Coming up on Craft In America. It’s important that we pass down traditions
and things that we’ve learned so that people know who they are and where they’re from. I think that that energy of teamwork actually
is transferring to the piece, it is very much about the spirit cooperation. We knew there were quilters in the community,
and we wanted to celebrate a traditional art that is here. America is made up of a lot of different people
culturally and ethnically. And so when you talk about craft in America,
you’re talking about a lot of different cultures. The whole concept of the lone creator/artist
is one of those modern myths in modern art history, nobody is really that alone, nobody
really comes up with those ideas really by themselves. There’s always other people. It’s so obviously made and touched over
time by another human being. That kind of transference from one human being
through an object to another person in this culture is rare. Ellen Santeyakis has a theory that we are
hard wired to make art. Human beings as not very big, not very strong,
hunter/gatherers, no fur, no, I mean, we don’t have many natural defenses, needed to be,
to band together to survive. And that embellishment of tools, creation
of art was sort of a kind of glue between people. A quilt made for a loved one. A piece of jewelry passed down from one generation
to the next. Crafts connect us to other times, other places,
other people. How do simple, beautiful objects bind us
together? And how do they come to embody our sense of community? Quilting is very relaxing, I mean it really
just frees your mind from things that might happen in your life like someone
dying or you having a bad day. And you can just get up in the morning
and just go directly to quilting because, you know, it really just frees your mind. Most of the time when I’m sewin’, I can
tune out the entire world. I don’t hear anything and don’t see anything
but that quilt. I can sit there for hours and not even think
about anything else but quilting. When I retired, I didn’t have anything to
do. I went to Piggly-Wiggly’s for groceries
one day and I met Patty. On my way out, and she said, “Oh, Miss G,
what are you doing these days?” And I said, “Bein’ bored. I'm not doin’
anything.” She said, “Why don’t you come to Mississippi
Cultural Crossroads and learn how to quilt?” Cultural Crossroads got started because we
knew there were quilters in the community and we wanted to celebrate a traditional art
that is here. The fact that we have a center where women quilt where women come, keeps the tradition
thriving. I have a little niece living in Kankakee, Illinois.
She came down last summer, and we pieced about three rows. I helped her to do it, we put it together. I let you know, she has done an entire quilt
on her own. It is something very unique about Cultural
Crossroads because the people, it’s just like they welcome you in, it’s like you
have known them for a long time. This is a community that has a history of
being segregated in the past. There are very few avenues where blacks and
whites in this community sit down and work together. Cause I would piece it during the summer,
and then quilt on it when school started and have it ready. People know this is a place that everybody’s
welcome. Nobody told me that you would be addicted
to quilting. I don’t like that I can’t go on and do
my other work because I want to see how this is going to come out. I was just gonna go in more than once, you
know, just go around, and then come back out, go around and then just keep doin’ it. (No, no) You don’t want that? Do a corner like that. Everybody can’t make a good square. I do remember when I first started quilting,
and after I would cut out the pieces, I would have all these little strings left. And someone at the… Cultural Crossroad asked me to give them my
strings. And I said, “Sure, you can have my strings,
what are you gonna do with strings?” And Mrs. Rankin said, “Miss Gustina, don’t
ever give your strings away.” And I said, “Why not?” And she said, “Because you can use them
yourself to make a string quilt.” And that’s when I was introduced to the
string quilt. My great grandmother was in the kitchen and
she, when she was cutting out scrap material, she’d give my mother the strings what was
left. And she’d say, “You can keep them. I show you
how to make, start make your top.” See, I put them together. I saw it here and I’m, okay now, here, it’ll
be dark. Mrs. Rankin learned to quilt from her grandmother
who she says learned from her grandmother and it was a utilitarian quilting. She used what she had at hand to put quilts
on beds. Women from a certain generation find it bizarre
that people will cut up little pieces and then sew them together when you have this
big piece, why not just use it. Mrs. Rankin didn’t think of herself as an
artist. She thought of herself as a woman who was
taking care of her family. My grandma Alice, she taught you how to quilt
to help keep the young ones warm. We had to have cover for the beds. The design later on in life, I began to add
a little more to it. First I better start here. Dad and momma picking cotton. They picking cotton, yes sir. Oh yes, that’s... killin’ the hog. See, that was our main meat back then. This walkin’ to school. We over in the ditch here. This is where the white kids ridin’ the
