Question: What's the most memorable exhibition opening you've ever attended?

I traveled to Chicago in July 2004 with my 12-year-old son, and we stumbled upon the opening day of Millennium Park. The place was jammed with humanity. The two main public sculptures—Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate and Jaume Plensa’s Crown Fountain—were being loved to death by hordes of enthusiastic kids, teens and adults. Kapoor’s sculpture was mostly polished, but a lot of exposed welds were still rough, so I got a sense of how much work went into generating the soon-to-be-seamless form. At the Plensa fountain, businessmen were taking off their shoes and wading in the water. Both pieces are models of brilliant public art.
—Tom Loeser, furniture maker and professor, Madison, WI

Once, at an opening at a prominent gallery for contemporary glass, I watched an uninvited guest wander in off the street, immediately stumble, collide with a pedestal, and send a large sculpture by a big-name glass artist crashing to the floor in a thousand pieces before the stunned and horrified gathering.
—Joyce Lovelace, journalist, Los Angeles, CA

For our joint opening of “Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future” at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Walker Art Center, the exclusive donor event was held at the MIA first. A large video monitor was prominently placed just outside the exhibition’s entrance, showing a portion of the film Monument to the Dream, about the construction of the St. Louis Gateway Arch. A very dramatic film, it was meant to convey the monumentality of Eero’s work and to draw visitors into the show.

Moments before the event started, the Walker curator and I realized the video monitor was not working. Panicking, we tried everything we could discreetly do to get it to turn on, but were not successful. No a/v people were there. Consequently, it was a blank, black entrance to the exhibition during the viewing! We later learned that it was on a timer not set to run on a weekend night. Good thing we had another version going in the main show!
—Jennifer Komar Olivarez, associate curator of decorative arts, textiles and sculpture, Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Right after grad school, I felt lucky to be included in a group show in a New York gallery. I scraped up enough money to fly to New York for the opening and I stayed in a $20 per night hotel on the Bowery that catered to both transients and backpackers. During the opening, a prominent artist who works in my medium stormed up to me and accused me of stealing the unrealized work he’d been formulating in his head for the past few years. He left, but returned with a friend who works in a similar vein. I think he was hinting that I was stealing her ideas too. This was my introduction to the glamour of the art world.
—Garth Johnson, ceramic artist and blogger, extremecraft.com, Eureka, CA

The opening of “Craft Today USA” at the Zacheta National Gallery in Warsaw on Mar. 23, 1990, was an especially memorable event, as it took place when a new, free society was emerging after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was exciting to witness the enthusiastic reception of American work from the new minister of culture, the arts community and the press who attended the preview. “The exhibition is a must for everybody to see and to learn what contemporary craft is and can be,” wrote a reporter in the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza. “The show presented by Americans is so artistically perfect, that we have nothing to do but drop to our knees.” During the monthlong showing there, the exhibition attracted 40,000 visitors, a record attendance for its 15-city European tour.
­—Paul J. Smith, director emeritus of the American Craft Museum (now Museum of Arts and Design), New York City

The most memorable exhibition I’ve attended hands down (or hands on, I should say) was “Touching Warms the Art” at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, OR, in January 2008. Usually I don’t travel outside of California to openings of exhibitions that my work is in, but this show, juried by Rebecca Scheer, Rachelle Thiewes and MCC curator Namita Gupta Wiggers, was not to be missed. I was one of 67 artists from 12 countries chosen to create jewelry from nonprecious materials that could be handled by the public over a two-month run. The work would become part of the museum’s permanent Teaching Collection. This was right up my alley, as I was just starting to work with Lego blocks (a perfect material for repeated handling). I was beside myself with excitement that finally a museum was brave enough to tackle such a registrar’s nightmare concept!

What a buzz the opening was! Participating artists had come from all over. They were not only studio jewelers but fashion designers, fiber artists and sculptors ranging from established professionals to experimentally driven students. To get to the show one had to walk throught the concurrent “Exhibition in Print” showcase of SNAG members’ work, serious pieces of studio art jewelry secured behind display glass, a stark contrast to the upstairs interactive “Touching.” Once upstairs, there was no denying that the “Touching” show was a full-body experience: a mosaic of enlarged images of the artists’ jewelry lined the back walls, drawing you back into the far corner where an iMac Photo Booth was set up to record the public’s “experience” of wearing the art jewelry. A brilliant idea: the images over the course of the exhibition would be uploaded to a Flickr site, making it an online exhibition so that people could easily share their experience with others globally. The pieces themselves hung from knobs on the walls and covered the Kraft-paper-lined tables. Descriptive hang tags were attached to each piece, almost like scientific specimens. People were like kids in a candy store, trying on everything, investigating the work and discussing it with others around them. And, naturally, in the presence of the iMac Photo Booth, many fleeting performances were enacted, inspired by the wearing of specific pieces. Wow, an opening where the jewelry was actually given attention and enjoyed!

I stayed all weekend. A spectacular after party was held at a nearby restaurant, where the artists and their guests could mingle further and enjoy finger foodd and wine. The following day was a panel discussion on this issue of handling work in a museum setting. A month later I returned with my family, glad to be able to give noncraft people a complete art-jewelry experience. I was amazed to discover that the security guard for the room had become quite familiar with the works in the show and happily guided visitors through the various aspects of many pieces.

MCC’s innovative vision left its mark on me, leading me into a new direction that has catapulted my work beyond the scope of the craft world, with a solo show to follow only nine months later (not unlike a newborn) that was very closely aligned to the “Touching” show. As Rob Walker emphatically stated during his presentation at the recent American Craft Council conference, “the mistake [crafters] make is thinking the most important story is their own story, but it isn’t....It’s best when your story is relevant to others’ lives.”
—emiko oye, jeweler, San Francisco, CA