Wharton Esherick (1887-1970) in a photograph by Emil C. Luks, c. 1940. Wharton Esherick Museum.
Restored wrought-iron gates by Samuel Yellin as recently installed on the third floor of the Old Yale Art Gallery building in the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut. Photograph by Christopher Gardner.
Dining set by Esherick, 1928. Walnut with ebony trim; height (of table) 28 ยฝ, length 62, width 41 ยฝ inches. The five-sided table was made for the dining room of the Esherick family farmhouse. Courtesy of the Wharton EsherickMuseum, photograph by Elizabeth Field.
Esherick’s Spiral stair of 1930 was removed from the house twice for exhibition: in 1939 at the New York World’s Fair, and again in 1958 for a retrospective at the Museum of ContemporaryCrafts. Wharton Esherick Museum; photograph by James Mario.
Screen by Powell and Paul R. Evans (1931-1987), c. 1955. Walnut, metal, silver and gold leaf; height 95 ยผ, overall width 43 ยฝ inches. Courtesy of Todd Merrill Antiques.
Sofa by Phillip Lloyd Powell (1919-2008), c. 1960s. Walnut and travertine; height 30 ยฝ, length 12 feet, 5 inches, depth 27 inches. Courtesy of Todd Merrill Antiques, New York.
Evans and Powell outside their showroom in NewHope, Pennsylvania, in a photograph of c. 1960. Courtesy of Dorsey Reading.
Faceted credenza by Evans for Directional, 1970s. Maple burl, brass, enameled fiberglass; height 32, width 82, depth 24 inches. Courtesy of SJAE Alexandre Collection, Los Angeles.
Rudolf Staffel (1911-2002) receiving the American Craft Council Fellows Award in 1978. Photograph by Jim Estrin, courtesy of the American Craft Council.
Vase by Staffel, 1973. Porcelain washed with copper salts; height 8 โ , diameter 5 โ inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art, gift of Dr. and Mrs. Perry Ottenberg.
(above left) Detail of Battle of Carnival and Lent by Judith Schaechter, 2012. Stained glass, 55 by 56 inches overall. Courtesy of the artist and Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.
(above right)Judith Schaechter (1961-), 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.
Doug Bucci (1971-) in the classroom as a visiting artist at Ferris State University, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2012. Photograph by Phil Renato.
Islet/White neckpiece by Bucci, 2012. Selective laser sintering (glass-filled nylon) and silver; length 20 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art, purchased with funds contributed by the Young Friends of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Olaf Skoogfors (1930-1975) in his Mt. Airy studio, early 1970’s. Courtesy of Judy Skoogfors-Prip.
Candelabrum by Skoogfors, 1957. Silver; heigh 5 7/8, width 8 1/2 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art, gift of Judy Skoogfors.
Oval Chamber by Daley, 1986. Slab-constructed and oxidation-fired stoneware; height 40 โ , width 23 โ , depth 20 ยฝ inches. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D. C., gift of the James Renwick Alliance and museum purchase through the Smithsonian Institution Collections Acquisition Program.
CRADLE OF LIBERTY, CRADLE OF CRAFT
By David L. Barquist & Elisabeth R. Agro |ย March 13, 2013
An impressive roster of renowned craftsmen trained and worked in Philadelphia during the twentieth century. This flourishing activity is due to the city’s long history as a center for artisans extending back to the time of its founding. The French Huguenot silversmith Cesar Ghiselin arrived in Pennsylvania in 1681 in the company of a cabinetmaker, pewterer, blacksmith, printer, and a second silversmith, who would become part of the city’s first community of craftsmen. As America’s largest city in the later colonial and early national periods, Philadelphia was a center of innovation. In 1770, for example, Gousse Bonnin and George Anthony Morris founded the American China Manufactory, a successful if short-lived attempt to produce porcelain tablewares to compete with those imported from Europe and Asia.
