Arts Travel: Reservations Necessary

April 2009 | BY admin | Issue 67, June 2009 | NO COMMENTS

: Larry Shank’s bronze satyr “Randy” welcomes visitors to Proof on Main at the 21c Museum Hotel. Credit: © KENNETH HAYDEN 2008

If you’ve ever wanted to curl up and fall asleep in a museum, now’s your chance. Louisville, Ky.’s 21c Museum Hotel pairs luxury furnishings with a $10 million world-class contemporary art collection. Many of the pieces are from the private holdings of owners Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson.

Oversized red plastic penguins meet you outside. Provocative sculptures by Judy Fox congregate behind the reception desk. A playful bronze satyr by Larry Shank greets you at the hotel’s upscale bar and restaurant, Proof on Main. Art is found near elevators, in bathrooms, on balconies— in every room. In short, 21c is a livable museum.

The hotel is also home to the 21c Museum, a 9,000-square-foot contemporary art museum funded and managed by the International Contemporary Art Foundation, and dedicated solely to collecting and exhibiting contemporary art of the 21st century. A permanent exhibition includes Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv’s “Text Rain,” an interactive video installation that allows participants to lift and play with falling letters.

And if that’s not enough, 21c Austin is set to open in 2010, just one of 15 21c hotels Brown and Wilson plan to open across the country. Louisville room rates range from $199-$499. For more information, visit www.21cmuseumhotel.com.

Arts Travel: Art Knocks

April 2009 | BY admin | Issue 67, June 2009 | NO COMMENTS

: Robert Schlegel painted this 80-inch door in oils for the 2007 “Door Jam” at Mary Lou Zeek Gallery.

How do you start a party in an otherwise quiet downtown area? Invite the locals and tourists in, of course! That’s what Mary Lou Zeek did in 2003, two years after she started her eponymous gallery in Salem, Ore. She “opened the door” to her neighbors, attracting visitors into the vibrant downtown community with a biennial walking tour “Door Jam” exhibition.

Zeek asked more than 20 artists to treat a door as a canvas. She displays them at various local businesses, and creates a walking map for the public to use to explore the art, and take in the sights and sounds of the city.

The fourth “Door Jam” returns May 5-31. The 2009 exhibition features a few familiar artists, including Kristin Kuhns, Robert Schlegel and Jed Thomas, and participating businesses include Et Cetera Art Gallery, Cascade Baking Company and Wild Pear Restaurant.

To jump in on the excitement, visit www.zeekgallery.com.

Cottage Living, Inside and Out

April 2009 | BY Hilary Nangle | Issue 67, June 2009 | NO COMMENTS

: Cathy Shamel comissioned Andrew Leck to create a peace-symbol weathervane before the screen house it tops was even built. Photography by Ken Woisard

Grand Lake Stream, Maine, might not be the end of the world, but, quip the locals, you can see it from there.The one-store village, which takes its name from the famed fly-fishing waterway flowing through it, is surrounded by lake-studded wilderness and tethered to civilization by a 10-mile byway. Among the fewer than 200 souls who maintain year-round homes here are Cathy and Bill Shamel.

Folk art overflows their cottage, spilling onto the lawn and gardens surrounding it. Fanciful birdhouses and birdbaths, forged iron pieces and chainsaw animal sculptures pepper the gardens. A tropical fish swims amid the hydrangea; a wooden cat holds a box of flowers. Colorful palettes of showy perennials, corralled by twig-and-branch trellises, arbors and fences, tier down to the stream’s edge.

Adding more whimsy are gingerbread-trimmed outbuildings—a pigeon loft, rabbit hutch and screen house—and rustic furniture. Inside the house, every shelf and tabletop, wall and window, even the ceiling and stairway, is brightened with smile-producing folk art.

