like being inside a Tobey painting?

2002 Delores Tarzan Ament:

"...a shimmering light that reflects the idea of mist still permeates much of [Northwest] art, regardless of style. And symbols--birds, the moon, a hail of strokes reminiscent of Mark Tobey's 'white writing'--make regular appearances. Most prominent are references to water--particularly rain.

The Northwest School has left an indelible imprint on the region's art. Its themes and techniques have jumped to new media--a step that had already begun in the 1970s when Doris Chase moved into producing films and video. In the nearly fifty years since Tobey and Graves left the Northwest, and others of their circle have dispersed or died, far more Northwest art has moved into three dimensions, and many more women artists have emerged, particularly as sculptors. Norie Sato and Nancy Mee layer clear glass in ways that build transparency into substance, much as fog over Northwest water transforms Northwest air. Julie Spiedel's totemic bronzes and Steve Jensen's wooden poles carved with formalized patterns of water are contemporary echoes of the symbolic carved totem poles traditional to some Northwest tribes. Gerard Tsutakawa continues the tradition of his father, using classical Japanese forms as departures for bronze sculpture.

[...] Nothing reflects the change in Northwest art more dramatically than the phenomenon of Dale Chihuly, who was designated in 1992 as America's first Living National Treasure. Chihuly entered the art scene unremarkably in the early 1970s, at Seattle's Foster/White Gallery, with a show of simple glass tumblers featuring embedded patterns that harked back to the weaving of Northwest Indian baskets. Year by year, he expanded the scope of art glass to audacious new applications, with a genius for promotion that soon had even his coworkers calling him simply Chihuly, like a rock-star phenomenon. He became the greatest impresario of art promotion since Salvador Dali, with his own publishing company to document his work. He even founded a glass museum in Tacoma, where he had grown up unremarkably as the son of a butcher.

The difference between Chihuly's style and the understated, often reclusive nature of earlier Northwest artists can be understood in part if we recall that while painting is a solitary and contemplative activity, glass is blown in a team context, surrounded by noise and fire, with the necessity for constant awareness of the dangers attendant to molten glass and sharp broken shards. Glass work is intense. Physical exertion is significant; appetites are hearty.

No one could be oblivious to glass art after Chihuly hit the headlines. Every art gallery in the greater Northwest, it seems, represents at least one glass artist. Most have more than one. Because he has made glass art the trendiest, most collectible art in the world, all glass artists--including some more gifted than he--receive more recognition and higher prices for their work.

At first glance, nothing might seem more radically different from the whisper-soft imagery of Northwest art fifty years ago than massive installations such as Chihuly's feat of suspending glass chandeliers that resemble gaudy, multi-breasted fetishes over the Grand Canal of Venice. Lost again. Glass is entirely about light. Chihuly calls it 'the light of the future and past.'

Chihuly rejects the idea of symbolism in his work and he denies narrative content. Yet he speaks movingly of glass as a magical material made of sand and breath, and of the marvel of human breathe giving life to fragile matter. And he has chosen such forms such as the mountain and the moon, which have a long history in Northwest art. Not to mention connections with water such as Seaforms, the ruffling seashell shapes with which he scored his first major success.

[...] In a dozen individual pieces [at the Citadel], Chihuly reiterated Northwest themes in three light-chomping dimensions. The largest Crystal Mountain [...], was formed of rebar welded in random cross slashes, embedded with chunks of the pink glassy plastic Chihuly calls Polyvitro. The mountain rose as a web of crystals 33 feet high, emanating the recorded prayers of three religions. Anyone who entered its interior was bathed in sparkling pink light. From that vantage, looking up in any direction yielded the sensation of being inside a Mark Tobey painting, with the famous slashes of white writing having become black, as if one had walked through the looking glass and found the world reversed.

[...] The Northwest School--the school that never really existed--is not only alive and well in art today, it is making appearances around the world. Each of the artists who helped to define the look of Northwest art half a century ago had a markedly individual style. Yet the more personal their imagery and symbolism, the more universal it appeared in affirming the unity of all life."

Arment, D.T. "Now" in Irridescent Light: The Emergence of Northwest Art. U of W press, Seattle and London, Museum of Northwest Art, La Conner. 2002.

1995 part two

In this time line I pull quotes to illustrate a thread in popular and scholarly writing and criticism about glass. Here we will see current glass artists defending their art against the accusations and separating themselves from these stereotypes and, hopefully, find out how and where the now-common opinion was born. Fundamentally, the general thesis seems to be born of the question, What Is Art? This question I will leave to others to answer, here I am only documenting the written history of a popular way of thinking and a popular taste.

1995 Robin Updike:

"Cameras click and video cameras hum as William Morris, Dante Marioni and Lino Tagliapietra, all stars of the glass art scene, trot through their repertoire of crowd-pleasing skills.