Twentieth-century Philadelphia craftsmen were nurtured at institutions created in the nineteenth century. The nation’s oldest art school and museum, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, was founded in the city in 1805. In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, when Philadelphia became known as the “workshop of the world,” nineteenth-century philanthropists followed the lead of English reformers and set up institutions to train artists and improve public taste. The first to focus exclusively on what were then called “industrial arts” was the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, founded in 1848; it was subsequently named the Moore Institute and is now Moore College of Art and Design. After the Centennial Exhibition, the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art opened in 1876, modeled on London’s South Kensington Museum. Over time this entity evolved into two separate institutions, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts). In the following decades additional institutions were founded: the Philadelphia Textile School (1884), later the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science, now Philadelphia University; the Drexel Institute of Art, Science, and Industry (1891), now Drexel University; the Graphic Sketch Club (1898), now the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial; and the Graduate School of Fine Arts (1920) at the University of Pennsylvania, now the School of Design.
Twentieth-century Philadelphia craftsmen also found a heritage of local artist communities that had formed at the century’s beginning, inspired by the arts and crafts movement in England. Around 1900 a number of painters, including several graduates of the Pennsylvania Academy, began settling in and near New Hope, Pennsylvania, which by the 1910s became an artists’ colony that included furniture makers Frederick Harer (1879-1947) and Morgan Colt (1876-1926). In 1901 architect William Lightfoot Price (1861-1916) formed the short-lived Rose Valley community in Delaware County, with workshops devoted to furniture and ceramics. Beginning in 1912 Raymond Pitcairn (1885-1966), heir to the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, undertook the construction in Montgomery County of Bryn Athyn Cathedral and his home, Glencairn. He organized guilds of craftsmen at the site who produced stone carving, furniture, woodwork, stained glass, and metalwork for the buildings; some of the work on Glencairn continued into the early 1940s.
Pitcairn was but one of a class of wealthy patrons for artistic endeavors that had been created by Philadelphia’s and Pennsylvania’s industrial might. Members of the Bok, Curtis, Ingersoll, Price, and Wetherill families were others who supported contemporary artists. For over three hundred years Philadelphia has offered craftsmen a stimulating community of peers, patrons, and institutions. The artists profiled in the following pages, who are only a selection from a much larger list of distinguished artisans, were and are the beneficiaries of this long history, and their careers have continued and enriched the story. DAB
I have drawn on the work of many other scholars and curators, to whom I am most grateful. For historical information: Nina de Angeli Walls, Kathryn Bloom Hiesinger, William Ayres, E. Bruce Glenn, and Edward S. Cooke Jr. For biographical details in my artist profiles: (Samuel Yellin) Myra Tomach Davis, Edward S. Cooke Jr., and Jack Andrews; (Parke Edwards) Robert Edwards; (Wharton Esherick) Edward S. Cooke Jr., Gerald W.R. Ward, Kelly H. L’Ecuyer, and Mansfield Bascom; (Phillip Lloyd Powell) Todd Merrill, Julie Iovine, and Jane Port; (Paul Evans) Todd Merrill, Julie Iovine, Jeannine Falino, and Monique Long; (Olaf Skoogfors) David Hanks, Elisabeth R. Agro, and Jane Port; (Hans Christensen) Barbara McLean Ward and Gerald W.R. Ward; (Henning Koppel) Graham Hughes. DLB
Samuel Yellin
From about 1915 until his death Samuel Yellin was the nation’s foremost creator of architectural wrought iron. Most sources have recorded his birthplace as Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now divided between Poland and Ukraine), and his birth date as 1885. However, Joseph Cunningham has recently discovered that naturalization papers filed in 1917 and 1924 state that he was born in Mogilev, Russia (now Belarus), in 1884 and immigrated to Philadelphia in 1900 at the age of sixteen.1
Yellin came to Philadelphia as a master blacksmith, having begun his training in a manual arts school at the age of seven. In 1906 he enrolled at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art to study the history of ornament. Recognizing his skills, the Museum School hired him to teach blacksmithing from 1907 to 1919; one of his students was Parke Edwards (1892-1975), who would go on to execute metalwork at Glencairn and Bryn Athyn Cathedral. In 1909 Yellin opened his first workshop in Philadelphia, and a commission for exterior gates from financier J. P. Morgan in 1911 is credited with launching his career. By 1920 his workforce had expanded to about two hundred, and during the ensuing decade’s building boom, he filled over twelve hundred commissions for clients ranging from Yale and Princeton Universities to cathedrals in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., to residences for Henry Clay Frick, George Eastman, and Edsel Ford. The two hundred tons of decorative ironwork he created for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 1924 was the largest single commission for wrought iron by any American craftsman.