The Shamels’ love affair with folk art seriously deepened in the 1980s, when Cathy began exhibiting her fancifully dressed, handcrafted soft sculpture Jellicle Cats at craft shows. At her first big show in Virginia Beach, Va., Barry Grosscup occupied a booth across the aisle. “He made arks, and I’d go over there and ‘ooh’ and ‘aah,’ and when the show ended, he gave me an ark and animals,” she recalls. With that gift, a passion was ignited.

“We’ve never gone looking for anything,” Cathy says. “The piece picks us out.” Future value and the prominence of an artist’s name have never driven their purchases. “I don’t care who made it, it’s how it affects me. Something just grabs us,” she says. Bill nods in agreement. “Folk art comes from within,” he explains. “We see past the piece, right into the soul of the person who made it.”

For more of “Cottage Living, Inside and Out,” pick up the June 2009 issue of AmericanStyle today!

Living in Paradise, Playing With Mud

April 2009 | BY Lynda McDaniel | Issue 67, June 2009 | NO COMMENTS

: Robin Hopper and Judi Dyelle have spent a lifetime cultivating work in clay and a singular masterpiece in British Columbia, the gardens of ‘Chosin Pottery. Photography by Allan Mandell

Just inside ’Chosin Pottery gardens near Victoria, B.C., two ceramic “Mad Dogs” transform broken tree branches into sculpture. Farther along, new plantings bask in sunlight exposed after strong winds felled beloved trees.

As Robin Hopper walks the curved path of his two-and-a-half-acre Asian-inspired gardens, the Chinese expression Wu-wei comes to mind. Natural action. Effortless doing. Hopper has spent more than 50 years with his hands in the earth—both soil and clay—and he’s learned to live in sync with its rhythms.

An internationally recognized studio potter, Hopper says he was only 3 when he became “intoxicated with [clay’s] possibilities.” Reared in England, where in 1961 he graduated from Croydon College of Art, he drew from the inspiration of legendary potters David Leach (Bernard’s oldest son), Michael Cardew and Ray Finch, all of whom he knew personally.

But Hopper is no traditionalist. In 1968, he sailed to Eastern Canada to establish his own reputation. That didn’t take long. By 1977, he was awarded the first Saidye Bronfman Award, Canada’s most prestigious award in fine crafts. Decades of traveling, teaching and perfecting his pottery followed. “I really enjoy functional work,” he says. “It gives me an enormous amount of pleasure to give pleasure to people who use my pottery to enrich their lives.”

The gardens, which Hopper whimsically describes as “Anglojapanadian,” surround the main house with inspired interpretations of the five basic forms of Japanese gardens. The Stroll garden blends into the Scroll garden, which leads to Tsuboniwa—the courtyard or pond garden—and on to the Zen garden.

For more of “Living in Paradise, Playing With Mud,” pick up the June 2009 issue of AmericanStyle today!

It Started With a Vase… and Became an Art Collection.

April 2009 | BY Karen S. Chambers | Issue 67, June 2009 | NO COMMENTS

: The Wolfs display much of their art collection in the light-filled gallery room of their Cincinnati home. Among the pieces shown are “Cobalt, Cerulean, Purpura, and Oxblood Persian Installation,” which Dale Chihuly created especially for the space beneath the demilune window; “Through the Cone” by Stanislav Libensky´ and Jaroslava Brychtová, which sits in front of the picture window; and “Circle and Square” by Michael Pavlik on the pedestal to the right. Viola Frey’s “Standing Woman with Yellow Cheek” looks on from the corner. Photography by Tony Walsh

In most homes, a 20×32-foot room with 16-foot ceilings and comfy sofas and chairs would be called a “great room.” In the suburban Cincinnati home of collectors Nancy and David Wolf, it is a great room, but in a different sense—the space is filled with pieces from their outstanding collection of contemporary glass, ceramics and wood. The Wolfs rightly call it “the gallery.”

