Arts and Crafts Fare

Arts and Crafts Fare

Local artisans are propelled by a rich East Bay tradition that’s pushed craft to a higher level over time.

It was Berkeley in the ’50s when a group of East Bay artists sponsored a modest arts and crafts fair featuring some 75 exhibitors in the University Avenue Co-op meeting room. Surprising even the organizers, hundreds flocked to the event and inspired an artistic cooperative that is still thriving.

The Arts and Crafts Cooperative (ACCI) bought the brick building on the corner of Virginia and Lincoln in 1958 to create a permanent arts and crafts gallery, a venue for local artisans. Now celebrating its 50th anniversary, ACCI is the oldest artist cooperative west of the Mississippi.

In the five decades since the cooperative officially formed, some 3,000 artists have shown their work in the gallery. Initially, ACCI offered public classes in pottery and painting in the shed at the rear of the building. But as membership grew, the gallery expanded to encompass even that space. The standards also evolved.

Glenda Jordan’s ceramics on display at ACCI, a cooperative that just celebrated its 50th birthday. Photo courtesy ACCI gallery.

“Over the years there’s been a duel between crafts and fine arts,” says ACCI’s director Lisah Horner, describing the co-op’s evolution. “The shift has gone from crunchy granola toward an upgraded aesthetic. We’ve elevated the status by jurying the work pretty carefully. ACCI is now the perfect marriage of fine art and fine craft.”

Jurors from various mediums select new ACCI artists in a competitive process that considers technical skill, continuity of style and an original viewpoint.

Along ACCI’s shelves, clay figures by San Francisco psychologist and sculptor Robert Cantor represent the poignancy of the human condition. Daniel Oliver’s raku-fired boxes combine playfulness and magic within a Japanese aesthetic. Michael Sosin’s opaque and transparent glass pitchers come in vibrant orange, emerald and amethyst, each with unique Venetian-inspired handles.

“Before 1980, ceramic vases were worth five bucks, but now people understand [art] is not just a painting hanging on a wall,” says Foster Goldstrom, a local art dealer and collector. “It can be glass, ceramic, video, something that creates a conversation between you and the work of art.”

The local passion for fine arts and crafts that took root decades ago is now a movement of open studios and artist’s enclaves throughout the East Bay.

One such epicenter is on 8th Street in Berkeley in what’s known as the Sawtooth Building, a place where jewelry-makers, potters, painters, glassblowers, photographers and other working artists ply their trade in intimate proximity. Originally a window-frame manufacturing factory, the building began to attract many artists in the 1970s for its large and airy studios. Gradually the spaces were divided to make room for dozens more artists. At a time when gentrification has claimed similar studios, Sawtooth is a refreshing anomaly.

“We have an incredible landlord,” says Susan Brooks, a painter and jeweler who has a studio in the building. “Over the years, I have seen once-thriving artisan communities disappear because of gentrification and rising rents. It’s very rare to have a working artists’ community. Our landlord Mel Davowitz seems to have an interest in our well-being.”

 

Art on Your Sleeve

In one Sawtooth studio, fabric designer Ruth Spencer produces seemingly impossible combinations of gossamer silk and felted wool melded into one-of-a-kind scarves. In another section of the building the EarthWorks group of potters shares time on a number of kilns. Dina Gewing’s cheerful cobalt blue teapots invite company: “I consider a teapot the ultimate symbol of friendliness.”

Carpenter Jim Rosenau, a former comedy writer, entertains visitors with belly laugh–producing sculptures and shelves constructed with recycled wood and the bindings of old books. He calls his work “This Into That.”

Rosenau, whose grandfather worked with publisher Bennett Cerf at Random House, grew up in a house full of books. “Every weekend we worshipped at the public library,” he says. The decision to turn books into furniture bordered on sacrilege. “Based on how I was raised I thought it was blasphemy. But once I thought of the idea, I laughed my head off.” The books he selects are unremarkable except for the design, color and catchiness of their titles. “I don’t judge a book by its cover. I judge a book by its spine,” he says. “Sometimes it takes years to find five books in a theme with the right visual composition.”

 

To Jingletown

In an industrial section of the Fruitvale district in Oakland now dubbed “Jingletown” (a reference to the sound of the old local fruit canners’ payday coins), a rich assortment of craftspeople, musicians and other artists has come together. Painter Fernando Reyes is at the fore of the community.

Reyes has already spent several hours this morning dealing with the business of art—checking e-mails, updating a mailing list and reviewing submissions for exhibitions and art fairs. Reviewing the charcoal figure drawing that forms the basis of his latest painting, he picks up his paintbrush and creates a more definitive stroke on the canvas, establishing the direction of the piece. For the next seven hours, this will be his focus. Reyes, who received his undergraduate degree in fine arts from the Chicago Art Institute, describes his work as “classic contemporary.”

