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Home , Bagley Wright, Dale Chihuly, Ginny Ruffner, Hammering Man, Olympic Sculpture Park

Fellows of Contemporary Art Tour May 4 to 8, 2011

May 4 Wednesday

It is not an easy thing to have a tour facilitator who is a morning person… Of our group of ten, six arrived a day ahead, but four had to get up at the crack of dawn to catch flights to make it to our first scheduled program of lunch at noon. Sorry Bonnie and Robert, Elinor and Rubin!

Those who arrived earlier had a chance to enjoy a bit of sunshine, tour the , admire the beautiful tulips and the cherry blossoms in full bloom, grab a bite at one of Seattle’s famed mobile gourmet lunch spots (there are about 30,) or hold out to have a quiet dinner and then, perchance, a leisurely late morning to gear up to an intense program.

The distinctive Maximus-Minimus we saw up the street from Pike Market

A mellow start to our Seattle tour was lunch at Il Terrazzo Carmine, a lovely restaurant with great Italian food located in the Pioneer Square area. We enjoyed meeting our fellow travelers and our informed and well-connected guide Dena Rigby.

After lunch we hit the ground running visiting three outstanding private collections.

While driving to the various locations Dena introduced us to beautiful Seattle, bordered by the silver waters of Lake , Elliott Bay and , touching the distant snow-capped tips of the Cascades and the Olympics on this rare clear day.

Poised on the Pacific Rim - representing the juncture of West and East - and at the forefront of the cyber industry, Seattle embodies innovation, experimentation, and conceptual freedom. It is today a vibrant city, aglow with culture and affluence. Brand- new fortunes, fueled by biotechnology, coffee, grunge rock and computers, have turned this Northwest lumber-and-aircraft city into the boom-town it is today. Further to Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon and Starbucks, the city has a thriving art scene supported by powerful and generous collectors, as well as major museums and art galleries. With so much going on it was high time for our FOCA group to come for a visit.

Unfortunately due to privacy concerns we were not allowed to take bags or cameras to any of the residences but we will always remember the beautiful collections and homes we saw.

We started in Madison Park, an upscale area in East Central Seattle, where we spent some time with Stacey Winston-Levitan owner of Winston Wachter Fine Art, with locations in both New York’s Chelsea District and Seattle. Her husband Dan is a VC who took Starbucks public. We loved her home and her art collection, especially the large encaustic paintings of Tony Sherman and the lenticular works of Margeaux Walter.

Tony Sherman Margeaux Walter

2 We drove back to , to one of the 36 spacious high-rise “estates” of the Four Seasons Hotel and Private Residences ideally situated in the cultural and business heart of the city, just steps from Pike Place Market, across from the , and in a premier waterfront location.

A relevant to our times aside: built during the height of downtown’s recent construction boom, the $180+ million project opened in the fall of 2008, just as Seattle’s real estate market started to visibly crumble. The project went into default a year later in December 2009, and faced possible foreclosure or bankruptcy, an untenable prospect to the investors, which include a number of prominent Seattle families and residents at the Four Seasons. Announced on April 26th, just before our arrival, new terms were successfully negotiated and the hotel and residences were back on track.

Herman and Fay Sarkowsky’s stunning space was designed by famed Seattle designer Terry Hunziker, whom we would visit on the last day of our tour. Competing with the stunning views, the elegant environment was created to showcase a blue-chip collection of, among many, a giant blue Frakenthaler, a Stella overlooking Puget Sound, a major work by , and some important by the likes of and .

Long-time philanthropists, the Sarkowskys civic activities cover a huge swath including medicine, athletics, architecture, arts and sciences, the Seattle Art Museum and the Henry Art Gallery. Trustees of the SAM, they were part of a small group of collectors to pledge a total of 1,000 works of art as gifts to the museum on occasion of its 75th Anniversary.

Still active in business, one of Seattle's richest and most powerful men, Mr. Sarkowsky once owned the Portland Trail Blazers and Seattle Seahawks, supplying financial backing for the NBA team on a whim, and for the NFL franchise out of civic duty. In addition to his investments in team sports and horseracing, he is one of the most successful builders and real estate developers in Seattle history. Obviously still active at 86, he just came home from work as we finished touring the collection with his wife.

3 Unheard of situation on a FOCA tour: we were running early, so we were able to squeeze in a brief visit to 's Chapel of St. Ignatius, an architectural gem.

Dedicated on April 6, 1997, it was the first major work in the region designed by Steven Holl (b. 1947), a New York architect born in Bremerton, raised locally, and educated at the . This small 6,100-square foot building is highly symbolic, physically complex, and boldly expressive. It celebrates the life and thought of St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order of priests that staff and administer the university.



More than any other local building, the chapel makes light its essence, treating it metaphorically as a means to wisdom, and physically as a substance to be captured, manipulated, and used to visually define the free-form shapes of the spaces inside. The result is a mysteriously glowing interior whose visual mood changes throughout the day and the year.