The collection is, in fact, museum-worthy. Nearly 70 pieces, part of a promised gift, will be exhibited in the Cincinnati Art Museum’s “Outside the Ordinary: Contemporary Art in Glass, Wood, and Ceramics from the Wolf Collection,” which runs June 20-Sept. 13. “This exhibition is a celebration of one of the country’s premier collections of contemporary craft,” declares Aaron Betsky, director of the museum. “The Wolfs’ addition of approximately 200 works promises to secure the Cincinnati Art Museum’s place as a major repository and study center for contemporary craft in the United States.”

: Nancy and David Wolf sit in their gallery room surrounded by the art they love. “Chimu Diver” by William Morris is set above Akio Takamori’s “Blue Karato” on the left. Tom Wesselmann’s steel-cut drawing of a woman is on the wall above Michael Lucero’s “Anthropomorphic Jughead Baby in Stroller” behind the couple.

The Wolfs met in Cincinnati in 1965, when David, a hometown boy, took Nancy’s roommate on a date. Nashville-born Nancy had come to Queen City after college. After they were married, the couple’s love affair with collecting began innocently enough in the late 1970s with the purchase of an Art Nouveau vase from a New York gallery. The piece wasn’t bought as an example of one of the most important periods for decorative art glass, but because it appealed to the couple aesthetically. That’s been the guiding principle in building their collection, with each having veto power.

“We’ve always bought pieces that spoke to us,” Nancy explains. “We buy what we like, what we have an emotional reaction to. We’re not thinking ‘will it appreciate in value?’

For the first 10 or 15 years, the Wolfs focused on glass, a notoriously seductive medium. “It dances with the light, and I guess that’s what always attracted us,” David shares.

For more of “It Started with a Vase,” pick up the June 2009 issue of AmericanStyle today!

Dan Cormier, Artist

February 2009 | BY Kris Stewart | April 2009, Issue 66 | NO COMMENTS

: Dan Cormier, “White Necklace”

From his boyhood days exploring the forest behind his babysitter’s house to time spent delving into the mysteries of the mountains of central Mexico, Dan Cormier has always thought of himself as an explorer. Trained in illustration and interior design, Cormier began working with polymer clay in the early 1990s.

This theme of exploration carries over into his work. Endlessly fascinated by topics ranging from mathematics to pop culture, Cormier immerses himself in new ideas and expresses his thoughts in polymer clay. “Like postcards sent from other lands,” the British Columbia artist says, “they’re expressed through my finished work.” His latest work evokes natural elements—sea, sand or time-worn stones—and represents his “passion for wandering through unexplored terrain.”

Cormier devotes much of his time to teaching and hosting workshops internationally with his partner, fellow polymer artist Tracy Holmes. The two have recently developed a line of tools and techniques specifically for working with polymer clay. To see more of Cormier’s work, and learn about upcoming workshops, visit www.dancormier.ca.

To learn more about polymer clay, including its origins and techniques, and to see work from a range of artists, visit www.polymerartarchive.com. Artist and curator Elise Winters developed the site as an essential resource for the study of polymer clay.

Jana Roberts Benzon

February 2009 | BY Kris Stewart | April 2009, Issue 66 | NO COMMENTS

: Jana Roberts Benzon, “From the Sea”

Jana Roberts Benzon began her artistic career at a young age, sculpting soap, designing paper dolls and creating minute furniture from twigs and leaves. She was inspired by her mother, a portrait and textile artist who often worked with intricately patterned fabric with Arabic, Tibetan and East Indian motifs.

Those influences are evident in Roberts’ starkly geometric shapes, which use rich color and fine detail to suggest secretive spaces. “I am intrigued and drawn in by hidden, protected spaces,” she says, “and the mystery these spaces evoke.” Benzon’s latest work has a more organic feel, with delicately unfurling forms evoking the new leaves of spring, or an underwater creature dancing in the deep.

Benzon, who lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, also teaches a range of polymer clay workshops internationally. Her work is available through the gallery of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. To see more of her work, go to www.janarobertsbenzon.com.