They plunge molten glass globes into fiery furnaces. They spin the globes on rods like circus performers whirling plates on sticks. They wedge slab-sized wooden spatulas against the twirling, glowing glass. Flaming sparks fly through the air. Murmured oohs and aahs drift through the 50 or so onlookers at the Pilchuck Glass School hot shop in Stanwood. It's a mesmerizing show.

Meanwhile, just outside the hot shop, Dale Chihuly is being interviewed by a camera crew from CBS' "Sunday Morning." The shop is an open-sided, shake-roofed, octagonal pavillion that night and day hums with activity. Nestled as it is in the woods - a pleasure dome for glassblowers - there may be no more idyllic hot shop in the world.

A crowd has gathered to watch. Chihuly is unmistakable with his black eye patch, Trotskyite hair and trademark paint-splattered shoes. And he is, after all, not only the most famous glass artist since Louis Comfort Tiffany, but the founding spirit behind Pilchuck.

A little later will come the smoked-salmon feed for 400 served on paper plates, picnic-style, on the clearing in front of the rustic lodge - a Pilchuck potlatch - and the ceremonial burying of the time capsule, to be dug up in the year 2021 on the school's 50th anniversary. The school is this summer celebrating the beginning of it's 25th year, and calling it an anniversary.

There is also a ritual crowning of Anne Gould Hauberg on the back of a flat-bed pick-up. Hauberg and her former husband, John Hauberg, donated the 64-square-mile, bosky Stanwood site to found the glass school in 1971, and she is still considered the fairy godmother of the place. A glass crown has been made for her. She grins and vamps as it is placed on her head.

This is followed by a brief speech cheerleading for the school's $3.4 million capital campaign. The speaker: Jon Shirley, former Microsoft president and vintage car collector/mechanic, and now a Pilchuck advisory council member. The school needs improved kilns and a staff bath house, among other physical improvements, and it wants a $2 million scholarship endowment. Mark Haley, former college art student, one-time sculptor of fountains, current president of Brown & Haley candy company of Tacoma, and Pilchuck board president, also makes a few remarks.

Pilchuck has long attracted board members who are not only wealthy, successful and relatively youthful but, to a certain degree, hip.

Watching from the sidelines, a famous art critic who has been flown up to Seattle for a Seattle Art Museum seminar on glass art, seems baffled by the cheerful camaraderie and air of congratulatory goodwill. The day-long party strikes him as "tribal."

He wasn't far from the mark. The July 21 party was a ceremonial rite of passage of the Northwest clan of glass. Pilchuck has turned Seattle into the glass art capital of the U.S. Even, some say, of the world.

Woodstock for art hippies

Since 1971, Pilchuck has gone from a primitive summer camp for counterculture glassblowers with artistic aspirations - a Woodstock for art hippies - to a world-reknowned school of glass. Each summer the school attracts a teaching lineup of some of the world's leading glass artists, as well as acclaimed non-glass artists drawn to Pilchuck's ecumenical philosophy about art.

Tagliapietra, for instance, was a master glassblower at the legendary Venini glass factory in Murano, an island off Venice, Italy, before Chihuly brought him to teach at Pilchuck. Bertil Vallien, a Swedish master of cast glass sculpture and a Pilchuck regular, is one of the head designers at Kosta Boda glass factory in Sweden. This year Pilchuck students came from 24 countries and 36 U.S. states.

It's not uncommon these days to hear comparisons between Pilchuck and the glass art scene it has spawned in Western Washington, and the historic glass community around Venice, where for centuries master craftsmen produced some of the world's most sought-after goblets and glassware. Even the aesthetics of traditional Venetian goblets and vessels have been imported to Pilchuck. Marioni's classic forms are considered direct descendants of the Venetian style.

Says Douglas Heller, owner of Heller Gallery in New York, one of the nation's most established glass galleries, "The Pilchuck culture, which is an outgrowth of Tagliapietra and Chihuly, is a return to Venetian classicism. Tagliapietra represents a lifetime of achievement. He's an Italian maestro.

"But suddenly there is a bunch of these Pilchuck-trained Young Turks challenging his work," said Heller. "All of a sudden Pilchuck is like a little Venice, and that's a brilliant achievement."

The Seattle emphasis

Even casual observers of the regional art scene know that Seattle and glass art are synonymous. Walk into an upscale retail building, such as City Centre on Fifth Avenue, or a hotel, such as the Seattle Sheraton, and instead of seeing paintings on the walls you're likely to see glass sculpture in cases. Such individual tastemakers as Jeff and Susan Brotman (he co-founded Costco), Jon and Mary Shirley, and Jack and Rebecca Benaroya (he is one of the area's major real estate developers) all have sizable collections of Northwest glass.