bus. There are white children on the bus going
one way and there are black children walking going the other way. And for her and so many African Americans
growing up in this state, they walked to school when they could get to school. And the school buses carrying the white children
would just pass them by. So that that image sets off her history and
her particular time in this community. When Miss Rankin was quilting, she really
inspired me. It was the way that she used colors. She could just take some material that I would
call just ugly, and before you knew she would’ve made something really beautiful out of it. When the quilters win prizes, that validates
the work they do. A lot of times women see that somebody they
know can do this well, and they say, oh, I can do that too. You know, that here is something to this,
making quilts. Mrs. Rankin received the National Heritage
Award form the National Endowment for the Arts. This is an award that’s given every year
to about ten traditional artists in this country. When I got a $10,000 award, they carried me
to the White House. Lord have mercy, I’m at the White House,
that’s what I’m sayin’ in my heart. And when Hillary Clinton, when she come by
me, she was so nice. God, she just like one of my daughters, come
by me, I wasn’t nervous or nothin’. I never knew a quilt would go so far in life. Just thinkin’ about it, how far can a needle
carry ya? Quilting has long been an art form practiced
in groups. In 1987, this notion was taken to an extreme. Thousands of people contributed pieces to
the original AIDS quilt, making it the world’s largest community art project. The work connected panels of all skill levels
and people from all across the country. This idea of community always central to craft,
became a more formal concept during the arts and craft movement through the creation of
several craft schools. Lucy Morgan was the founder of Penland School
of Crafts. She had been quite dismayed when she first
came to Penland to discover that there were only one or two women in this area who were
still weaving, it had pretty much died out. She got some local men who were carpenters
to begin building new looms, and in fairly short order, she had about 40 or 50 women
who had looms in their homes who were weaving hand woven goods. And then she organized what was called the
Penland Weavers to market these goods. Miss Lucy saw a need for the mountain women
to have some income and that’s when weaving program started. And at one time there were up to 60 women
that were weaving for the Penland Weavers. The weaving cabin down the road was built
because they had to have a place to go to, and that’s where the thread was and the
woman in charge would tell them what to weave. And then when they came back, they were paid
by the piece, it was called “piece work” for each place mat or napkin or apron that
they did. The way the school came about was that in
1928 she persuaded a man named Edward F. Wurst, who was a renowned expert on hand weaving,
and she got him to come down here for a week and work with the Penland Weavers. Within a few years after that, she added pottery,
metal work, leather craft, all kinds of stuff. And by the mid 30s, she had this thriving
summer school with these workshops in all kinds of traditional crafts. It’s an intensive, it’s art camp and unlike
any other environment that I’ve been in before, the interest and the enthusiasm
about collaborating and elements from other media trickling in is so exciting. I moved here because I wanted to be in a community. So coming up here and seeing what was happening
with the school and the residency program that Bill Brown was starting, I felt like
this would become a community of crafts people. And that’s where I wanted to be. There are presently about 50 working craft
studios in this area that are run by people who have been resident artists at the school. If it hadn’t been for Penland, I wouldn’t
be a weaver. I had another career and I would go back to
Memphis and work and come back and take more weaving classes. The thing about the community around here
is a lot of crafts people come because of people of like minds that are around them. The residency program gives you that time
to experiment and to spend time getting your work out into the world because you get to
start a studio, you get to start a business in a supported atmosphere with artists all
around you and also the exposure of people coming in and out constantly. There’s instant community, instant studio
and instant housing. It’s three years that, you know, you sort
of really do become part of the community here and it makes you want to stay. Penland is a very social place - a couple
of hundred people coming through every two weeks in the summer is unbelievable, and that’s
not even to touch the number of studios that are all over these mountains around here. There’s this funny thing with craft. It affects your life and changes the experience
of doing something that’s quite ordinary. So it’s not important like successful chemotherapy
or something, I don’t know. You know, it’s supported in a very quiet