Significant roles were played by many artists and artisan-fabricators, most notably Linda Beaumont, who designed the interior and furnishings of the Blessed Sacrament Chapel, a subsidiary space with an onyx tabernacle, a 20-foot Madrona tree branch, and beeswax-coated walls inset with gold-leaf prayers.

We were right on time for our next visit located in the Highlands in North Seattle. Allen and Kathleen Shoup, the owners of Long Shadows winery, have been longtime collectors and are trustees of the . Their grand yet warm and comfortable mansion has a number of collections including antique toys, mechanical banks, and photorealist paintings.

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Allen Shoup is widely recognized as one of the founding fathers of the Washington wine industry. After twenty years at the helm of the Stimson Lane wine group (Chateau Ste. Michelle, Columbia Crest and other wineries), he retired to pursue a personal dream. For years he had envisioned a joint venture with highly acclaimed winemakers from different regions of the world. His goal was to bring their expertise to Washington to create some of the most special wines ever crafted from the region’s top vineyards; wines that would stand shoulder to shoulder with the world’s best. He named the venture Long Shadows.

The Shoup’s art library with some of the studio glass collection

5 After touring the art and admiring the grounds framed by unobstructed views of the Puget Sound and Olympic Mountains, we were treated to a tasting of ultra-premium wines. As we were departing, we all got a bottle to take, including a very special one without a label that we took with us to our dinner at the Dahlia Lounge. It was fabulous!

Tom Douglas’ Dahlia Lounge is a quintessential Seattle dining experience and has rightfully earned its iconic status on the Northwest dining scene as the epicenter of the local, sustainable, organic food movement. We feasted a la carte on varied and creative menu options like carpaccio, crabcakes, Peking duck, doughnuts and coconut pie.

May 5 Thursday

Hope against hope that it won’t be one of those gray days locals insist they love, it was a grey day but it was colored with all the hues of rainbows by the art we saw.

Dante Marioni’s studio

What is happening now in blown glass is a new synthesis of the Studio Glass Movement and European traditions. is at the center of this trend. We were able to see the studio gallery of this celebrated artist whose works reveal combinations of classical Greek, Italian, and modern forms using opaque and transparent colors. He resists being called an Artist, but was quite eloquent describing the intense process that results in his vibrant, attenuated vessels that stretch to unexpected proportions, crossing the line into the realm of . Although he describes his pieces as "Post-Modern sculptures that refer to vessels," Dante simply sees himself as a "glassblower." And his work, he asserts, "is, if anything, about glassblowing itself."

In the same building we visited the studio of Janusz Pozniak, Marioni’s assistant and collaborator, where we saw the works of this distinguished young artist revealing the creative and technical dialogue that takes place between the two of them.

6 British ex-pat Janusz’s work transcends the mundane functionality of vases, bowls and pitchers and is inspired by forms that have a reference to British Pop Art design, with a bit of humor. As he prepares his wedding next month, we were lucky to be there at the time of a studio sale and didn’t even try to resist.

Our next stop was a highly anticipated, hard to obtain tour of ’s Boathouse Studio that is not open to the public. On the shores of Lake Union this electrifying labyrinth of distinctive rooms serves primarily as a fully functioning glass-blowing studio. It also features vibrant and imaginative displays of Chihuly's glasswork as well as his individual collections.

Our group at the Boathouse “on the floor”

After touring the hot shop and watching the production of the famous tendrils, we were awed by the indoor pool and an aquarium of exotic fish:

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Chihuly seems to collect everything from native artifacts, Indian blankets and baskets, vintage photographs, comic books, masks, many of which are beautifully displayed in spaces as varied as galleries and bathrooms - most however are in storage.

Lunch in the Evelyn Room (named after a sign Chihuly found and installed here) was another treat, though somewhat challenged by the fact that the caterer we hired had the date wrong and had to resort to a simple emergency solution that we still quite enjoyed.

The Evelyn Room is the heart of the Boathouse originally used as a room where the artist would create his drawings. The table is a single-cut old growth Douglas fir that is approximately 85 feet long, with Chihuly’s glorious chandeliers suspended above, and his collection of antique carnival masks on the wall. The view of the water and boats gliding by was another wow.

8 From the sublime to the strange, we stopped by the famous Troll, a mixed media colossal statue, located under the north end of the Aurora Bridge. It is clutching an actual Volkswagen Beetle (with a California license plate) as if it had just swiped it from the roadway above, and winks with its one good eye (a hubcap) at people taking and posing for photographs. How famous? Well, Aurora Avenue North was renamed "Troll Avenue" in its honor in 2005. The Troll is said to be public art (though more fun than serious) and was a collaboration of four artists.

