolis Gallery, for instance, we find Ludwika Ogorzelec’s “Sculpture #1,” a wood and stone planetoid floating in space, hundreds of short wood pieces assembled in grids upon grids. At its base a stone lays wedged in the grip of these wooden pieces, marking an imaginary center of gravity both for this uninhabited woodsy world and the object’s actual place in the world above which it hangs.
At Bentley Projects, a series of miniatures in recessed frames include Cybele Young’s Japanese paper piece, “We Haven’t Been There Before,” derived from origami but more complete somehow, fully colored and evocative of a frozen almost cinematic moment. Perhaps an exploding moment in the visual imagination, her baby stroller floating between pot and lid, a mini-satire that calls to mind Jonathan Swift’s 18th-century essay “A Modest Proposal,” in which the author suggests the public save money by boiling and eating the children of the poor. Darkly comical, Young’s piece spares the viewer no anxiety, though its miniature scale introduces a breath of humor to an otherwise scarifying ideal. At Lea Sneider, our actual ideals are represented in the religious artifact of a Korean temple; on the back wall hangs an example of an early 20th century silk-wrapped “Temple Wall Hanging,” a piece purchased, as Sneider herself tells us, by the Director of the Museum of Arts & Design.
Moving into the realm of fiber abstraction, at Gallery Materia/Cervini Haas Gallery we find Marian Bijlenga’s “Untitled (green perspective),” made of horse hair and paper yarn, a delicate assemblage that visually evokes the sight over water of islands adrift in still seas, or perhaps lillypads in a Manet scene or even a martian landscape. It’s a credit to the interminable interpretive range of this fiber installation that we can find no resolution to its representative quality, since it exists thoroughly in the artist’s own conception of a place, time, a scene only revealed here. Similarly, we find in the wall-hangings of Ruth Duckworth, an artist who hails from the SOFA headquarter-city of Chicago, artifacts of another never-existing place, an Atlantis of science fictional purpose: her porcelain “Untitled #8581004,” for example, resembles a piece in a museum storeroom register. But of what place, of what purpose this enigmatically aerodynamic shape? It simultaneously recalls the waves of a far-off body of water, out the center from which rises a lightless orb—a porcelain sun. Having escaped from the Nazis during her youth, Duckworth eventually made her home in Chicago, and the University of Chicago Midway Studios, where she makes work that recalls a lost home—possibly even a better place than that of her own scarred memory.

Dante Marioni Vessel Display #15 Blown glass Marx-Saunders Gallery

Imaginary places can be viewed at this show alongside works of very real tradition. Case in point: at Marx-Saunders Gallery, we find Dante Marioni’s wall-hung blown-glass “Vessel Display #15,” filled with examples of geometric phials, decanters and cruets affixed with black geometric and organic elements in black. In a text by Artforum Magazine’s James Yood, Marioni’s attributed with evoking “the mists of Murano,” where glassblowers from Venice have worked since the late 13th century. In Marioni’s work, we indeed find the curlicues and flourishes that mark the inventiveness and skill of centuries refined experience with glass-making.
Viewers can find a playful counterpoint to these venerable works at this year’s show as well. Youngest in feel and zeal, WEISSPOLLACK has transformed their booth into a sort of clothes-closet of works, from panties, coffee mugs and ball caps to one-word propaganda posters (“Dictator” announces one; “Never Contract” we are instructed by another). In a narrow niche alongside an inner wall of the booth plays a video of what viewers have spontaneously come to refer to as the “red dot lady” movie. It’s called “Virus,” by an artist named Liuba, and depicts a woman wearing a dress covered with red dots. She wanders a show very like SOFA, in and out of the aisles, trailed by a photographer snapping shots of her standing alongside the works, as if she herself were part of their exhibition. Then, peeling a dot off her dress, she places it on the wall next to each piece. Sold? Video of the gallerists gives us their reactions, from wonder to bemused consternation. She has owned the works herself, merely by juxtaposition of life with living art. It’s perhaps as good a metaphor as any for the experience of this year’s SOFA NEW YORK, a show that concludes with all the enthusiasm for return to a creative core that no art-loving New Yorker in good conscience could miss.
Michael Workman is a writer and editor living in Chicago, IL."
Workman, M. "SOFA New York, Forever, Never and Now." Accessed October 18, 2009. http://www.sofaexpo.com/NY/2005/workman.htm

2005 Regina Hackett:

"Back when logs were rolling down Skid Road, a few might have veered off to clip a classical pianist moonlighting in a bordello, a homeless man disoriented from a bad night's sleep or a painter who had just stepped off a wooden sidewalk to get a better look at Mount Rainier.
Skid Road is now Yesler Way, and the ever-expanding area known as Pioneer Square is the city's gallery hub.
In most cities, galleries migrate, gathering in one spot till they're priced out or bored.

In Seattle, the first significant gallery cluster sprang up in the 1970s in Pioneer Square and never left.

