Scratching the Surface: Art and Content in Contemporary Wood
Peter Gourfain: Clay, Wood, Bronze, and Works on Paper
Lenore Tawney—Signs on the Wind: Postcard Collages
Great Masters of Mexican Folk Art
Katsina: Commodified and Appropriated Images of Hopi Supernaturals
Southwest Textiles: Weavings of the Navajo and Pueblo
Art in the Modern Era: A Guide to Styles, Schools & Movements
Filz: Kunst, Kunsthandwerk und Design (Felt: Art, Crafts and Design)
Nicht Ohne: Schmuck Gerät Produkt (Pretty Sharp: Jewellery Implements Products)
Thos.
Moser: Artistry in Wood
by Thomas F. Moser with Brad Lemley, 2002, Chronicle Books, San Francisco,
CA, 415-537-3730; 192 pages, foreword by Andy Rooney, illustrated. $60.
In 1971 Thomas F. Moser, a 36-year-old professor of communications at Bates College in Maine who enjoyed building furniture and renovating houses in his spare time, was becoming dissatisfied with a career that gave him little opportunity to work with his hands. When a table he’d just completed was promptly bought, it occurred to him that he could make a living building tables like that. The next year he began Thos. Moser Cabinetmakers in an old grange hall in New Gloucester. Thirty years later, he heads a 65,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art facility in Auburn, Maine, employing 65 craftspeople and supplying furniture to showrooms around the country. Moser tells the story, setting forth his aesthetic (“Every design we make is rooted in a basic preference for simplicity of form, precise craftsmanship, and respect for natural materials”), his influences (Shaker, Arts and Crafts, Mission, Frank Lloyd Wright, among others), his wood choice (Pennsylvania black cherry), the development of his designs (his Laptop Desk, for example, meant to house a computer, printer and fax machine, is based on the laptop desks once used in stagecoaches), and the organization of his shop (parts production on one side, assembly and finishing on the other). To those who might argue that the use of such machinery as a five-axis Cartesian router for shaping chair seats represents a compromise in handcraftsmanship, Moser responds that his “philosophy has been to seek the fastest possible way to make parts consistent with quality and safety. . . . Then, we rely exclusively on skilled hand labor to put the pieces together.” The photographs bring to life the furniture, the shop and Moser’s hand-built home.
Scratching
the Surface: Art and Content in Contemporary Wood
by Michael Hosaluk, 2002, Guild Publishing, Madison, WI, 877-344-8453;
128 pages, texts by Judy Coady and Paul Sasso, illustrated. $35.
The surface treatment of wood for expressive purposes is the focus in this compilation of nearly 100 makers of sculpture, furniture and other functional objects. The works pictured have been painted, bleached, burned or carved and are grouped in such categories as color and line, making marks, fun and humor, balance, nature and culture. Michael Hosaluk, a woodworker and educator living in Canada, discusses the emergence of surface design on wood as a trend in studio furniture in the 1980s, a nose-thumbing reaction against the orthodoxy of “truth to materials” prevalent in woodworking in the previous two decades. “It was a mild sort of rebellion from what I saw as the tyranny of the woodiness of wood,” he quotes the furniture maker Alphonse Mattia as saying. “In the end,” writes Hosaluk, “it is not only the soul of the tree that reaches out to the viewer, but the soul of the artist as well.”
Contemporary
Natural
by Phyllis Richardson, 2002, Thames & Hudson, New York, NY, distributed
by W.W. Norton, 800-233-4830; 192 pages, photographs by Solvi dos Santos.
$40.
The artists and designers from around the world whose homes are presented here all work with natural (or recycled) materials and organic forms, and have integrated their love for them into their living spaces. The hand-built wood house by the late J. B. Blunk in northern California, the New York loft of Michele Oka Doner, who works in metal, the Berkeley, California, home of woodturner Bob Stocksdale and fiber artist Kay Sekimachi, the farmhouse of British ceramist Rupert Spira are among the 27 seductive dwellings. Both photographs and text convey that there is nothing incompatible about natural materials beautifully crafted and modern style.
Peter
Gourfain: Clay, Wood, Bronze, and Works on Paper
by Russell Panczenko, 2002, Elvehjem Museum of Art, University of
Wisconsin-Madison, 608-263-2240; 112 pages, essay by Lucy R. Lippard,
illustrated. $24.95 paperback.
