Oral history interview with Jon Shirley, 2018 August 7-8 Funding for this interview was provided by Barbara Fleischman. Contact Information Reference Department Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington. D.C. 20560 www.aaa.si.edu/askus Transcript Preface The following oral history transcript is the result of a recorded interview with Jon Shirley on August 7 and 8, 2018. The interview took place at the home of Jon Shirley in Medina, Washington, and was conducted by Mija Riedel for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, and the Frick Collection. Jon Shirley and Mija Riedel have reviewed this transcript. Their corrections and emendations appear below in brackets with initials. This transcript has been lightly edited for readability by the Archives of American Art. The reader should bear in mind that they are reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose. Interview MIJA RIEDEL: This is Mija Riedel with Jon Shirley at his home in—Medina? JON SHIRLEY: Yes. MIJA RIEDEL: Medina, Washington, on August 7, 2018, for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, and the Frick Collection. This is card number one. So, thank you for making time today and for showing me the extraordinary collection before we started. That was a real treat. JON SHIRLEY: Well, you're welcome. MIJA RIEDEL: So this house, as we were saying, was built in 2001 to house your collection. JON SHIRLEY: That's right. MIJA RIEDEL: Are the cars here as well? JON SHIRLEY: No, the cars are in a warehouse—that's about 12 minutes away. MIJA RIEDEL: Okay. So were the house and the grounds designed around particular pieces or groups of pieces? JON SHIRLEY: What happened was that, in the '80s, we bought a house that's on half of this property—the part that goes from the front gate all the way to the lake. And we started collecting art, and we outgrew the house. And so we hired George Suyama as an architect, and we bought land next door to us. We essentially bought everything from the lake to the street next door. We tore down three old houses, but we kept the one on the end and later sold it, and the people who bought it still live there. We didn't want the whole frontage to just—I guess political reasons. And we moved out and of course tore down that house. So for a period of five years we lived elsewhere in the area while this whole thing was in process and constructed. And the idea when we first talked to George was, "We have an art collection—and it's growing." MIJA RIEDEL: Yes. JON SHIRLEY: [00:02:00] And it wasn't a matter of saying, "We're going to have this, this, and this, and you need to design a house around it." It was more a matter of, "Give us space that is appropriate for the kind of art we collect." And this probably would have [been] mandated by the city anyway, but, "Save those great big trees." Those trees divided the property we own from the neighbors. And they didn't go back into the part of the house that we walked through, but they split the entry and the main gallery. And so the house was wrapped around them, and part of the wonderful effect of that is there's no place you can go, except in a helicopter, and see how big this house is. If you stand in the backyard, it doesn't look that big. If you come up the front driveway, you can't see the gallery at all. You can see sort of an edge of it. And that, I think, was part of George's great sensitivity in designing the house. A little bit about George: George had an art space in front of his architectural office, until they finally sold the building two years ago to build a high-rise apartment building. George had an office on Second Avenue, and the front of it was a nice-sized space, and he would give it to one artist for a show. He had a curator, and they'd have five or six shows a year. And so, just visit George's office as you walk through an art exhibit to go back to the offices. And, you know, our idea when building and finding the architect was, "We'll talk to the local architects." We talked to Jim Olson, who did Barney Ebsworth's house and the Brotmans' house, and many houses in the area. And Jim is into flat roofs, and they're just—he does great houses, but they just weren't our aesthetic. And we figured, "If we don't find one locally, we'll just head east and see what we can do." [00:04:00] And then we ran into George, and George had a great sensitivity to art. It turns out he and Jim Olson were each other's best men at their weddings. They went to college together. So it was an easy decision as far as which one, because they both liked each other so much. They didn't really care who got the job. And George did exactly what we wanted. He designed a home that could hold an art collection but still be a home, and that was really important to us. We didn't want that main gallery to just not be a place that people wouldn't want to go and feel comfortable and go in and sit down and read a book, surrounded by wonderful things. So that's sort of the evolution of the house. It was a big building job. MIJA RIEDEL: Isn't it 23,000 square feet? Something like that? JON SHIRLEY: The floorplate of one of the main floors is about that, yes. And then there's an upstairs with a couple of bedrooms and a workout room and some art you haven't seen. MIJA RIEDEL: [Laughs.] I'm sure, because there are 350 pieces. I know I haven't seen that many. I mean, the main gallery is magnificent, but nothing feels overwhelming. It does feel very welcoming and warm, and it has a wonderful meandering quality to it. JON SHIRLEY: Yeah, that was very intentional. When [laughs] we cleared the site of those old homes and laid out on the ground where the boundaries of that part of the house would be, they used a spray can of, you know, very bright, fluorescent-colored paint, and my late wife stood at one end, and I stood at the other, and we said, "This is never going to work" [00:06:00]. [They laugh.] We yelled down the—whatever number of feet that the gallery is. And then, when it was done, we were so amazed—and we couldn't see it for a long time, because while they were building the house, inside that room they put the big machines, huge things, that rolled out the zinc that is the roof. These big rolls came from Switzerland, and they ran through the machines, and the machines did the fold where the roof joins—the metal roof, because these overlaps adjoin. So that room was just full of equipment, and noisy, and, you know, we just never went in there. And it was only when they finished the roof and took everything out of there, we could start to get an idea of the scale. But then the interior walls had to be put in, and that really helped a great deal, because before those went in, you could see further out. There's a hallway behind the far side, and then behind that there's a catering kitchen, and a swimming pool there and all, which is kind of hidden behind those walls. But those interior walls—what I like about them is they don't go all the way up. They go up high enough to be able to hang large pieces of art, but then you have all that space above them. And the other wonderful thing about the gallery is that, acoustically, it's wonderful. Musicians love it. We've had musical events in there, and it's been really, really good. I don't know why. You'd think it's a hard floor, hard— MIJA RIEDEL: So it wasn't intentional. It just worked out that way. JON SHIRLEY: Well, I think George must have thought that it would be a good reason to have the acoustics in there be good. But the acoustics in there are remarkable [00:08:00], either for a single speaker or for a small band or something like that. MIJA RIEDEL: Yeah, actually, when we were speaking in there, it had a nice sound to it. There was no sense of echoing— JON SHIRLEY: Right. MIJA RIEDEL: —but it was easy to hear, so I'm not surprised. JON SHIRLEY: Well, it may be partly the slope of the roof, and everything up above is all acoustic tile. So the— MIJA RIEDEL: That makes sense. JON SHIRLEY: —material is—I mean, obviously, with all that hard floor and everything, we didn't want reverberating sound in there. But I had no idea it would be so good for music. And it turned out to be wonderful for that. MIJA RIEDEL: Wonderful. So, we were looking at the collection—there's currently about 350 pieces, is that right? In the art collection— JON SHIRLEY: Yes, there was— MIJA RIEDEL: —and we figured about half, maybe, were sculpture.