way. It’s qualitative rather than quantitative. I don’t think my work with would be a quarter
as good if I wasn’t living here, honestly, just because of having to, having to look
at what everybody else is doing. And I do mean sometimes having or feeling
forced to like actually look and see what people are doing, it really keeps me, it forces me to
stay on some kind of creative edge. It’s like the cooperative competition, like
we all want to, you know, do the best we can do. It was part of Lucy Morgan’s brilliance
that she valued the effect that doing this work had on the maker equally with what was
being produced. That has a nice feel to it. They work real hard at trying to get all ages
of students at Penland there from 19 to 80 plus. I think the greatest thing is to have a student
who is younger and they’re sitting next to someone is their mother or grandmother’s
contemporary and they can’t keep up with them. And so they see people in a different light
that way. You want to choose a cup? I think I’ll just have a sort of a mid amount. (OK) That one. Well, I’m going to have an Andrew Martin
cup and saucer. You’re going formal. I’m going formal. Yeah, I’m gonna do that. At some point somebody said to me, “You
know, Sarah, you’re the village potter.” As many ceramic artists as there are working
here in Helena, I am the one who sort of makes pots day in and day out. And people who know me know that there always
will be pots here. So nice to meet everybody. Thank you for bringing the entourage here. And let me explain one other thing. I have work in my showroom here in the house. and work in my studio out in back and it might be,
you can just fan out and go both places. Just make yourselves at home. I walk into a lot of houses and there are
my pots, or I meet somebody I’ve never met before and they say, “Oh my gosh, that cup
I got from you, I use it every day. And if it’s in the dishwasher I have to
get it out and wash it out so I can have my coffee in the morning.” I love the physicality of my work, both in
terms of the, my own activity, and the fact that you know, at the end of a workday, I
can see what I’ve done. It’s so satisfying to get the feedback from
people who use it. It makes me feel that when I’m at this moment
in my studio, making these physical objects, that I need to really pay attention and be
careful, not just to try to get some curve right or something like that, but to make
as... just to do the best I can possibly do. I spent two years at the Archie Bray Foundation
here in Helena. The Bray has a tradition of really well known
artists. Pete Voulkos, Rudy Autio and Ken Ferguson,
those were like three of the first generation father figures from the Bray. We all learned from each other, I think, that’s
the great thing about that place. It’s a collection of peers. I mean, there’s no hierarchy. We can be very vulnerable when we put our
work out there. There were people in my years at the Bray
that I really can talk to about my work. I worked in close, like sort of studio right next
to Akio Takamori for the first year and, you know, we talked all the time. He had a way of making observations that were
really about the whole and the kind of emotional qualities of a piece. And he’s just so perceptive. That kind of dialogue and conversation broadens
your perspective so much. So I want to see what Sun Koo’s doing. Cause I heard it’s a really great piece. When you walk through that summer studio at
the Bray with how many different languages? Eight probably, and the range of work is breathtaking. So how much more, how much more is it gonna
go? Not much, it’s almost done. Once you figure out the horse? Yeah, I’m trying to, you know, make one,
one Montana horse. They are beautiful. I choose a porcelain. I can’t believe it’s the same clay body
that I use, and that you can make those things and not have them crack. You never know who will crack. There are lots of clay objects that are not
utilitarian that I love. But I love them as somebody’s else’s work,
it’s not as something that I want to do. There are certain qualities that I aspire
to in my work. It’s that elegant folky thing, which to
me implies making work that is useful and beautiful. People like me former residents have
settled in Helena. There’s kind of an extended community. I love what happens with people sitting around
a table eating and drinking together. And pots are part of that. To me, that’s the thing about community,
it’s sharing food, presenting food, celebrating the really basic activity of nourishing ourselves. But it can be nourishment on a lot of levels. And I think when you add the element of beauty
and the, the personal element that comes from something made by another person’s hand,
it just deepens that experience. Clay is among the oldest traditional art forms. Glass has been around nearly as long, but
for centuries was produced almost exclusively in factories. Harvey Littleton changed all that in 1962
with the creation of the studio furnace. The studio glass movement was born, and it
paved the way for a new generation of glass artists and one very innovative school. Pilchuck came about back in 1971. We built two furnaces and two annealing ovens, kind of a tent affair that went over it in
