Through the Looking Glass

If the worlds of art and craft were involved in a kind of civil war, with the battlegrounds being blogs and gallery openings, panels and salons, then there would be the so-called artists on the one side and, coming up over the hill, on intricately crafted carousel horses, would be the so-called decorative artists, with their platoons of ceramists and furniture makers, with regiments of wallpaper designers and jewelry makers. They would very likely be led in their charge by General Judith Schaechter, who is not really a general, of course, but is a huge Civil War aficionado as well as a stained glass maker. Schaechter wouldn't just yell charge! She would shout points, philosophical notes and punch lines. Imagine her firing a rhetorical shot that pokes fun at her side. "No one calls themselves a decorative artist any more!" she says, for instance. "They might be an applied artist or a craft artist or a functional artist. No one says they are a decorative artist-that's like a category at a museum!" Then she fires again, this time aiming a little closer to the other team, or perhaps just shooting over their heads: "I will say that I agree with the Pasteur quote that Pasteur never actually said-'I don't think there's such thing as applied science and pure science. There's only good science.' Just change it to art."

The good thing about an art war is that (usually) no one gets hurt, physically. Another good thing about it is that it allows you to hear more precisely what artists on both sides think about what it is they do. Judith Schaechter, for one, knows exactly what she does-she makes stained glass. That's all she makes. She has made stained glass since college. She has not dabbled in painting or used ceramics techniques in her stained glass work or worked partly in gouache. In a time when artists and makers alike are changing their mediums as fast as they change their Facebook page, she is the constant, unchanging glass star. Why? "It bothers me that people change media all the time," she says. "It's like getting divorced before you've even met the person. Having a really intimate relationship with a material, you don't just leave it." She is hopelessly devoted to glass, in other words, chained to it and liberated by it. "Stained glass made itself known to me like no other medium and stained glass requires not a learning curve but fluency that I haven't gotten to yet. And, in a way, I'm stuck with this. For better or worse. And it is very much like a marriage."

Philadelphia is a place that intense luxury condo development has not yet found completely, and if you visit Schaechter there, you head south of downtown and come to a tough-looking old corner with a couple of Vietnamese restaurants and an auto repair shop. You have lunch at Viet Huong; they know her noodle order. After, you see her place is urban doll house-like-small and Victorian. Inside, it's dark and cozy, with a narrow wooden staircase that leads past the marionettes to the second-floor studio. Two cats play in the bay window, overlooking an immaculate workspace, cds stored carefully along the wall, notes and decorations at a minimum. Watching it all is a small daguerreotype of her great, great, great-uncle, John Fletcher Hamlin, a Civil War soldier from Sugar Grove, Pennsylvania, who died in 1864 in Petersburg, Virginia, a tip to her interest in the paraphernalia of Victorian death mourning. Other tips are on her blog, entitled "Late Breaking Noose," and on her MySpace page where she loves listing inspirations, which are numerous: "Cemeteries and cemetery art ... old New England graveyards, the Gettysburg battlefield, of course, but also lots of other stuff related to death piques my interest-I am interested in death in general. I mean, aren't we all on some level?... Civil War letters are amazingly beautiful and a tonic to all that is cynical and ironic in our world today."

Schaechter grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, her mother an accomplished pianist, her father chairman of the microbiology department at Tufts, and for many years the man that the poison control people called on when they were concerned someone had swallowed a deadly mushroom. Even in her youth, she loved patterns. "I remember I'd sit on the toilet and stare at the tiles on the floor and see paintings that were way better than Turner," she remembers. "You know, ships in storms and stuff, beautiful things, and this was just all around my environment." At the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, she liked the scary paintings. "There's one of someone being drawn and quartered," she says. "I would beg to see those things, as I recall, and then not be able to really look but be fascinated. I think children have an intuitive sense that the true function of an image is as a magic spell." On the lighter side, she also played with Lite-Brite, learned classical guitar and perpetually built furniture for her dollhouse. "To this day, I often think I'm just going to drop this art crap," she says. "I know how to make the most killer dollhouses."