As early as 1912 The Craftsman reported that Yellin’s ironwork “rivals the industrial achievements of the Middle Ages.”2 He worked exclusively in forged iron, creating weathervanes, interior and exterior gates, window grilles, door hinges, staircase railings, lighting fixtures, and fireplace equipment, all inspired by past models. He is best known for work in the medieval style, although he worked with equal facility in the Renaissance and baroque styles. He maintained a collection of historical ironwork for his workmen to study; fifty-one of the finest examples were sold in 1931 to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Despite this reverence for tradition, Yellin also worked in modern materials such as aluminum and Monel metal (a patented alloy of nickel and copper), and he used electronically powered blowers for better control of temperatures in the forging process.
An archetypical craftsman of the arts and crafts movement, Yellin organized his shop on the Old World model, with himself as the master craftsman supervising the work of many skilled individuals. He believed that each artist’s hand should always be visible in his work, whether in the chiseled decoration on bolts or whimsical elements incorporated into the design. Above all, Yellin believed in expressing directly the character of his medium: “There is only one way to make good decorative metalwork and that is with the hammer at the anvil.”3 DLB
Wharton Esherick
The career of Wharton Esherick in many ways was the antithesis of Yellin’s. He preferred to work in relative isolation, with only one or two assistants. Also unlike Yellin, Eshยญerick preferred a modernist aesthetic, rejecting historical precedents in favor of innovative forms. Born to a prominent Philadelphia family, Esherick studied drawing at the Central Manual Training School, commercial art at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art, and painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He embarked on a career as an artist, but few of his paintings found buyers. His first jobs were in commercial illustration, converting photographs into drawings that could be reproduced by lithography. In the early 1920s he took up carving woodblock prints as well as frames for his paintings, and over the course of that decade he evolved from painter to sculptor and furniture maker.
Esherick’s earliest furniture shows the influence of arts and crafts models, such as furniture made to the neo-medieval designs of William Price (1861-1916) at the nearby RoseValley community. In the late 1920s Esherick came under the influence of expressionism, futurism, and cubism, in part with his designs for stage sets at the Hedgerow Theatre in Rose Valley. By 1928 Esherick was making innovative furniture with angular, geometric forms inspired by European modernism. He worked primarily for friends and the acquaintances he made in avant-garde literary and artistic circles and he transformed his own house and studio with experimental works. Perhaps his most significant commission was for renovations to the Gulph Mills, Pennsylvania, residence of Curtis and Nellie Lee Bok from 1935 to 1938, which included a spiral staircase, a “book room” with cubist-influenced elements, and a dramatic music room with a more curvilinear design. In 1939 architect George Howe (1886-1955) invited Esherick to collaborate on his “Pennsylvania Hill House” installation at the New York World’s Fair. Esherick’s furniture and woodwork for both projects marked a transition from angular forms to more sculptural, organic shapes that would characterize his work of the 1940s into the 1960s.
Throughout his career, Esherick sought to emphasize the character of the material in his furniture. His approach was that of a sculptor: “I begin to shape [wood] as I go along. The piece just grows beneath my hands. I treat furniture as though it were a piece of sculpture. I dig up what I do out of my soul.”4 Although the hand joinery was usually executed by his assistant of thirty years, John Schmidt, the finished objects followed Esherick’s designs and his delight in whimsical references or details. During the post-World War II era, the younger generation of woodworkers hailed Esherick as a seminal influence, and in 1958 to 1959 he was given a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York. He was seen then, and now, as the progenitor of studio craftsmen. Most historians credit him with “almost singlehandedly establish[ing] the twentieth-century style of American woodworking.”5 DLB
Phillip Lloyd Powell & Paul Evans
Born in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, Phillip Lloyd Powell began making furniture in high school and studied engineering at the Drexel Institute of Technology (now Drexel University). After military service in World War II, he settled in New Hope, Pennsylvania, where he became acquainted with George Nakashima (1905-1990). Powell ran a shop that sold his own furniture as well as antiques and contemporary designs by Knoll, Herman Miller, and Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988). He began collaborating with Paul R. Evans in 1955, when Evans moved to New Hope. Evans had been born in Newtown, Pennsylvania, and studied sculpture and silversmithing at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan.