Bonnie and Robert with the Troll

Maybe here I could mention something about Seattle’s respected public art program that unfortunately we didn’t have time to explore. Seattle was one of the first cities in the to adopt a percent-for-art ordinance in 1973. For more than 30 years, its public art program has been considered exemplary. The program integrates artworks and the ideas of artists into a variety of public settings, advancing the city’s reputation as a cultural center for innovation and creativity. It specifies that 1% of eligible city capital improvement project funds be set aside for the commission, purchase and installation of artworks in a variety of settings. By providing opportunities for individuals to encounter art in parks, libraries, community centers, on roadways, bridges and other public venues, it simultaneously enriches citizens' daily lives and gives a very public voice to artists.

One of the most recognizable public art pieces of the city, Jonathan Borofsky’s 48-foot , marks the Seattle Art Museum’s original First Avenue entrance to the Robert Venturi designed downtown facility inaugurated in December 1991. The expansion of SAM, designed by Portland’s famed Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture, opened four years ago. The expanded building offers 70 percent more gallery space, a large museum store, and a new restaurant, with the ability to expand into additional space in phases, in correlation with the growth in audience and collections. In anticipation of the expansion, over a thousand new pieces, with a total value over a billion dollars, were donated to the collection.

9 The museum has two arrival experiences: the Borofsky sculpture outside and an installation in the Brotman Forum by Cai Guo-Qiang of nine identical white cars suspended from the ceiling. Inopportune: Stage One, Cai’s largest installation to date, presents the cars in a cinematic progression that simulates a car bombing. The artist has a history of making works of extraordinary beauty from violent beginnings, most famously using gunpowder, fireworks and explosions.

We met the museum’s handsome young director Derrick R. Cartwright, who took us around the various installations and spoke enthusiastically of the museum’s collection, programs and plans. We learned with great surprise that right after our visit, on May 10 he resigned from his post to “pursue scholarly projects.”

 SAM’s contemporary galleries with Do-Ho Suh’s Some/One The Porcelain Room 

When we proceeded to the exhibition Meet Me at the Center of the Earth: Nick Cave, Marisa Sanchez, Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art, took over the tour.

Nick Cave tailors “sound suits” that are sculpture, clothing characters that spring out of his imagination, reminiscent of African and Native American ceremonial masquerade robes, extreme haute couture, and Liberace’s outfits. His work underscores the transforming possibility inherent in society's most easily overlooked rejects.

10 The costumes are meant to be worn, using movement and sound to amplify their visual impact as shown in a video in one of the galleries. Some of us caught the exhibition at the Fowler last year, but the SAM had a more extensive installation able to surprise and make us long to partake.

A Soundsuit and a fan

The new addition to the museum opens SAM up to the city, connecting street activity to the life inside the museum. We saw this relationship a little later when the “March to the Center of the Earth” a community costume parade, initiated by the museum and inspired by Nick Cave, passed by our hotel as we were leaving for dinner.

Creative costumes of the parade to the Center of the Earth

11 Our afternoon continued with a visit to Winston Wachter Fine Art, one of Seattle’s premier contemporary galleries, designed by local architecture star, Tom Kundig. On view were Betsy Eby’s thorough explorations of the representation of musical ideas through finely honed encaustic painting technique. Stacey Winston-Levitan, our hostess from Wednesday, showed us around and introduced us to mosaic sculptor Ann Gardner.

Ann Gardner is known for her unique sculptures that use hand-cut, tinted and etched glass to create elegant mosaic-covered forms that challenge the physical boundaries of the medium. She created a slide show to explain work from her most recent exhibition and her large-scale public commissions.

Ann Gardner’s large and small-scale work

Unfortunately the weather turned from grey to wet, so we passed on our stroll in the Seattle Art Museum’s .

Opened in 2007, this nine-acre redeveloped industrial site has some of the museum’s largest and most recognized sculptures, donated by Seattle’s notable art patrons. Redesigned by Weiss/Manfredi Architects, it has sweeping views of Elliott Bay and the Olympic Mountains (hence its name). The park changes with the seasons and works are regularly rotated by the museum. It has become an integral part of the city, showcasing sculptures by some of the best-known names in contemporary art: (the Park’s signature work is his red “”), Louise Bourgeois, , , , , and the highlight, ’s 300-ton “” that monumentally evokes the ripples of the Sound. Next time.

12 After a pleasant break back in our hotel, with a courtesy glass of champagne while waiting for our bus, we proceeded to star glass artist Ginny Ruffner’s exuberant home and studio in Old Ballard, Seattle's historic neighborhood.

Ginny helped create the field of lampworked world-wide and we saw her pieces in practically every collection we visited.

Ginny’s kitchen office

Her home and garden are an explosive example of her vision and her kaleidoscopic mind. After overcoming the challenges of a very serious accident, she is as loved for her spirit as for her constantly evolving visual vocabulary.

Ginny and Rubin in deep conversation Annette and Herb in Ginny’s garden oasis

From Ginny we walked up the quaint, hip Ballard Avenue to Judith La Scola’s studio, barely even remembering that we were in the same town as the . The neighborhood of Ballard is known for its Nordic maritime roots and a large historic population of immigrants from Sweden. King Karl Gustaf of Sweden read the proclamation inducting the district to the historical registry in 1976.