She was supposed to have been a painter, like her grandmother, who learned to paint in her 70s, but Schaechter found an empty canvas terrifying. Or frustrating, or some combination. While studying painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, she took a class in stained glass. That was it. It was love/hate at first sight. Love because with stained glass she was making a thing that contained a picture. Hate because it takes forever; stained glass is hard, though she loves the part she hates, thankfully. "Recently, I said to a student, 'You can be my assistant, but you have to come up with all the ideas and I sit there and grind.'" The grind is a solution for her, a cure for her attention deficit disorder. "The problem with a lot of these media was that it was sort of a very direct confrontation with me and creativity," she says, "and th at is something I can walk away from with very little excuse to walk away. But with glass you have to do this." She points to her tools, to the painstakingly etched glass. "You have to put the contact papers on. You have to grind this. You have to sandblast there. And there's all this stuff that has to be done to it before anything has happened. By the time you are done you love it like a baby because you have gestated it."

In 1983, after graduating from risd, she moved to Philadelphia. "Since no one knew me here I decided to reinvent myself as someone cool, 'cause I'd always been such a big dork," she says. "That was very difficult. That was quite a project, and totally worthless." She laughs her big, crazy, infectious laugh. "It turns out, I couldn't erase my inner dork!" She did hook up with the hard-core punk scene, playing in a band called Ice Box and another called Ken, an all-girl band with a guy singer. "Some people think my glass is nervous and edgy. Well, my songs were like the most morose morbid things in the world," she says. "My glass is a happy picnic in the sunshine compared to that songwriting stuff." In lieu of Grammy awards, she has, as a stained glass artist, won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pew Fellowship, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, as well as n.e.a. grants and, most recently, was named a United States Artists Fellow.

Lately, it's been difficult to open or renovate a new museum without one of her pieces. For Seeing Is Believing, the site-specific piece Schaechter designed for the new Museum of Arts and Design, in New York City, she put together hundreds of abstract medallions to build a 11-foot-high, 9-foot-wide window. The reasons people think her work is dark may have to do with the appearance of widows, flashers, bank robbers, and dead or wounded unicorns. But she is not so much dark as observant, and she manages to mix medieval Christianity with Hello Kitty-ness, though there is no sugar coating-there is a simultaneously mischievous and serious stare into the accoutrements of death and other darknesses. With spider web-like nuance, Schaechter details remorse, or dread, or something somewhere having gone wrong, but behind it all-precisely because they are stained glass-is light.

Today, Schaecter is working away at Self-Portrait of Someone Else, a work inspired by a stained glass window design at Holy Trinity Church in Lincolnshire, England, an example of what stained glass artists call jumble windows, which, in this case, were smashed during the Protestant Reformation, and reassembled by an anonymous craftsperson whom Judith admires for his postmodern sensibilities. "I mean, this is incredible," she says. The piece will take her a little less than two months-a quick one. She has no master plan but changes her mind as she goes.

It's an austere workspace, a little medieval, except for the npr on the radio, which is how she likes it. "I think people equate this kind of handwork and labor with a type of stupidity-let's just call it what people think," she says. "And they see the idea of somebody sitting there grinding 500 circles as, well, they say, why would you have somebody like Einstein sitting there grinding 500 circles when you could have his brilliant mind curing cancer or coming up with e=mc2. But for a certain segment of the population this is a way to your intelligence and handwork is where it's at. I couldn't do it any other way. When I get arthritis, it's all over."

She is now back on her horse at the battleground of art and craft. "There are a lot of really obnoxious assumptions about art that have adversely affected craft," she says. "My new thing right now is I think that the whole craft identity crisis is a projection from art. It's art that has the identity crisis. And they sit there and project all their shit on us because they have no definition, and the art-for-art's-sake thing was so nihilistic that when it came to its logical conclusion, all those people who liked to make art were left sitting there like musical chairs had ended, still standing without a chair to sit on." She's laughing again. "Thanks, Duchamp!"

After a chat, she walks you over to Broad Street, the main drag in Philly that runs up to the 37-foot-tall statue of William Penn, sculpted by Alexander Milne Calder, grandfather of Calder the engineer turned mobile maker and son of a tombstone maker from Aberdeen, Scotland. Philly looks like an older place on a drizzly day, a city from the 70s, or before, and as Schaechter walks, she gets worked up about old cathedrals, and what it must have been like, in, say, 1200. How sensually engulfing, especially if you add incense and music, and then, to the stained glass, the sun. "It must have been amazing," she says. "Think about it."