Review / Informed Opinions

 

July Issue 1998

Three Metal Shows in Asheville, NC

A Review

Samuel Yellin Metalworks: Three Generations, 5/16-8/5, Folk Art Center

Women of Iron, 6/4-8/6, Asheville Art Museum

Forging New Boundaries, 5/8-7/11, Blue Spiral 1

 

by Bill Alexander

 

Concurrent with the Artist-Blacksmith's Association of North America Conference held at University of North Carolina-Asheville June 17-21, three Asheville institutions have mounted shows of metalwork. There is plenty here for all sorts of interest, ranging from functional work to sculptural expressions of a high order.

 

The blockbuster show is the massive Samuel Yellin Metalworks exhibit at the Folk Art Center. Yellin, a native of Poland, and instructor in metalsmithing at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art in Pittsburgh, opened his own forge in 1909. It was rapidly recognized with commissions for such clients as the Federal Reserve Bank, J.P. Morgan, and the Cathedral of St. John the Devine. Hiring as many as 250 workmen at its height in the 1930-40's, it continues today under the leadership of his granddaughter, Claire Yellin.

 

The show is rich with a profusion of objects: small pieces, such as a display of curtain rod finials, show the same level of craftsmanship as the larger railings, furniture, and gates. Given the current interest in the Gothic, it is instructive to note the deliberate primitivism of a railing in a pattern of saints and devils, and the twisting grotesques and gargoyles of an elaborate coat rack for the 1920's, and contrast it with the contemporary railing in a sea life motif of current Yellin artists Peter Renzetti and Chris Tierney.

 

The show also includes a number of sketches and sample studies for clients, such as the design and sample segments of a brass door for the Bok Carillon Tower in Lake Wales, FL. The biblical scenes of the sample are clearly inspired by Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise of the Florence Baptistery; the repoussé (hammered from the rear) brass reliefs depict scenes from the Creation and the Fall. The accompanying drawings and studies make it clear Yellin's mastery was the product of hard work. Featured, too, are industrial designs such as cast aluminum building ornaments in a heavy flowers of an art modern style, and a marvelous aluminum and vinyl morris-style chair commissioned in bulk by the US Navy during WW II.

 

Women of Iron at the Asheville Art Museum is not as large a show. Curated by Gwen Heffner of Berea, KY, this is the work of over twenty women blacksmiths from the USA and Canada. Of course, functional work is not stinted: two music stands are shown side by side: Susan Hutchenson's is in the art nouveau tradition, with tendrils of twisting iron holding the upright structural elements into an open book shape. Lisa Jacob's stand is a tripod (one leg rebar, one straight iron, one a large spiral), supporting scrolling free-form in an oxide brown, split by the backrest.

 

Other noteworthy functional works include Loreen Babcock's Moore's earrings, necklace, and hairpins, with a profusion of branching shapes, Judy Best's floor stand basin, an approx. 18" bowl, decorated with copper rivets, supported by severe uprights joined by horizontal copper fittings, and Paige Davis', funky Diamondplate Urn, the familiar crosshatched steel rendered into a seductive shape flanked by wild spirals. Less effective is Marcia McEachern's Moonlight Sonata Bench an unfortunately clunky polychrome (mostly blue, green and purple) bench, flanked by sketch branches holding a bird (in twisty iron painted red or blue) and two green leaves. The rear is supporting a thick disk painted bright yellow.

 

The real standout of this show is Christina Shmigel's two diagrammatic sculptures; both appear to be fragments or closeups of the sorts of bins once common in factories or grain processing, exquisitely made models in welded steel. Fig. 1 is a single conical bin, topped with a conical top and a curving fragment of ducting, looking like a piece of alchemical equipment mounted on the wall. Fig. 6 is a single bin shape, cantilevered over-head high by spindly pipes as legs, casting architectonic shadows.

 

Blue Spiral 1's show, Forging New Boundaries, contains work of some of the women artists featured in the Museum show: Elizabeth Brim, who had two small hinged boxes that were "pillows" of steel (in a plaid pattern) in the Women show, here shows purely sculptural life-sized rendering of such "feminine" items as an apron, with lovingly crafted ruffles, a camisole top, and a tuffet (yes, Ms. Muffet's seat) in dark steel. These works derive much of their interest in being made of a hard, dark material. Paige Davis' sculptures of a female form are assertions of women's power. Provider (fruit tray with brush) stands a wide-bodied Diamondplate form holding a 5x8x24" bowl overhead in the upright bristles of a steel brush.

 

Closer to traditional ironwork is Dan Howachyn's tree table where a branching tangle of iron springing from rooty coils supports a circle of glass. But here, sculpture is the rule. It is interesting that Hoss Haley's iron and concrete sculptures, like Elizabeth Brim's, utilize the forms of old industrial sites to generate evocative forms. Some seem to be segments or fragments in a brown oxidized iron of some abandoned factory, chosen for the simple abstract shapes that bulk form the wall or floor. Other, smaller works, like Dance, seem to be models of abandoned factories that are selected to allude in a surreal way to human forms. In Dance an iron bin, a cylinder stretched into cones top and bottom, generically like Brim's favored shape, is in the embrace of a cast concrete grain elevator form pierced by square windows. The works are shown with some of Haley's drawings and studies; these have a denseness and concentration reminiscent of Charles Demuth, or Marcel Duchamp's obsessive drawing of a chocolate grater. The drawings document Haley's pursuit of using architectural/mechanical forms as symbols of human contact.

 

All these shows are recommended highly, for lovers of functional craft work as well as serious connoisseurs of high art.

 

Bill Alexander is an artist who works primarily in fiber: collections include SAS Institute, Sara Lee, and the City of Atlanta. His reviews appear regularly in ART PAPERS, and he resides with his family in Morganton, GA.

 

Editor's Note: Bill Alexander is also a Board member of the Southern Highland Craft Guild which operates the Folk Art Center. We normally don't let reviewers cover exhibits at facilities they are involved in, but in this instance, due to a shortage of writers and because of the common focus of these three shows, it would have been wrong to

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