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Judith received us with lovely wines and introduced us to her work in blown, carved, painted, and enameled glass.

Judith La Scola Effervescence

Her new work focuses on the vessel, both as a form and as an element in a still life. She is exploring new areas dealing with surface and texture and has been drawn to various references from Italian Renaissance armor to Chinese snuff bottles. It inspired many of us and Annette and Herb “adopted” several pieces.

Annette and Judith Herb and Judith

Time for dinner! We just crossed the street to Volterra to enjoy a wonderful feast that brought together Northwest cuisine with Tuscan Italian traditions by internationally acclaimed Chef Don Curtiss. The wild boar and the lamb shank with creamy polenta, and the giant tiramisu were memorable experiences!

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May 6 Friday

Lead Pencil’s Studio is a collaborative of two installation artists, Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo. With a background in architecture they pursue installation and site specific art establishing new territories that surprise and alter perceptions. Hard to present any other way than PowerPoint, the two showed us inspiring, interesting projects they created in the public realm and in museums. Recipients of the Founder’s Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, they also had powerful installations at the Henry Gallery and the Boise Art Museum.

The design of museum exhibitions can be transparent to the viewer. The way the works are installed often helps to define and reinforce the conceptual sphere of the curator. When Liz Brown, Chief Curator invited Lead Pencil Studio to create an installation at the Henry Art Gallery the result was 150 Works of Art. It broke new ground by bringing the art off the walls and onto the floor of the space allowing for new possibilities of thinking about art and reconsidering how viewers experience art in a space without a master narrative or theme. Upon entering the gallery, the nature of the installation suggested a conceptual art installation of text. The information about the selected artworks displayed on wooden panels raised to eye level on metal posts and scattered in loose rows changed when proceeding to the opposite end of the gallery where the actual 150 artworks were revealed on the other side of the wooden panels.

We saw their most known public art project Non-Sign at the US-Canada border on our way to Vancouver. The sculpture illustrates their approach to site-responsive art. It consists of a blank space in the shape of a billboard, surrounded by tangled metal. Commissioned by the U.S. government it gives the appearance of a ghost of one of the billboards that populate the area adding a bit of awareness to the signage landscape in the border zone.

Lead Pencil Studio Non-Sign

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We had an appointment at the at opening time – 10 am. It was immediately a busy place, obviously popular with the locals.

Rem Koolhaas’ show-stopper is an asymmetric, glass/mesh-grid form with great cantilevered volumes extending precariously beyond its core. The views, the light, the space for 400 readers are a triumph.

Seattle Central Library outside and inside

Inspiring artworks by Tony Oursler, George Legrady, Ann Hamilton and Gary Hill enhance the experience.

The first artwork we saw coming in the Fourth Avenue entrance was Ann Hamilton's Floor of Babble, a 7,200 square-foot typographically sculpted floor design in the Literacy and World Languages section at the south side of the main floor. Hamilton had maple floorboards routed with lines of text in 10 languages, using the first sentences of books found in that part of the library. A pleasingly mysterious pattern of familiar and foreign alphabets and phrases, the words appear backward, as if one was looking down at a line of wooden type on a printing press.

Ann Hamilton Floor of Babble Tony Oursler Braincast

Tony Oursler installed his ensemble of virtual talking heads in a broken-out section of wall covered in glass flanking the escalators. The video projections put library guests nose-to-nose with several strange, murmuring apparitions for the few seconds it takes to ride between the third and fifth floors.

16 Gary Hill's "Astronomy by Day (and other oxymorons)" is a 40-foot square video projection in the library’s atrium, but it did not function when we were visiting, and neither did George Legrady's "Making Visible the Invisible" which consists of six liquid crystal display screens that interpret live data regarding material that patrons are checking out from the Central Library.

Both Oursler (of New York) and Hill (based in Seattle) are known for their high-tech approach to art, suitable to a digitally advanced library with an army of computers for online research.

Seeing iconic architecture naturally had to include the bewitching Experience Music Project – though just as a drive-by. Adjacent to the Space Needle, EMP/SFM is in , the cultural campus best known as the site of the 1962 World’s Fair: Century 21. And it is emphatically 21st century, as its architect Frank Gehry sees it. Founded by Microsoft’s to memorialize Jimi Hendrix and the Northwest’s rock `n ´roll history, it also includes the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame. The Seattle Center Monorail runs through the building.

Gehry’s EMP/SFM

We had to see more artists at work so our next stop was the co-op studios of Dan Webb, Leo Saul Berk, Claire Cowie, Chris Engman, Claude Zervas, & Chauney Peck, a few of Seattle’s young emerging contemporary artists. Located in the Georgetown District in a raw industrial space their individual studios surround a central space where they share tools and workbenches, but more importantly, camaraderie and support. We enjoyed touring the studios and chatting with the artists about their work and the art scene in Seattle.