Jeffrey Lloyd Dever, Artist

February 2009 | BY Kris Stewart | April 2009, Issue 66 | NO COMMENTS

: Jeffery Lloyd Dever, “Ephemeral Muse”. Photo credit: Gregory R. Staley

Each of Jeffrey Lloyd Dever’s works begins with a series of sketches that allow him to conceptualize an idea or follow a train of thought to a natural end. As a practicing graphic designer, he taught illustration and design at the college level and has been receiving recognition for his polymer clay work for nearly a decade.

His work, while reminiscent of naturally occurring flora and fauna, does not attempt to replicate the objects, but only to “enter the dialogue,” Dever says. “All of my works, whether baskets, vessels or jewelry, are miniature sculptural studies. The fact that they are functional at all is almost incidental to the poetic qualities I seek.” The Laurel, Md., artist creates his work layer by layer, adding hollowware sections over reinforced armatures. This painstaking process can encompass 30 cycles and take weeks to complete.

Dever’s work is carried by del Mano Gallery in Los Angeles and Function + Art in Chicago. He will be teaching a class on his signature technique in April at the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, Tenn.

Kathleen Dustin, Artist

February 2009 | BY Kris Stewart | April 2009, Issue 66 | NO COMMENTS

: Kathleen Dustin, “Horizontal Hibiscus”

A professional artist for 30 years, Kathleen Dustin is a pioneer in the field of polymer clay, having worked with the medium for more than two decades. Through her years of creating art, she has kept a quiet watch on the lives of people around her, and tries to draw attention to the small beauties in everyday life.

Her latest work incorporates natural elements, such as seedpods, buds, grass, sticks and leaves. “I strive to make a beautiful object based on what I find,” she says, “so that someone desires to pick it up and become engaged with it.” That interactivity carries through into the form of her work—Dustin creates purses, instead of sculpture or figurines, expressly because they are functional. “You are supposed to touch them, caress them and examine them,” the New Hampshire artist says. “Your life is enhanced because it’s wonderful to carry beautiful things around with you and use them.”

Dustin’s work is available through Julie: Artisans’ Gallery in New York. Her purses will also be featured in a one-person show at Snyderman-Works Galleries in Philadelphia in April. To see more examples of her work, visit www.kathleendustin.com.

Arts Focus: More Than Meets the Eye

February 2009 | BY Kris Stewart | April 2009, Issue 66 | NO COMMENTS

: Ann Krugalak, “Anemone Tea Pot”

Polymer clay didn’t hit the U.S. market until the early 1980s. There were no strong traditions; artists who took up this burgeoning medium carved their own way. That’s what makes it so exciting, for artists and for collectors.

“Collectors can be in on the ground floor,” says Elise Winters, a polymer clay artist and curator who is the driving force behind the online Polymer Art Archive. They can “figure out what’s meaningful to them,” and, she adds, it’s possible to get quality work that’s still “way underpriced.”

Here’s a look at a few artists, both pioneers and newcomers, who are moving the medium forward. Their work is visually stunning— it’s easy to forget that you are, in fact, looking at polymer clay.

Web Exclusive: Polymer Jewelry Artists

Parting Shot: Spring Fever

February 2009 | BY The AmericanStyle Staff | April 2009, Issue 66 | NO COMMENTS

It’s time to bag those sweaters, open the windows and breathe new life into your environment. For inspiration, check out this 5-foot high glass “Water Lily” by Pittsburgh, Pa., artist Gary Guydosh. Each petal on the botanical behemoth is individually hand-blown, then attached to a metal base.

“Like nature, the design is simple looking, but the engineering is complex,” he says. Guydosh came up with the idea a few years ago from a hospital bed in Venice, Italy. Recovering from a heart attack, he realized it was high time to “stop putting off my ideas and bring them to fruition.”

Guydosh is also working on a new “Sunflower” design, and is making plans for what he hopes will be the world’s largest glass Christmas tree.