Powell reportedly used wood that had been rejected by Nakashima to make furniture, and like both Nakashima and Esherick, he allowed the character of a specific piece of wood to influence the finished object’s design. He viewed the design and manufacture of an object as profoundly interconnected, observing that as he worked, “I continue remodeling, add or cut to create an entire finished whole piece. It’s a gradual process.”6 He preferred walnut because it was easier to shape using a spoke shave, carving the wood like a sculptor. During his partnership with Evans, the latter frequently made fish-scale grilles or other metal elements that were incorporated into the finished object.
Powell and Evans had a two-man show at America House in New York in 1961, which led to a commission from Directional, a ten-year-old furniture company that sponsored a number of young designers. Evans created a line of bronze furniture that debuted at Directional in 1964 and was an immediate success. Powell, however, was dissatisfied with working for a corporation, preferring the counterculture approach of working alone on unique objects for individual clients. His collaboration with Evans ended in 1964. He later said, “I do not want to be in the business of making furniture. When I had eight employees, I realized I was in business. As a drop out, I did not want to be just a designer.”7
During his collaboration with Powell, Evans began working in metals on a larger scale, and by the early 1960s was producing case furniture with sculptured steel fronts. This transition coincided with the arrival in 1959 of Dorsey Reading, a machinist from Lambertville, New Jersey, who began as Evans’s apprentice and became the principal fabricator of Evans’s designs. Evans created several lines of furniture for Directional featuring bronze, aluminum, and steel surfaces with chrome, brass, and gold-plated details, mostly on wooden substrates. By the mid-1970s he employed almost ninety workmen who produced between three and four hundred pieces of furniture each week in factories first in Lambertville and subsequently in Plumsteadville, Pennsylvania. A 1975 brochure suggested that Evans’s role in this process was similar to Samuel Yellin’s half a century earlier: “Every piece is made by hand. One piece at a time. Every piece is finished by hand. One piece at a time. And every piece is supervised every step of the way by the artist who conceived it – Paul Evans.”8 DLB
Rudolf Staffel
Rudolf Staffel, the son of first-generation German parents who immigrated to the United States in 1852, was born in San Antonio.9 After graduating from high school in 1928 he studied painting with Jose Arpa (1858-1952) and life drawing with Xavier Gonzales (1898-1993). In 1929 Staffel attended the Art Institute of Chicago, but finding the coursework too conservative he spent most of his time in the galleries of the Art Institute and the Field Museum, entranced by the exhibits of glass and ceramics-both ancient and modern. In 1932 he went to Mexico to study glassblowing but ended up apprenticing himself to a potter in San Juan Teotihuacรกn.
In 1940 Staffel joined the faculty of the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia with responsibility for building their ceramics program. During World War II, he enlisted in the Air Force and later used the GI Bill to take life-drawing classes with Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) in New York. Early on his work in ceramics was primarily functional but sometime around 1954 his interest in translucency was rekindled, resulting in his use of porcelain to achieve the light-catching quality he sought and for which he is known. The exceptional thinness of his vessels often resulted in holes, which he patched with other pieces of porcelain. Some of these vessels were hand built and some were thrown. Over time his repairs to them became less utilitarian and more about the transmission of light through different thicknesses of the vessel walls.
An innovator, Staffel influenced several generations of students. He retired from Tyler in 1978 to work full time in his studio, garnering numerous awards and honors both here and abroad. ERA
Judith Schaechter
Judith Schaechter was raised in Newton, Massachusetts, and like many children of the late 1960s and 1970s, she was captivated by popular culture, particularly sitcoms and comics. She became enchanted with Gothic art when her father took her on a visit to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her stained glass pieces are directly informed by Gothic images of crucifixions and beheadings mixed with motifs from popular culture.10 “Television, lectures, talk-radio, music, and telephone conversations all serve to improve my work,” she has said.11
After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, she moved to Philadelphia in 1983 and began to amass the materials for her own glass studio. Considered an innovative technician, Schaechter combines techniques-layering, engraving, collage, painting, photomechanical stenciling, sandblasting, and digital technology-with great skill, and makes stained glass that sits quite comfortably within the world of contemporary art. ERA
Doug Bucci
Doug Bucci was raised in Mount Holly, New Jersey, where he used the materials in his grandfather’s metal shop to make the sorts of weapons found in a boy’s fantasy.12 Growing up across the river from Philadelphia, he treated the Philadelphia Museum of Art as his personal playground. At the University of the Arts he initially studied painting but was lured away by the attractions of jewelry and metalsmithing. He continued his studies at the Tyler School of Art, from which he received an MFA in 1998.