17 Very close-by we stopped for lunch at Ivar's Salmon House, right on the water of Lake Union with views of boats cruising and the Seattle skyline in the background. A cedar replica of a Northwest Indian Longhouse, complete with an open-pit Native American- style barbecue for preparing succulent alder-smoked dishes in a setting filled with native art and historic photographs, Ivar’s is a Seattle institution. They served us their famous chowder and fresh-caught fish based on Ivar Haglund’s original recipes perfected over 70 years as we appreciated a break in our busy schedule.

Our day continued with a tour of the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington with chief curator Elizabeth Brown, or Liz as we knew her when she was our “girl next door” at UC Santa Barbara, where she was chief curator of the University Art Museum. There, she organized many exhibitions of contemporary art and worked closely with local, national and international artists. She enthusiastically welcomed us as old friends and proudly showed us around. While Seattle has numerous important museums, the Henry was the first public art museum in the state of Washington. The major renovation and expansion, completed in April 1997, quadrupled the museum’s size to over 40,000 square feet. The increased size allowed for the addition of a 154-seat auditorium, a multimedia gallery, a café, and an outdoor court. An architectural collage of glass, textured stainless steel and cast stone, designed by Charles Gwathmey, complements the original red-brick, collegiate-Gothic structure designed by Carl Gould in the 1920s.

The Henry functions as a contemporary art museum for Seattle and delivers a direct experience of the art of our time. It engages diverse audiences in the powerful encounter with artistic invention and serves as a catalyst for the creation of new work that inspires and challenges.

Our tour started with an exhibition curated by Liz, with the evocative title: Shadows of a Fleeting World - Pictorial Photos and the Seattle Camera Club. Presenting over 100 works of photographers who worked in the Seattle area in the pictorial style during the movement’s heyday, it provides a glimpse into the artistic milieu in Seattle in the early decades of the twentieth century.

18 Pictorial photography was a movement trying to emulate painting and etching. Many pictorialists used soft focus, filters, Vaseline on the lens, various darkroom manipulations and processes to get a "painterly" look. Alfred Stieglitz (1864 - 1946) is a good general representative of the pictorialists. The movement is by no means dead, and many photographers working today still try to get a look that is sometimes anything but "photographic" in the sense of, say, Ansel Adams and the f/64 school, which emphasized very "straight" photography with crisp focus and infinite detail.

Uta Barth Untitled

Another exhibition, that of LA artist Uta Barth, who also uses photography as medium in her aesthetic projects, shows experimentation with depth of field, focus and framing to take photographs that are suggestive rather than descriptive, alluding to places rather than describing them explicitly. By photographing in ordinary places and in simple rooms and landscapes, Barth uses what is familiar to shift attention from subject matter to a consciousness of the processes of perception and the visceral and intellectual pleasures of seeing.

To complete our tour of the Henry, we tried to wrap our minds around two related installations by Lucy Pullen. The artist situates her work in the unexpected terrain opened up when the disciplines of visual art, philosophy, and physical science meet. Working with engineers and astrophysicists, Pullen created two new sculptures to act as detectors that present cosmic rays as they pass through our earthly environments. Each geometrically specific chamber contains a distinct atmospheric condition. When a cosmic ray passes through The Cloud Chamber a contrail is formed. When a cosmic ray passes through The Spark Chamber, a spark ignites.

On our way out we dropped in Jim Turrell’s contemplative Skyspace — Light Reign, installed permanently in 2003. Combining architecture, sculpture, and atmosphere, the work is not only a spectacular addition to the museum’s permanent collection, it is also now an important part of the building’s architecture.

The next stop was another hard to obtain tour: the Ballard Studio, Dale Chihuly’s large installation facility and corporate headquarters for Chihuly Inc.

On the other side of an unmarked security door in an undistinguished Ballard warehouse, we caught a glimpse of the soul of a multimillion dollar business empire. In something akin to a war room, a map of the United States displays clusters of pushpins, spreading from coast to coast. Shelves filled with three-ring binders line the walls. Storage galleries have bins and racks of various glass components.

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The works “on the move” area (loans, exhibitions, on-approvals) A corridor of parts

Staging area preparing a work for the new Chihuly Glass Museum at Seattle Center

The most fascinating area was the staging - “mock up” warehouse where all of Chihuly’s large installations get assembled. Here the scene changes regularly to recreate locations where the work will be placed. On any given day one can see a giant tower heading to Dubai, or an intricate chandelier going to a private home. We saw works being prepared for the just announced new Chihuly exhibition hall scheduled to open in April 2012 at the Seattle Center. The brainchild of the wealthy Howard Wright family, which owns the Space Needle, it is to be a for-profit tourist draw, featuring a permanent installation of Chihuly glass works, controversially to be run without a curator.