In his series entitled “Body Language,” which depicts the unspoken way we communicate with one another, the figures are colorful, multidimensional and kinetic. The series grew out of Reyes’ habit of drawing overlapping sketches on the same page to save paper. “As an artist you have to recycle,” he says. And how long does it take to create one of his paintings? “A lifetime,” he laughs. “I say that in jest, but I don’t document the amount of time in each of my paintings . . . it’s taken my entire life to get to this point.”

 

Opening the Studios

In one small, brightly lit studio on 8th Street, Susan Brooks leans over a desk strewn with tiny metal squares and triangles. Using tools handed down from her father, an artist and toymaker, she “chases” designs onto the pieces.

Brooks explains that chasing tools are like punches and stamps. “They might look like nails but hammer on top of them and they imprint part of a design onto the metal,” she says.

Brooks, who studied graphic design and fashion illustration at Parsons School of Design in New York, grew up in the Bronx among a family of painters, musicians and artisans. “I just assumed that art was one of the viable professions,” she says.

Seventeen years ago, Brooks founded the Berkeley Artisans Holiday Open Studios, an event that features more than 100 artists who live and work in Berkeley. Although the tour is geared to the holiday season, the Open Studios Web site remains up year-round so that patrons can visit or make appointments with artists.

Some artists at Sawtooth offer classes and workshops to the public. Brooks feels passionately about these classes. “Everyone who wants to make art should,” she says. “I think more people would do art if they weren’t hung up on having to show it.”

Many of the Berkeley Open Studios artists also participate in events sponsored by an organization known as Pro Arts, established in the ’70s. Part of the Alameda County Neighborhood Arts Program, Pro Arts has hosted exhibits, juried competitions and special events at its gallery near Jack London Square.

Pro Arts produces a quarterly newsletter and a directory of more than 400 arts associations and galleries throughout the East Bay. Every June, Pro Arts publishes a calendar of events and map for its Open Studios tour which includes artists from Alameda to Richmond. (See Be East Bay and below for the details about Open Studios on June 7, 8, 14 and 15.)

 

Sand into Glass

Glassblower Holly Wallace, of Ruby Glass, pores over sketches from ideas of the previous day. Turning up the studio furnace to 2,100 degrees, she fills the oven’s silica crucible with fine powdery glass particles. Taking a stainless steel pipe, she twists and rolls the molten glass around the end of the pipe. “At this point it’s like honey on a chopstick,” she says.

At exactly the right time, she cools and forms the glass ball, then begins blowing it into the shape she wants. After infusing the new form with colored glass sprinkles or swaths from colored glass bars, she adds another layer of clear. “Now it’s getting heavier,” she says, sitting at a bench and rolling the glass bowl back and forth in a heating chamber. It’s a balancing act in a narrow window of opportunity. “It all involves physics,” Wallace says, “gravity, centrifugal force, heat, viscosity.”

Art glass such as this used to be produced in large factories like Orrefors, Corning and Baccarat. But in the late 1960s, Wallace’s teacher Marvin Lipovsky scaled down the equipment and thus began the studio-glass movement.

Wallace, also a landscape designer, produces pieces whose shape and texture often mimic nature. “Beauty already exists,” she explains. “All we can do is interpret it.”

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Andrea Pflaumer is a frequent contributor to The Monthly.


Studio Time

GALLERIES

ACCI, 1652 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, (510) 843-2527; www.accigallery.com (visit the 2008
National Juried Exhibition July 11 to August 17)

California College of the Arts, 5212 Broadway, Oakland, (510) 594-3600; www.cca.edu

Craft and Cultural Arts Gallery, State of California Office Building Atrium, 1515 Clay St., Oakland, (510) 622-8190; www.oaklandculturalarts.org

Creative Growth Art Center, 355 24th St., Oakland, (510) 836-2340; www.creativegrowth.squarespace.com

Expressions Gallery, 2035 Ashby Ave., Berkeley, (510) 644-4930; www.expressionsgallery.org

Fourth Street Studios, 40-member artists’ workshop and public gallery, 1717D Fourth St., Berkeley, (510) 527-0600; www.fourthstreetstudio.com

Lafayette Gallery, 50 Lafayette Circle, Lafayette, (925) 284-2788; www.lafayettegallery.net

Sawtooth Building, 2547 8th Street, Berkeley, (510) 665-9880; www.sawtoothbuilding.com

ARTS ORGANIZATIONS/TOURS
City of Oakland Art Gallery Listing; www.oaklandculturalarts.org/main/galleries.htm

Pro Arts, extensive list of East Bay galleries; www.proartsgallery.org

Berkeley Artisans Holiday Open Studios, (510) 845-2612; www.berkeleyartisans.com (Begins Saturday, Nov. 29, for four weekends.)

Jingletown Artists, www.jingletown.org

Faces of the East Bay