16 days. And we also each had to built our own shelter. It was raining a lot. Everybody had some kind of little camp they had staked out. But everybody loved doing it. I thought we’d do it for one summer, and
everything just went just right and some patrons, the Haubergs gave us the money to keep it
going. Actually one interesting part about Pilchuck
is that they’re not teachers, they’re people that do something well. People are interacting all the time and learning
from each other. The people that are accomplished learn
from the people that want to be accomplished. And vice versa. Pilchuck played an important role for all
of our careers. I mean, especially those that are here today,
we started out there very early on. We're not as involved now but another
generation is. We usually do our sketches in order to communicate
between us and when with the team of people who are helping us. And also to decipher how we are going to construct
this, what comes first, like, you know, if we’re going to make a face, the nose comes
first, what are the layers of the face. So one thing that I see a lot of people do
that I’ve never understood… One of the most enjoyable things about the
medium in particular is that it’s a social event, because most glass people utilize people
helping you in all different aspects of the production of a piece. And in one way or another they are adding
to this piece. It’s fascinating when, the dance between
the people to produce these things alone and people are actually contributing and they
feel free to do so. Glass students, sometimes they’re fearless
because they haven’t been taught how to blow glass and therefore they grab it and
take it places, and it’s fascinating to see somebody who just doesn’t, you know,
that won’t be stopped. Bring it around good? Nice and hot? Hotter actually. Why don't you go in this glory hole for a second, go in there Heat it up some more. Yeah, go ahead. Til you can't stand it. Then bring it. That's when it's perfect. When you can't take it. Good. Alright, come on out. Nice. Straight up and down. Bring it up to him. You're gonna hold it right there in the air. Nice. There you go Christina. Woo hoo. One thing that I think was just amazing is to go on
a hillside for two weeks in such a beautiful place. It’s just wonderful to sort of immerse yourself
and not think about anything else but the work you’re doing. There’s some people that came to Pilchuck
to be part of the class and the session. A couple of more visiting artists. And that’s… Einar and Jamex De La Torre It’s a
little microcosm that happens here, sometimes they call it the Pilchuck bubble. It’s not uncommon to hear that this place
has changed somebody’s life. I’ve known Einar and Jamex De La Torre for
many years. I mean, I was excited that they were here because
my class in particular was, you know, more about symbolism and iconography and that type
of thing. They’re a perfect fit for, you know, giving
a talk to my class and inspiring them. We had some ideas about the Native American
influence and the Mexican culture… Search for identity is a great deal of
powerful work. It has to do with our Catholic background,
and also our background as Mexicans. We don’t look for the simplification of
only one image. We want layers, we want more. Think of a piece of rock and then sculpt out the sides. That's how I would think of it. This is like the Mexican wrestling mask. We have very common backgrounds, you know,
the pre Columbian, Aztec and Mayan types of works. But look remarkably like Northwest coast. Let me see something real quick. I'm gonna put a beak on it still so it's still got to be bigger than this. The head that they created, I would relate
that to sort of a Northwest coast transformation mask where the beak and the eagle would open
up and then there’s a face inside. I think one of the hardest things for an artist
to do collaborating is to just basically letting go. Because if you fully collaborate, you have
to completely let go and the other person has to be able to do whatever they see fit. I think that what glass has that is, I think
somewhat unique is that there’s a little bit of performance going on, because it’s
a stage out there. You’re on the hot seat. You can’t just stop and say, “Wow, let
me see it, let me think about it.” There’s a the show must go on kind of attitude,
cause the furnaces are hot. Yeah, come on over. One, two, and bingo. Okay, come on out. Want me to get the panito? Okay. Other side. Cook the end please. Turn it over. Okay, push. Native cultures have a sort of defining historical
connection to beads and glass, so what we’re doing today working with sculpture and hot
glass, it’s sort of an extension of that. The amazing thing about the glass community
in general is that it is very much about the spirit of cooperation. I think that that energy of teamwork actually
is transferred into the piece. You know, there’s always been a desire to
make things or to make jewelry to adorn yourself, beautify your world. My goal is to do as good a work as I can as
a craftsperson to represent my culture and community, if it’s a Native person. And in the process expose the world to that
culture and that beauty that I find in the people and the country, and the objects