A dominant presence in the art world, Dale Chihuly has long provoked considerable controversy as part of the art/craft debate. He is most frequently lauded for revolutionizing the Studio Glass movement by expanding its original premise of the solitary artist working in a studio environment to encompass the notion of collaborative teams and a division of labor within the creative process, but the volume of his output and the marketing intensity of his team do rub purists the wrong way.

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Visiting two private collections back to back is not an unusual occurrence on our tours, but visiting the collection of two brothers on the same afternoon seems to be a first.

Bill and Ruth True are widely considered to be among the top 200 art collectors in the world. Not only do they collect challenging new media artists—artists with and on the cutting edge—but they also make their collection available to the public, free of charge, through their non-profit gallery, Western Bridge. The Trues collect work that demands attention and elbows into the many nooks and crannies of their Roy McMakin designed house. Many of the artists were unknown to us and some of us thought that the architecture was not very supportive of the art. Artist/architect/furniture designer Roy said that he intended to choreograph an organic, living experience and embrace the 90 degree views to Mt Rainier. Hmmm. Very small windows for that.

Bill, in his mid-fifties, is open, cheerful, casual and very involved with artists and art. He is chairman of Gull Industries founded by his father and grandfather as Gull Oil in 1959. The petroleum distribution business expanded into real estate, becoming one of the 25 largest companies in Washington State by 1998. Since 2001, however, Bill and his brother Doug have been selling off their petroleum interests to concentrate on real estate.

Both Gull Industries and the Trues donate to a variety of medical, educational, and arts- related causes. Bill sits on the boards of the Henry Art Gallery, 4Culture (an evolution of the King County Arts Commission), and the Pike Place Market Foundation (social services in Seattle’s historic Farmer’s Market), as well as Duke University’s Nasher Art Museum. They underwrite Washington Trust (historic preservation), and Seattle Arts and Lectures, with major gifts to Swedish Medical Center, the Henry, and the Seattle Rep. They helped the Henry acquire the installation by James Turrell we experienced earlier.

Doug and Janet True’s collection and home couldn’t be more different. So much so that serious, bookish, conservative Doug felt compelled to clarify that they are very close with his brother.

Collectors of some of the best and rarest works by Northwest Masters, Doug and Janet True have great interest in Mark Tobey (1890-1976) and Morris Graves (1910-2001.) A number of works from the collection were exhibited in the Tobey Retrospective at the Reina Sophia in Madrid in the mid-1990’s.

Other artists in their collection include George Tsutakawa (1910-1997,) Kenneth Callahan (1905-1986,) and William Cumming (1917-2010.) They collect in depth and live with their collection - nothing is in storage.

Their elegant mansion exquisitely designed by the iconic Jean Jongeward, is all large, open, high, flowing spaces in light tones and stunning textures. Janet True has maintained the home faithful to the original plans with a respectful addition designed by Terry Hunziker. No detail is ever left to chance: only white flowers are planted in the gardens and only white flowers decorate the home, in keeping with Jean Jongeward’s direction. The ladies in our group were envious of the two superb kitchens, one in the north wing the other in the south wing of the home.

Braving the elements – yes it was raining – we voted to return to our hotel for a restful night after an intense day.

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May 7 Saturday

After a lovely breakfast in our hotel’s restaurant we boarded our bus on yet another rainy day for the hour-long drive to Tacoma. Dena tried to entertain us with a video about Ginny Ruffner but many of us took the opportunity to dose.

The Tacoma Museum of Glass, its iconic cone, and the Chihuly Bridge of Glass

Our destination, the Museum of Glass was completed in 2002. The $63 million building was designed by , in collaboration with Nick Milkovich Architects, and Thomas Cook Reed Reinvald. The unique architecture is a work of art in itself. In addition to the distinctive 90-foot-tall cone, the outdoor plazas feature reflecting pools that highlight the interplay of Northwest weather and light on the evocative glass sculptures that are placed in or near the water. The cone houses the museum's state-of- the-art "Hot Shop Amphitheater" where glassmaking is a spectator sport. A partnership between the Museum, local boy and Studio Glass pioneer Dale Chihuly, and the city of Tacoma, resulted in the Chihuly Bridge of Glass, a 500-foot-long pedestrian overpass that links the Museum to downtown Tacoma and its cultural corridor.

The Museum’s Visiting Artist Program invites internationally known artists and emerging artists from the region and around the world for week-long residencies to work with the Museum’s resident hot shop team to explore, invent and create with glass. The museum gives artists an opportunity to experiment and push the limits of their work. Visiting artists have included Dale Chihuly, Lino Tagliapietra, Ginny Ruffner, Dante Marioni, Anne Wilson, and Maya Lin. This key program of cross-pollination, along with the activities of the Pilchuck Glass School, has put the region in the forefront of the revolution in Glass Art, Art Glass and Studio Glass internationally.

The definitions for these terms can be as complex and contentious as definitions of what constitutes "Art."