Seattle's role as the nation's glass art center has been particularly noticeable this summer. There have been glass shows virtually every month at several galleries. Pilchuck anniversary banners hang everywhere. The Seattle Art Museum organized a special glass exhibit (still on view) and hosted a day-long seminar on glass art last month. The next day many of the 300 or so glass artists in Western Washington opened their studios to the public.

One of the art exhibits at Bumbershoot next weekend will be a 25-year retrospective of the work of Pilchuck-affiliated artists. When the Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner re-opens in October, a gallery donated by the Benaroyas will be devoted solely to glass; the opening show will be works by Pilchuck's big-name artists. And though it is still some years in the future, plans are under way for for a museum of contemporary glass in Tacoma, Chihuly's hometown.

And the nonprofit, private Pratt Fine Arts Center in Seattle has become an in-city glass center. Many of its instructors and staffers also are affiliated with Pilchuck. In the Seattle glass community, all roads eventually lead back to Pilchuck.

Not since the ascendancy in the '40s and '50s of the so-called "mystic painters of the Northwest" - Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, Guy Anderson and friends - has Seattle been so closely associated with a particular art movement. And it's fair to say that without Pilchuck, there would be no Seattle glass culture. Some say that without glass, Seattle's entire art scene would be less dynamic.

"I think Pilchuck is really more essential to this city than the museum," said Linda Farris, owner of Linda Farris Gallery. "Pilchuck constantly has groups of people coming through here on this quest for glass.

"But they buy other art, too," said Farris. "One of the glass collectors who was in town for the last Pilchuck auction bought one of Sherry Markovitz's abstract works," she said, referring to a Seattle sculptor who makes beaded works.

The glass detractors

That's not to say there aren't plenty of people who dismiss glass as pretty but dull. Crowds flock to see Chihuly exhibits; SAM's '92 Chihuly show drew two to three times as many people as nearly any show since. But there are painters, sculptors, print makers and others who roll their eyes at the mention of glass.

Though by now it's a weary debate, there are those who still consider all glass art to be craft, a supposedly less intellectual pursuit than art. The same detractors describe glass artists as buff glassblowers making oversized candy dishes and paperweights.

In part it's sheer envy. Glass artists seem to have more fun. Judging from the attention they get and their sales, they're also popular.

Working at something that for practical reasons must be accomplished in teams, glass artists not only make art together but often share social lives. On First Thursdays, clusters of them make the rounds of gallery openings. While painters toil alone in their studios, glass artists, especially those who work with blown glass, buzz around in their undershirts, their studios cozy and warm from the furnaces, boom boxes turned up. Chihuly's Lake Union factory, called The Boathouse, is legendary for its parties.

SAM and Pilchuck, eager to validate glass' artistic merit, called their July seminar "Contemporary Glass: Seduction vs. Intellect." But judging from the growing collections of contemporary glass at museums, many curators already have decided glass belongs in art museums.

The Tacoma Art Museum has a Chihuly collection and SAM continues to acquire glass. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, works by Seattle-area artists Ginny Ruffner, William Morris, Flora Mace and Joey Kirkpatrick, as well as Chihuly, will be among those exhibited in a show of contemporary glass to open at the museum in April and run through next fall. The pieces are from the museum's collection.

Jane Adlin, Metropolitan Museum research associate of 20th-century design, said the U.S. is where the most innovative contemporary glass is coming from, and that Seattle "is the country's glass center. Pilchuck is the big place for glass," she said.

"We all talk about the Pilchuck spirit, but don't know how to define it," says Haley, the Pilchuck board president. "It's a sense of community, and the fact that not very long ago the art form was relatively unknown, so there's still a pioneer sense about the place . . .

"It's more than Dale Chihuly's Pied-Piperish personality. There's a sense of pushing new boundaries, finding new opportunities, of breaking through.

"Until Pilchuck, glass was an unsung art. That's no longer true."

Updike, R. "Capital Of Glass -- Pilchuck Puts Seattle On The Map -- With Ceremony And Fun, A Family Of Artists Celebrate A Major Milestone In Their Movement" The Seattle Times. August 27, 1995. Website Accessed May 27, 2009. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/PrintStory.pl?slug=2138386&date=19950827

1995 Regina Hackett:

"

If Dale Chihuly's name passes into the language, as Thomas Bowdler's did in honor of his zeal as a censor, it will mean to dazzle (or daunt) with excess.

After making forests, giant butterflies, mutant swamp flowers and multiple clusters of swollen, pendulant breasts, the country's No. 1 glassman now plans to hang five of his 2,000-pound, vividly colored chandeliers over the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy.