As a young maker, Bucci was passionate about the work of two Bay Area funk jewelry makers, Ken Cory (1943-1994) and Don Thompkins (1933-1982). In the summer of 2000, as he was doing some reading about Cory and Thompkins, he learned that they were both diabetic and that both had succumbed to the disease. This struck home for Bucci, also a diabetic, and prompted him to address the disease in his work. “I am a diabetic, an educator and an artist. I work in the medium of jewelry. I can always escape from teaching or making, but what I could not escape was the reality of what I was and that it defined me,” he says.
In his Wounds series Bucci explores the toll that diabetes takes on various parts of the human body with brooches in the form of bloodied feet and toes. His Islet series, constructed of a hexagonal, honeycomb-like structure created by computer-aided design represents the cell shape of diabetes mellitus, a severe form of diabetes. Aware that jewelry is an age-old communicator between wearer and spectator, Bucci uses his designs to publicize the physical state of diabetes and the fight against its deadly consequences. ERA
Olaf Skoogfors
Olaf Skoogfors was born in Bredsjรถ, Sweden. In 1934 his family moved to Wilmington, Delaware, returning to Sweden three years later, only to come back to the United States at the outbreak of World War II, when they settled in Philadelphia. The family’s original surname was Jansson; his father changed it to Skoogfors (“forest stream”) when he became a United States citizen in 1945. As a youth Olaf Skoogfors studied drawing at the Graphic Sketch Club, and after he graduated from Olney High School in 1949 he trained as a silversmith and jeweler with Virginia Wireman Cute (1908-1985) and Richard Reinhardt (1921-1998) at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art. After a period of service in the U.S. Army between 1953 and 1955 Skoogfors entered the School for American Craftsmen in Rochester, New York, where he studied for two years under the recent Danish รฉmigrรฉ Hans Christensen (1924-1983), who had worked at Georg Jensen Silversmithy in Copenhagen from 1939 until 1954. During his years in Rochester, Skoogfors was also influenced by Ronald Hayes Pearson, who taught part time at the school; John Prip; and Svetozar and Ruth Radakovich, who taught at the Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Rochester.
After graduating from the School for American Craftsmen, Skoogfors returned to Philadelphia and established his first shop in West Philadelphia in 1957, moving his studio to Mount Airy in 1962. Beginning in 1961 he taught part time at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art (his renamed alma mater); he became chairman and associate professor of the craft department in 1969 and full professor in 1971. He was a founding member of the Society of North American Goldsmiths (SNAG) in 1969.
Skoogfors’s hollowware from the later 1950s and early 1960s echoes the simple shapes and sleek surfaces of postwar Scandinavian silver, such as Christensen’s work and particularly the designs of Henning Koppel (1918-1981) for Georg Jensen. The flowerlike form of his remarkable candelabrum shown here is characteristic of Skoogfors’s love of curvilinear, organic shapes and unadorned surfaces that highlight silver’s malleable and reflective qualities. In 1963 he developed an interest in lost wax casting, and his focus shifted to jewelry in the later 1960s. His interest in jewelry was further supported by his close friendship with Stanley Lechtzin (1936-), a professor of metalsmithing at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University.
Jewelry offered Skoogfors greater freedom to experiment with textures, colors, materials, and even narrative elements. He wrote in 1968, “I have strong feelings about the relationship of organic forms to rigid mechanical forms, the desire to combine them in a complimentary way to enrich each other… . My desire in jewelry is to say something and not just be decorative.”13 Much of his jewelry was made in series. Between 1972 and 1974 he produced a number of men’s belt buckles inspired by the Civil War “ironclad” warships, the Monitor and the Merrimack, evoking their details with rivets, ridges, and drilled holes within a rectangular frame-mechanical details appropriate for masculine accessories. DLB
William Daley
Born in 1925 in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, William Daley, a self-proclaimed “mud man,” was raised in a home that valued art and poetry.14 In the wake of Pearl Harbor he enlisted and served as an aerial gunner in the Army Air Corps. After the war he took advantage of the GI Bill and enrolled at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. A class with Charles Abbott, a ceramist from Maine, introduced Daley to the idea of making pots.