22 One-off pieces whose design is so revolutionary that they become "art" first and the medium of glass, while integral to the construction or form, is a secondary consideration, is Glass Art. It is distinguished from "Art Glass" and "Studio Glass" which are typically smaller and often made in editions of many identical pieces, but the boundaries are not clear-cut.

Specific approaches include glassblowing, hot-glass sculpting, hot casting, kiln casting, coldworking, flameworking, fusing, glass painting, stained glass, and more.

On view at the museum at the time of our visit were “Glimmer Gone: Ingalena Klenell and ”; an outdoor reflecting pool installation by Martin Blank; and “Kids Design Glass.”

Deputy director Susan Warner took us on a tour and we went from one key experience to the next. First one was the winter wonderland of Glimmer Gone.

“Glimmer Gone: Ingalena Klenell and Beth Lipman” – details of the installation  Inspired in part by the landscape paintings of former Tacoman Abby Williams Hill (1861- 1943), it is a 12-foot-high by 25-foot-long by 18-foot-deep installation of clear, sculpted, slumped and fused plate glass. It looks like shimmering ice. Slight differences in transparency and surface textures loom large. There is a forest of dense trees, a mountain range, a brook and waterfall with shimmering mirror fragments that form the mountain stream, and a large evergreen tree. It is a magically beautiful installation. Hard to photograph (and not allowed…)

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“Kids Design Glass” is an exhibition that pays tribute to the imagination of children. It showcases 52 glass sculptures designed by children who participated in the Kids Design Glass Program that invites children 12 and under to stretch their imaginations and create original designs based on the artwork displayed at the Museum. One entry is selected to be interpreted into glass by the hot shop team each month. Two sculptures are created—one for the designer to take home and one for the Museum’s Kids Design Glass Collection and exhibitions.

After watching the resident team of professional artists, among the best glassblowing teams in the world, create magic in the Hot Shop, we left for lunch at Bite at the Hotel Murano.

Hotel Murano has an extensive glass collection including works by Italian flame working great Lucio Bubacco; a rising star in carved glass, April Surgent; and the internationally loved glass dress maker, Karen La Monte.

The lobby and an elevator directory at the Hotel Murano

Additionally, each sleeping floor is dedicated to either an emerging or famous Studio Glass artist. The artists were invited to make a significant piece for “their” particular floor, and the corridors, rooms on that floor had drawings, photographs and documentation on the artist and the specific work displayed.

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The Dante Marioni 14th floor

After yet another enjoyable lunch in a scenic spot, and touring several of the art floors of the hotel, we moved on to the Greg Kucera Gallery to view the exhibition of two California artists, Joel Biel and Darren Waterston.

Joe Biel Monkey (Microphone) Darren Waterston Specter

25 In his first new series in several years, L.A. artist Joe Biel replaces his usual human characters with various species of monkeys, juxtaposing them with a man-made object, inviting the viewer to re-examine the accepted use of everyday objects.  Darren Waterston has seized upon the subject of animals associated with Saint Jerome in Medieval and early Renaissance paintings. He examines how clerics of the day perceived both good and bad qualities of animals then transmitted them via religious art to a primarily illiterate audience. Image supplanted word as animals stepped in to warn of the folly of human experience.

And next we were visiting history.

For the first half of the twentieth century Seattle was still a young city. Four names stand out in this early period of awakening to the arts: Horace Henry, who collected traditional paintings and initiated the Henry At Gallery; Charles Frye, collector of European academic art who, with his wife Emma, founded the Frye Art Museum; Nellie Cornish, who established a progressive art school, the Cornish College of the Arts; and Dr. Richard Fuller, who lovingly amassed an extraordinary collection of Asian art objects. In the midst of the Great Depression, Dr. Fuller and his mother Margaret gave the city the incredible sum of $250,000 and their Asian collection to establish the region's major art museum: The Seattle Art Museum. Designed by Seattle architect Carl Gould, it opened in 1933.

Seattle's contemporary art consciousness made a key leap forward thanks, many feel, to the World's Fair in 1962 and to Seattle native Jinny Wright.

Virginia Wright’s passion for art began during the late 1940s in New York, where Abstract Expressionism was gaining critical attention. She started collecting while a student at Barnard College and honed her skills as an assistant to Sidney Janis, whose Manhattan gallery dealt with such emerging artists as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and .

In the early '50s, Jinny and her husband moved home to Seattle and introduced the city to Abstract Expressionism.

The Wright Exhibition Space with a previous installations of works - now at the SAM

26 The little-publicized Wright Exhibition Space opened in 1999 and is home to one of the 20th century's most important collections of art. It is a semi-public venue for the massive holdings of Virginia and Bagley Wright, admittedly Seattle's most influential and legendary arts patrons. They rotate the collection with thematic exhibitions. On view during our visit was “Color Fields Revisited” with important works by Morris Louis, , Kenneth Noland, Larry Poons, Robert Motherwell and Jules Olitski among others. A number of them were borrowed back from museums for this exhibition.