that they make. My mother’s mother lived in a small town
in Alaska. She was a story teller, and she sang in
her native tongue. And she was really a wonderful grandmother. When we were kids we would go up fairly often,
we always went for hikes up in the mountains and went looking at the fish, and went looking
at the eagles and everything. I always felt a connection to our family up
there as native people, although we didn’t have a lot of strong traditional activities
going on. There was no dancing. The language really was only spoken by my
grandmother and her peers. The whole thing was assimilation for her parents,
and our grandparents to let go of your traditional ways and your language. And it just felt like I needed to do something
that said who I was and where I was from. It started out that we were both doing lapidary
and silversmithing, and then we sort of settled into Wally doing lapidary and I doing the
silversmithing. The normal way to design a piece of jewelry
is to take a stone or several stones and design the piece around it. Well, we do it the opposite: Denise makes
the piece, gives it to me and then I put the stone into it. That frees her up to design it any way she
wants to. I went to the Institute of American Indian
Arts, and it happened to be in Santa Fe New Mexico, which I rethought was really an exotic
place. In Santa Fe, where all the Indian people sell
on the Palace of Governors, that’s where we would sell. So I sat next to people from Santa Domingo
Pueblo and Santa Clara Pueblo and Navajo jewelers. And being around these other very rooted cultural
people made me want to really go forward and make things happen. My grandmother was ill and she passed away
and I had a couple of my cousins who were really close in age to me that had committed
suicide. And so I thought, I really need to do something. And that’s really where that whole need
to express myself as a Native Alaskan person came forth. The first major piece we did was that killer
whale belt. The reason I wanted to do killer whales is
because as a child, when I would go to Alaska and I would see them, I just thought it was
the most magnificent thing I’d ever seen. It’s the kind of thing where you try
and shut everything else out and you just fill your whole space with this imagery from historic
pieces. It’s like you’re taking a walk and you’re
looking at things as you go down this trail. The next Alaskan piece was a mask belt. This is all based on Yupik masks. This is the preliminary designs for the women
and children belt. So I was trying to imagine that there would
be several mother figures and then two or three children in between. I might look at some of the older pieces and,
you know, little scenes of dancing. The idea of doors opening up came directly
from some of the older masks that would open up. This is the drawings of the Crossroads belt. And this particular belt I imagined this ark
of figures, you know, from Siberia across into Alaska. The first five are Siberian and the next five
are Alaskan. When we sell things, people ask us, you know,
well what is the background of this piece. Is it from a legend? So we explain that to them and everything. And the, the story is spread, so the person
who owns the jewelry becomes a storyteller, like Denise is. When I come back to Cordova, I feel definitely
like I’m home, and having most of my siblings here and their children here makes it even
better. It’s just a rich experience for me and it’s
one that every time I come back, I can’t figure out why I live somewhere else. You can just kinda turn it into something,
shape it a little bit more, or you can leave it like it is and polish it up a little bit
more and do your scrimshaw on it. But like if you wanted to take it and make
it into a seal shape or… It’s important that we pass down traditions
and things that we’ve learned so that people know who they are and where they’re from. Even if you’re teaching non Native people,
you’re still keeping it alive. And somewhere along the line it’s going
to get passed on to somebody else, and it may not be right now, but it will happen. The main thing is to keep things going. I’m looking for a large diameter tree because
I will use the bark peels off around the tree. And then I cut it in strips or cut my pattern
pieces out on this line, the same line that you see the actual natural markings on the
bark. And if I can have a larger diameter tree,
I get larger sheets and a bigger, more mature tree could be 36, 40 inches in length. When I first started working with birch bark,
I was cutting most of it into strips and doing a lot of weaving with it. And the more I worked with it, I found that
it had.. It was teaching me a lot about techniques, and I was learning how I could create certain
forms. And that became more limited and I switched
to doing both weaving and sewing pieces together because I could create forms that were in my
imagination by sewing bark together rather than weaving it. I’ve always called myself a basket maker
because I make containers that are made out of fiber, which happens to be the bark
of a tree. But I’m not really interested in functional
work, so my work is not meant to be carrying the laundry or, you know, feeding the animals