After graduating, he enrolled at Columbia Teachers College where he received a master’s degree in art education. Daley joined the Philadelphia College of Art (PCA), now the University of the Arts, where he taught many now established ceramists. He retired in 1990 and today dedicates himself to a studio practice.
Daley’s work focuses on the vesica, a form that is an ovoid at its core. He describes the space that is created by the intersection of two circles as “an ancient icon which informs the mystery of two as a new one.”15 Although these vessels are not functional in the strict sense, they are meant as spaces or containers for contemplation.16 His vesicas are steeped in ceramic antecedents but display a structural and spiritual vocabulary that is very much their own. ERA
Notes
1 I am very grateful to Joseph Cunningham for sharing his research on Yellin, which follows: In 1922, an article apparently based on a personal interview with Yellin described him as “German by birth” and chronicled a five-year sojourn when he worked in Belgium and Great Britain before coming to the United States at age twenty-two (William B. McCormick, “Samuel Yellin: Artist in Iron,” International Studio, vol. 75 [August 1922], p. 431). Most subsequent biographies, including those based on family records, have located his birthplace in Poland (e.g. Jack Andrews, Samuel Yellin, Metalworker [Skipjack Press, Ocean City, Md., 1992], p. 1: “Samuel Yellin was born in 1885 in Mogilera, Galicia, Poland, a small village near the Austrian border”). However, no town named “Mogilera” appears to exist; the name may be a corruption of “Mogilev,” which was in Russia, not Austria-Hungary. Andrews and other authors also record 1906 as the year Yellin immigrated to Philadelphia, which is consistent with McCormick’s account but not Yellin’s naturalization records (e-mail to the author, June 6, 2012). 2 C. Matlack Price, “A Modern Craftsman in Wrought Iron: Work that Rivals the Industrial Achievements of the Middle Ages,” The Craftsman vol. 22 (September 1912), p. 627. 3 Quoted in Andrews, Samuel Yellin, Metalworker, p. 14. 4 Quoted in Michael A. Stone, Contemporary American Woodworkers (G.M. Smith, Salt Lake City, 1986), p. 11. 5 Julie Hall, Tradition and Change: The New American Craftsman (E.P. Dutton, New York, 1977), p. 54. 6 Quoted in Edith Skiba Lamonica, “Behind the Eye: Phillip Lloyd Powell,” 2005, at artsbridgeonline.com/behindtheeye/powell.shtml (accessed February 26, 2010). 7 Quoted in Modern Americana: Studio Furniture from High Craft to High Glam, ed. Todd Merrill and Julie Iovine (Rizzoli, New York, 2008), p. 108. 8 Ibid. 9 Biographical details for Staffel are taken from “The Reminiscences of Rudolf Staffel” (1988) in the Center for Oral History, Columbia University; Oral History Interview with Rudolf Staffel, July 17-August 6, 2007, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; and Rudolf Staffel: Searching For Light, A Retrospective View 1936 – 1996 (Museum of Applied Arts, Helsinki,1996), pp. 40-43. 10 Biographical details for Schaechter are from Alex Baker, Extra Virgin: The Stained Glass of Judith Schaechter (Free News Projects, Philadelphia, 2006); and through studio visits and correspondence with the artist, 2007-2013. 11 Baker, Extra Virgin: The Stained Glass of Judith Schaechter, p. 6. 12 Author’s telephone interview with Doug Bucci, January 31, 2013. 13 Skoogfors to Miye Matsukata, January 14, 1968, Olaf Skoogfors Papers, Archives of American Art; cited in Elisabeth R. Agro, “A Resonant Silence: The Unfinished Work of Olaf Skoogfors,” Metalsmith, vol. 29, no. 2 (March 2009), p. 43. 14 Biographical details for Daley are taken from “The Reminiscences of William Daley” (1985) in the Oral History Collection of Columbia University; Oral History Interview with William P. Daley, August 7 and December 2, 2004, Archives of American Art; and “Selected Chronology,”in William Daley: Ceramic Works and Drawings (Moore College, Philadelphia, 1993), pp. 31-34. 15 William Daley, “Vesica Explorations,” in William Daley: Vesica Exploration (List Gallery, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, 2009), p. 4. 16 Stuart Kestenbaum, “The Spirit in the Form,” ibid., p. 3.