The Space, a warehouse in an industrial neighborhood, was transformed by Olson Kundig Architects into a SoHo-like home to display the collection. The existing one-story, concrete-block building was gutted to make way for an equally simple gallery and includes a re-assembly of Bagley Wright’s office previously designed for another building.

Bagley and Virginia Wright are known especially for their love of visual art, and their meaningful support of the Seattle Art Museum and the Henry Art Gallery, but they made and make a difference in many other fields as well. Bagley spearheaded the founding of the Seattle Repertory Theatre and the building of its theater some 30 years ago, and Virginia was the impetus behind many public art projects in Western Washington, including the Western Washington University Outdoor Sculpture Collection. Bagley took $20 million of his personal fortune to establish the Bagley Wright Foundation, which each year dispenses $1 million to major Seattle area arts groups. The Seattle Art Museum’s signature sculpture, Jonathan Borofsky's Hammering Man was acquired with funds from the Wright's art fund.

The last program of our tour of the Seattle art scene was a visit of Terry Hunziker’s collection and home in historic Pioneer Square. Seattle’s most notable interior designer is also considered among the top-top in the country. He is known for his sense of minimal warm design, creating thoughtful interiors for housing incredible art. His sensibility is a nod to his mentor Jean Jongeward’s work. She was the designer who created the uniquely Pacific Northwest style, now prevalent and non-regional. After having seen inspiring examples of Terry’s aesthetic during our collection visits, we were curious and anxious to discover his private environment.

75 South Main, Pioneer Square and Terry Hunziker’s interior

27 The loft penthouse on two floors with a delightful rooftop patio is in a Romanesque-style brick building originally built in the early 1900s as the Alaska Hotel. Restrained and elegant, with characteristic soft, muted colors, touches of raw and weathered materials and modern forms, Terry’s environment is a fabulous backdrop for artwork by Mimmo Paladino, some beautiful Mark Calderon sculptures, and photographs by Richard Avedon, and of Terry’s Mr. Character Norwich terrier, Hugo.

Our super group at Wild Ginger

After a brief rest we were ready for our final dinner at Wild Ginger, one of Seattle’s favorite restaurants and now our favorite also. Nestled in a private room upstairs we enjoyed one more feast of inventive and superbly prepared dishes, the creations of chef Rich Yoder, inspired by the cuisine of Saigon, , Bangkok. Yoder is the “fresh” king of Seattle who brought Pan-Asian food to the Northwest and consistently makes the top of the list of best restaurants with Wild Ginger as the pinnacle of quality and service. A fitting conclusion to our time in Seattle.

May 8 Sunday

As the Seattle portion of the tour concluded this Mothers’ Day morning, we said goodbye to our friends returning to sunny LA, and to our wonderful guide Dena whose knowledge, patience, organizational capability and respected local stature ensured a problem free interesting few days.

Six of us (Turner, Wolas, Barker) continued on to Vancouver driving up en-route to the Pilchuck Glass School where we had a chance to see Dena one more time when she introduced us to Jim Baker, Executive Director, as they toured us through the campus in a beautiful location of the foothills of the Cascades. Our concerns about the driving rain we encountered along the way were put to rest as we arrived to practically sunny weather.

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Daffodils, a totem and artist’s cabins at the bucolic Pilchuck School

The legendary Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington, has been the incubator of the vital studio glass movement since 1971.Influenced by an environment that fostered the blurring of boundaries separating all the arts, Dale Chihuly brought his interdisciplinary approach to the School which he co-founded, and where he served as artistic director until 1989. What began as a one-summer glassblowing workshop has grown into the world’s most comprehensive center for glass art education. Pilchuck has become a gathering place for international artists with diverse backgrounds and a mecca for artists, collectors, and museum professionals involved in all media.

The perfectly choreographed collaboration of artists preparing centerpieces for the school’s upcoming auction



29 Located on 54 acres in the midst of a Stanwood tree farm, Pilchuck offers classes each summer in a broad spectrum of glass techniques and year-round residencies for emerging and established artists working in all media. The campus was designed to provide working artists with a peaceful and inspiring setting for intense creative endeavors. We walked around the grounds, saw a very busy hot shop, and had the opportunity to talk to artists and instructors during a simple lunch served in the Lodge. Preparing us for our explorations in British Columbia, we had the opportunity to see the Pilchuck’s 20-foot red-cedar totem pole that was inaugurated on occasion of the school’s thirtieth anniversary and celebrates its founders.

As with all totem poles, this one tells a story. The bottom figures represent a chief holding a copper money piece to honor the generosity of one of the school's founders. Above that sits a raven with a sun, a reference to the Tlingit creation story and Chihuly's work in founding the school. The top figure represents a woman in a Native ceremonial robe with a conical crest, honoring one of the school's female founders. In keeping with the school’s support of multidisciplinary approaches, the totem incorporates glass backlit with neon lighting.

Crossing the border was a breeze and we arrived in Vancouver ahead of schedule at 3 pm, ready for our next adventures.

To be continued…

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