In spite of dire warnings of its pending demise as gallery central, the Square rebounded from the 2001 earthquake that gave its historic brick buildings a rude shove, a Fat Tuesday riot and the presence of two sports stadiums nearby.
Today, galleries in the Square are riding high. Anchored by a few stars (Greg Kucera, James Harris and Howard House) and the opening of the Tashiro Kaplan Building with artist lofts rising over ground-floor galleries, Pioneer Square galleries are the in-crowd.
Significant galleries elsewhere, such as Francine Seders on Phinney Ridge and William Traver near Pike Place Market, are lone wolves.
Not all forms of cultural life thrive in the Square: Theaters come and go, mostly go. Dance companies do better on Capitol Hill.
Pioneer Square's Elliott Bay Book Co. is the longtime center of the city's literary life, quite an accomplishment considering the competition from the big chains. Its prominence is all the more remarkable considering it takes a risk galleries run only once a month: staying open at night.
With the exception of the First Thursday night openings, galleries are a daytime affair, which is key to their success. At night, the bar scene heats up, and toughs have been known to stagger down the streets, insulting the homeless. There are rashes of violence too, and occasional waves of drug dealers peddling their wares.
Although violence historically spurs a crackdown on the indigent, Pioneer Square's 2001 Fat Tuesday deadly riot starred the housed, not the homeless, as perpetrators.
"Pioneer Square has always been a place where different classes coexist," said writer John Boylan. "The first time I was there, I noticed hobos and guys in suits had spots near each other as a normal thing."
The other thing that struck Boylan about the Square was its fakery. He was in the Allied Arts office in the late 1980s looking at an old picture when he realized Occidental Square's historic-looking cobblestones were nothing of the kind.
In the early 1960s, Occidental Square was a parking lot.
The Romanesque Revival brick buildings around it, with their stately pillars, terra cotta trim, cornices and bay windows, date from the late 19th century, built after the 1889 fire.
By the early 1960s, however, these buildings did not have friends in high places. Instead, they had friends in low places, a free-spirited, counterculture group that banded together against big business interests to save the Square. They included art dealer Richard White (of Foster/White Gallery), writer and agitator Bill Speidel who founded the Underground Tours, and architects Victor Steinbrueck and Ibsen Nelsen, among others. They in turn enlisted Mayor Wes Uhlman. The Square not only missed its date with the wrecking ball, it was expensively rehabilitated.
Occidental Park, with its totem poles, stately birch trees and cobblestones, was created to look vintage.

The galleries that existed then (Polly Friedlander, Silver Image, Foster/White, Linda Farris, Davidson) didn't realize they were starting an empire.

Farris, Friedlander and Silver Image are long gone. Foster/White is under new management. Only Sam Davidson continues. Maybe because he has been in business so long, Davidson rarely joins other galleries that frequently -- but not recently -- lament the possibility of their demise.

First it was the Kingdome that spelled the end. Hordes would come, and none interested in art!

Galleries outlasted the Kingdome, but two stadiums replaced it. More doom, even though the football stadium surrounded itself with some of the best public art in the city, and the baseball stadium's art is pretty good too.
Thanks partly to the benign neglect and cheap rents of legendary Pioneer Square landlord Sam Israel, artists lived in Pioneer Square lofts for many decades. After Israel died in 1994, his company, Samis Land Co., following the terms of his will, restored the buildings but charged market rates.
Artists exited, yet the buildings that had fallen into disrepair were saved.
Opening last year, Tashiro Kaplan offered 50 artist live/work spaces at a stabilized rent. It's a start. Plus, the dot-com bust meant prices fell, and artists moved back in as techies fled.
Two years ago, some of the Square's galleries began to resent their own success. First Thursday attracted independent artists and vendors who crowded the Square, sometimes blocking gallery entrances. Bars offered First Thursday drink discounts. Street musicians came, and dancers with boom boxes.
Can't we get rid of these people, asked galleries, forgetting for a moment that density is often lacking on Seattle streets at night. When we go out, what we want to see is each other. Parties are preferable to wastelands. The city had to step in, license the vendors and move them one block north.
Now everybody's relatively happy. Those continuing to bemoan Pioneer Square crime can talk to Billy Howard of Howard House.
He considers the Square a crime-free zone, but he moved there last year from Belltown. In Belltown, he says, addicts hung around his front door, smoking their crack pipes. One day, leaving for lunch, he was assaulted by drug dealers who found him unfriendly. "I'm an art dealer," he screamed. They didn't care. They punched him in the face.
The lack of crime is wonderful, said Howard, but the real draw is the foot traffic.
"During the week in Belltown, I would sit for hours by myself," he said. "Now people come in all week long. Plus, there's a real feeling of community."
Greg Kucera of the Greg Kucera Gallery says cooperation is the reason for the success of Pioneer Square galleries.
"We keep in touch with each other, see each other's shows and send clients to each other," he said. "The success of one helps everybody."
He's certainly a success. He owns his gallery instead of renting, and recently added 2,000 square feet of exhibition space.
G. Gibson Gallery left the Square after the earthquake and moved to Capitol Hill. Gail Gibson recently returned, taking a space on the ground floor of the Tashiro Kaplan Building, joining the new Platform Gallery, the ex-Capitol Hill Soil Art Cooperative and the ex-Columbia City Garde Rail Gallery.
"Capitol Hill was too quiet," said Gibson, who specializes in photographs. "I just opened, and I have four times the foot traffic. I'll never move again."
In an interview in the P-I shortly before his death in 1988, lifelong Pioneer Square activist Speidel said he considered the Square's street people an endangered species, threatened by high-toned development.
"We can't lose them," he said. "They're part of the atmosphere. When they're gone, what are we going to do? Call up Actor's Equity?"
Pioneer Square thrives on diversity. It doesn't bore people because it is always changing while retaining a core of cultural tolerance and open-minded experiment, surrounded by a cohesive group of lovely old buildings.
Artists have always been attracted. That's why galleries that represent them help make the city's oldest neighborhood its most exciting."

Hackett, R. "Happy days are here again for Pioneer Square galleries." April 1, 2005. The Seattle Post Intelligencer. website accessed July 28, 2009. http://www.seattlepi.com/visualart/218310_pioneerart.html