In the early 1970s Peter Gourfain began carving as a way to transform his minimalist work into vehicles for narrative. This catalog of a 2002 retrospective at the Elvehjem Museum of Art highlights his oeuvre over 30 years, depicting an array of subjects in a dramatic, often humorous, figurative style. Among his influences have been cartoons and Romanesque carvings, which, Gourfain says, are “like looking at comic books in three dimensions,” and the writings of James Joyce. Gourfain has carved on terra-cotta, on clay that was then cast in bronze, and on wood—used objects such as tools, toolboxes and ox yokes. Russell Panczenko’s interview with the artist and Lucy R. Lippard’s essay illuminate Gourfain’s development and political and social concerns.
William
Morris: Man Adorned
by Blake Edgar and James Yood, 2001, Marquand Books in association
with University of Washington Press, Seattle, 206-543-4050; 152 pages,
foreword by Bruce Guenther, photographs by Robert Vinnedge $40.
In his most recent work, the Seattle artist William Morris departs from the animals, vessels, faux artifacts and installations characteristic of his work in glass for more than 20 years to focus on the human face and the adornments—costumes, jewelry, headdresses and tattoos—people employ to beautify themselves or signify status. “Morris has cast his net widely—Native American, African, Asian, Oceanic, Arabic, Arctic, Indo-European individuals and more are represented,” writes the critic James Yood, to create a “personalized historical ethnography.” Presented in dramatic photographs, these men and women embody, Yood suggests, Morris’s ideal of a human culture securely rooted in nature. They also reveal the skill of Morris and his team (shown in process shots) at making blown glass mimic skin, bone, bronze, leather, clay and metal.
Rosanjin
2002, Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York, NY, 212-246-5360, with
Setsu Gatodo Co. and James Corcoran Gallery; 46 pages, texts by Franklin
Parrasch and Ken Price, illustrated. $32 paperback.
Rosanjin Kitaoji (1883-1959), an illustrious Japanese ceramic artist, was also accomplished in calligraphy and seal engraving and was a connoisseur of ancient pottery. This catalog documents an exhibition of 20 ceramic and calligraphic works, primarily from the 1950s, in the first U.S. exhibition of Rosanjin since 1972 (this fall at the Franklin Parrasch Gallery). Most of the ceramics are meant for serving food, apparently Rosanjin’s major interest and his motivation for taking up pottery making. The artist visited the United States in 1954, when he had a show at the Museum of Modern Art, and inspired American ceramists like Ken Price, who acknowledges the influence. A chronology offers glimpses of Rosanjin’s tumultuous life—catastrophic childhood, five marriages, fame as a chef and as a potter who declined to be designated a Japanese Living National Treasure.
Lenore
Tawney—Signs on the Wind: Postcard Collages
2002, Pomegranate Communications, Rohnert Park, CA, 800-227-1428;
96 pages, essay by Holland Cotter, photographs by George Erml. $24.95.
For decades, Lenore Tawney, known for her innovative fiber works and assemblages, also created postcard-size collages that she sent to friends through the mail without protective covering. These cards, collected here with an essay by the art critic Holland Cotter, incorporated photographs, newspaper clippings, musical scores, antique manuscript pages, and drawings and notes by the artist. Certain images recurred—cats, birds, giraffes, mushrooms—and the postmark and stamp became part of the composition. “Tawney’s postcards are rich, dynamic things,” Cotter writes. “They can be read as treatises or as valentines.”
Great
Masters of Mexican Folk Art
edited by Cándida Fernández de Calderón and Alberto
Sarmiento, 2002, Fomento Cultural Banamex, A.C., distributed by Harry
N. Abrams, New York, NY, 800-345-1359; 552 pages, illustrated. $85.
The color, vitality, craftsmanship, expressiveness and sheer variety of the popular arts of Mexico are celebrated in this lavish volume presenting 181 artists, representing 117 communities from every Mexican state. The artists, who are shown with their work, were chosen to participate in a program to support and preserve folk art traditions founded in 1996 by the nonprofit Fomento Cultural Banamex in Mexico City. A touring exhibit of works from the organization’s collection is at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, George Gustav Heye Center, New York City (through March 15).
Katsina:
Commodified and Appropriated Images of Hopi Supernaturals
by Zena Pearlstone, 2001, UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History,
Los Angeles, CA, distributed by University of Washington Press, Seattle,
206-543-4050; 200 pages, 7 contributors, illustrated. $60 hardcover, $35
paperback.
Katsinam (plural of katsina) are the “benevolent spirit beings” central to the religious beliefs of the Pueblo peoples of the American Southwest, in particular the Hopi. The term katsina, more commonly spelled and pronounced kachina, also refers to the wooden carvings of these beings given to young girls during ceremonies. Called kachina dolls, the figures and images of them are ubiquitous in the Southwest today, often adorning mass-produced products. The essays in this catalog of an exhibition at the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History (through March 23) explore the complex issues surrounding the commercialization of katsina by the Hopi themselves and its appropriation by non-Pueblo and non-Indian peoples. Profiles of 13 contemporary artists using katsina imagery are included.