in the barn, that sort of thing. I just see my work as more sculptural work. When I’m working on a piece, I generally
have bark from only one tree. For instance, all of the cutout pieces of
bark are from the same tree so that I have the same thickness and same color. I just have little numbers here in the corner
that tell me which year it is and what tree it was. And then I number the sheets so that I know
this piece of bark came from below, or this piece of bark was up near the top. Because the bark will become thinner going
up the tree. Hi Kenny, how you doing? Okay. Ken and I met in high school on the school bus. We were 14 and he just happened to be on the same bus, and we grew up kind of talking about each other’s work, and our friendship was so tight and it developed a
pattern of behavior that continued when we became, when we got married. We’ve worked together for 20 years making
jewelry, and our production line of jewelry has always been a collaboration in design. And he did 99% of the metal work, I ran the
other end of the business in terms of sales and marketing and all the computer work that he doesn’t like. I’m going to thin this out. There was nothing in here. I hope not. Ken and I were planning to go to Baltimore
and the American Craft Council show in Baltimore a few days before he had a stroke. It all happened so fast. One day when I was skiing, and the next day, I was.... Next day you were in the hospital. I didn’t know if Ken would ever work again. And initially it appeared that he would not. I just went in his studio and, and learned
how to make what he was doing so that I could continue that business, hoping that he would
get back to it. And at one point I thought that I should probably
just limit the work here in our studios, not try to do both jewelry making and basket making. I should just drop one of them and go find
a job. I just said to him that I needed to know whether
he was going to continue. It seemed after that he was up in the morning
and he was out there, and he made a decision to really make a huge effort there. And that’s helped me understand which way
I was going. I think part of the recovery of his brain
is all based on mental activity, so I think whatever he does in his studio helps him learn. He used to work very, just do very little
in the studio, just simple things that he wanted to do, that he wanted to do that he
couldn’t do what he wanted to do just to help out. But now he’s, he’s working on increasingly
more complicated things. And it’s good, he’s made a lot of progress,
I think, you know? How many do you want me to cut? Ten ahead of time? Yeah. There’s definitely an impact by the craft
community. My dad’s recovering because there’s just
so much support coming from them, and also there’s a artist relief fund that donated,
that donated money to my parents after my dad’s stroke. So there’s definitely a lot of help that comes
from them. There are a lot of people, and Ken is in the
hospital, a lot of artists that we, some we knew, some we didn’t know at all that had
heard of his stroke and wanted to just be supportive in different ways: financially,
and emotionally. That was, it was a really wonderful help. Big box of them. Ken has a big box of cards and notes that
he has to respond to one day. I realize there’s so many of those people
in that community that are so concerned about Ken’s welfare and so concerned about encouraging
him to remain determined, it’s really important for me to see those people. I always appreciated going to shows, it was
always so much fun to get away from the quiet meditative studio space. Do you want me to double this around you or do you want to put it on? It’s exciting because you get immediate
feedback about work and you go home feeling, hopefully very positive about what you’re
doing. But also, the important thing is coming here
and interacting with other artists and, just just the stimulation of seeing other people’s
work evolve and grow and the fun of being with friends. There’s just a great support between the
artists. The craft community as a whole is a very close-knit group. We know each other’s weaknesses and strengths
and illnesses and marriages and divorces and births and so we’re like a big, big
family. Coming to a show really does fulfill a whole
social need. A lot of our friends are similar kinds of
people. We come here, we join together, we have a
collection of objects and a collection of people. We have a neighborhood. And then it’s over. We disband and we go
back to our own environments. We’re making items that no one needs except
for aesthetic reasons. They’re buying our objects because someone
thought it up, it’s their design and it comes from the hand. There’s that inner drive to speak through
your work, and I think no matter what you try to figure out a way to do that because
that really is that voice and your connection to others. We have a need to be connected to communities. Having pieces of artwork or pieces of craft reminds us of who we are. Making and experiencing beauty between each
other is really a basic human need. I think it’s essential to have a way to
express yourself and it doesn’t have to be something salable. It can just be something
that comes from your own hands and your own heart.