Son of a Tacoma meatcutter, 53-year-old ((age)) Chihuly is now in residence with his crew in a tiny Finnish village called Nuutajarvi, population 400. With the blessings of the government, he has taken over the town's traditional glass factory and turned it into the temporary headquarters of Chihuly Inc.

Saying he owned the place would be understatement. Not satisfied with his shower, he commanded the Finnish army to build him a bathtub. Two hours later, it was ready for his leisurely soak. When he mentioned that a helicopter might be useful for his film crew, one was provided, an old, lumbering, camouflage-green Russian model that made canoes rock as it hovered overhead.

FINLAND IS the first stop on what Chihuly hopes will be a five-city glass-blowing tour. At each stop he plans to create a 2,000-pound glass chandelier, among other things. These are the chandeliers that will hang over Venice's Grand Canal, giving the gondoliers below something to worry about besides rain.

Actually, they won't have to worry much. Nobody is likely to be felled by a falling Chihuly. The man is excessive but he's not careless. If he hangs his pieces above the canal, they'll stay there until he takes them down.

Who's paying for all this?

``I am so far," he said, speaking from a portable phone down by the Nuutajarvian river as he directed a film crew to shoot an installation and sent various assistants scurrying with a seemingly endless series of requests.

``It cost me $200,000 for the Finnish trip," he continued. ``All I have to do is sell one chandelier and it's paid for. The studio work (for the five-city tour) will run about $1 million, and if I do a film in each place, the films will be a million each."

Money doesn't worry him. Expenses at his Seattle headquarters, known as the Boathouse, ordinarily run anywhere from $300,000 to $500,000 per month, he said.

Of course, a project such as ``Chihuly Over Venice" takes more than dough. He doesn't have permission to hang his chandeliers in Venice but feels confident he can get it. ``We're talking to the appropriate people," he said.

After spending two weeks in Finland, Chihuly plans to fly to Berlin to see the Bulgarian-born artist known as Christo wrap the Reichstag, the city's war-scarred old parliament building, in silvery fabric with blue ropes for bows. Afterward Chihuly goes to Venice where he hopes to nail down his installation plans.

``Christo is a big influence," Chihuly said. Christo is certainly the model Chihuly needs now. For this project, Chihuly will need Christo's organizational skills.

``I'm taking it one step at a time," he said, and then got distracted. ``Check the light in those trees," he called out to photographer Russell Johnson. ``It's too late to shoot. You need to be here at dawn."

CHIHULY ISN'T just directing teams of glass blowers in Finland. He's making installations as he goes. At his request, a crew stripped the leaves from a pair of 40-foot trees by the river and hung long, translucent glass cylinders on the straight, bare branches, ruby red on one and turquoise on the other.

As he spoke on the phone, three different film crews (one Finnish, one from KCTS-Channel 9 in Seattle and one hired by Chihuly) were focused on parts of the chandeliers, reportedly shaped like squashes or sides of ham, that were floating down the river in a series of photo opportunities.

Chihuly took 35 people with him to Finland, including eight Seattle glass blowers. He's being assisted by 12 Finnish glass-blowing students and 10 master Finnish blowers. They work in four teams, blowing an average of 2,200 pounds of glass daily, with a top figure of 3,000 pounds last Tuesday.

THE SUCCESS of art production isn't usually measured by its poundage. But while Chihuly set weight goals for the teams, he also set high standards for shape, volume, color brilliance and overall impact.

He has the show-business skills of a P.T. Barnum, and yet he's also an artist of consequence. He's the single most important force in elevating the status of glass art from fringe to something close to mainstream. He has forced the art world to reconsider its patronizing attitude toward decorative arts in general and proved that decorative arts have vast appeal to the general public.

His retrospective in 1992 at the Seattle Art Museum broke attendance records and proved exceedingly popular in each venue to which it traveled.

Chihuly and his crew plan to set up shop in Ireland this fall, followed by glass-blowing stops in France, the Czech Republic and Italy."

Hackett, R. "Euro Chihuly, America's premier glass artist is set to dazzle the continent." Seattle Post Intelligencer. June 19, 1995. accessed September 8, 2009. http://www.seattlepi.com/archives/1995/9506190064.asp

1997

In this time line I pull quotes to illustrate a thread in popular and scholarly writing and criticism about glass. Here we will see current glass artists defending their art against the accusations and separating themselves from these stereotypes and, hopefully, find out how and where the now-common opinion was born. Fundamentally, the general thesis seems to be born of the question, What Is Art? This question I will leave to others to answer, here I am only documenting the written history of a popular way of thinking and a popular taste.

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.""

Updike, R. "A Passion For Chihuly -- In A Thrilling Exhibition, A Portland Businessman Showcases His Large, Varied Collection Of The Glass Master's Works" December 9, 1997. The Seattle Times. website accessed May 4, 2009. http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19971209&slug=2576997

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