Southwest
Textiles: Weavings of the Navajo and Pueblo
by Kathleen Whitaker, 2002, University of Washington Press, Seattle,
206-543-4050, in association with Southwest Museum, Los Angeles, CA; 432
pages, textile analysis assistance by Susie Hart, illustrated. $65.
The overlapping but diverging stories of how weaving evolved among the Navajo and Pueblo peoples of the Southwest unfolds in this well-designed and scholarly book based on the rich textiles collection of the Southwest Museum. The more than 250 mostly 19th- and 20th-century examples shown, along with details of the works and vintage photographs, illustrate the interplay between the two Native peoples and their art. In addition to providing brief histories of the groups’ weaving, Kathleen Whitaker, director of the Indian Arts Research Center at the School of American Research, Santa Fe, traces the development of the textile collections at the museum and profiles Charles Fletcher Lummis, the museum’s founder, and George Wharton James, a collector and donor. An accompanying CD-ROM includes charts of the fiber and construction analysis performed on each illustrated textile and an inventory of the southwestern textiles collection.
Northern
Haida Master Carvers
by Robin K. Wright, 2001, University of Washington Press, Seattle,
206-543-4050, and Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver, British Columbia;
416 pages, foreword by Jim Hart, illustrated. $45.
The monumental carved and painted poles by the Haida people of the Queen Charlotte Islands (British Columbia) and Alaska are among the most distinctive of Native American artworks. In this comprehensive study—the term “totem pole” is not a native Northwest Coast phrase—using such sources as Haida oral history and journals of late-18th- and early-19th-century European explorers, Robin K. Wright, curator of Native American art at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, Seattle, interweaves the historical and artistic developments of this sculptural tradition, tracing the making of the poles from the days of early European contact to the present. She highlights the achievements of several of the most significant Haida artists: Squiltcange, the earliest named Haida pole carver (early 19th century), and Albert Edward Edenshaw and his nephew, Charles Edenshaw (both later 19th century). Abundant historical photographs enhance the scholarly narrative, as do maps and charts of significant family lines.
Art
in the Modern Era: A Guide to Styles, Schools & Movements
by Amy Dempsey, 2002, Harry N. Abrams, New York, NY, 800-345-1359;
304 pages, illustrated. $55.
The dynamic changes characterizing Western painting, sculpture, architecture and design from 1860 to the present are covered in 100 entries, ranging from Impressionism to Internet Art, that examine the context and evolution of each movement. The decorative arts are touched on in entries on the Arts & Crafts movement, the Bauhaus, Art Deco, the Deutscher Werkbund and De Stijl, among others. The book begins with a foldout timeline and ends with a dictionary of 200 styles and an index of more than 1,000 players in the story of modern art.
Filz:
Kunst, Kunsthandwerk und Design (Felt: Art, Crafts and Design)
edited by Katharina Thomas, 2000, Arnoldsche Art Publishers, Stuttgart,
Germany, distributed by Antique Collectors’ Club, Wappingers Falls,
NY, 845-297-0003; 279 pages, 4 contributors, German and English, illustrated,
felt slipcase. $35.
Felt as a medium for artistic expression and fashion is the subject of this catalog of an exhibition that toured Germany in 2001. Included are garments, accessories, wall hangings, sculpture, jewelry and furniture primarily by European artists. One essay discusses the philosophical underpinnings of the German artist Joseph Beuys’s pioneering use of felt, another explores its physical properties, while a third summarizes the increasing number of exhibitions, symposia and publications that indicate an international network of felt artists emerging as a subgroup of the fiber field. Brief biographies of the 57 artists are included.
Nicht
Ohne: Schmuck Gerät Produkt (Pretty Sharp: Jewellery Implements Products)
2002, Arnoldsche Art Publishers, Stuttgart, Germany, distributed by
Antique Collectors’ Club, Wappingers Falls, NY, 845-297-0003; 320
pages, 7 contributors, German and English, foreword by Sabine Staniek,
illustrated. $60 paperback.
The spirit of experimentation animates the works and texts by past and present students and the current staff of the School of Product Design, Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences in this catalog of a touring exhibition in Germany. Among the more than 400 jewelry pieces and useful objects, some are of precious metals or stainless steel—a classically modern geometric silver and ebony teapot, for example, or stainless steel brooches that double as eyeglass holders. But works in non-precious materials seem to dominate—a PVC neck ornament with acupuncture needles, Velcro rings in pastel colors, graceful silicone rubber vessels. With such features as a Japanese binding and an attached knife to slit the folded pages, the book’s design is indeed cutting edge.
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