AFA Winter 2017

Antiques & Fine Art 79 2017 T he Contemporary Craft Gallery at the Newark Museum opened in 1989 as part of the award-winning renovation of the museum complex under architect Michael Graves. The first museum gallery in New Jersey dedicated to the display of modern and contemporary craft, it is not a large space, and, because one must pass through it to get to the north wing elevator, it is commonly referred to as the “elevator gallery.” Since it gets more traffic than almost anyplace else in the museum, it’s a perfect spot for some focused looking. For my final installation in the Contemporary Craft Gallery before my retirement, I wanted to underscore the diversity of our collections with a survey of the works brought in over the course of my thirty-seven-year career at Newark. Landmark holdings in American craft include masterworks by Native American artists and African-American artists, as well as works by New Jersey’s best- known studio craftspeople such as Ubaldo Vitali and Paul Stankard. The fact that some of these objects, acquired as contemporary, are now seen as “historical,” makes me smile, as I, too, prepare to become a part of history. The installation is on long-term view. Preston Singletary (b. 1963), Tlingit chest, 2015. Cast and carved glass, H. 19, L. 31, W. 24 in. Purchase 2015 Contemporary Art Society of Great Britain Fund and Mr. and Mrs. William V. Griffin Fund (2015.10 a,b). At the entrance to the gallery is a large Tlingit chest of carved glass by Seattle artist Preston Singletary. Newark has been buying modern glass since 1912 and buying Native American craft as modern art since the same year. Singletary’s work is inspired by designs from his Northwest Coast decorative heritage, an example of which is the eighteenth-century carved and painted Tlingit chest in the adjacent gallery: Two different but closely linked expressions of artistic impulse. Christine Nofchissey McHorse (b. 1948), (Hopi/Taos), Burgeon, 2015 Coiled micaceous clay, H. 18, L. 10½, W. 10 in. Purchase 2015 Helen McMahon Brady Cutting Fund (2015.15) Virgil Ortiz (b. 1969), (Cochiti), vessel, 2015 Coiled and painted earthenware, 13 x 11 in. Purchase 2016 Charles W. Engelhard Bequest Fund (2016.25) In a corner of the gallery, in separate cases, two works by Southwestern native artists hold a quiet dialogue. Christine Nofchissey McHorse’s Burgeon , brooding and organic, offers an aesthetic counterpoint to Virgil Ortiz’s untitled painted vessel. The conversation is both about the differences between the artists’ Hopi/Taos and Cochiti ceramic traditions and about the role of contemporary Native American potters in the larger world of contemporary ceramics. Newark was purchasing Pueblo pottery as modern pottery before World War I, and presenting it alongside art pottery made in places like Marblehead and Rookwood.