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Canku Ota

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(Many Paths)

An Online Newsletter Celebrating Native America

 

December 28, 2002 - Issue 77

 
 

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Preston Singletary's expression of his Tlingit heritage has inspired other tribal artists

 
 
by Regina Hackett = Seattle Post-Intelligencer Art Critic
 
 

credits: Photo 1: Preston Singletary's glass art is on view at William Traver Gallery through Feb. 2. From left are "Raven Personified," "Old Man Mask" and "Eagle Personified." Now showing at the William Traver Gallery, 100 Union St., through Feb. 2, Singletary will be featured in a solo exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum in May. - Photo Credit: Gilbert W. Arias/Seattle Post-Intelligencer Photo 2: Singletary's "Crest Hat," 2002, of blown, sandblasted glass. courtesy of William Traver Gallery

 

Preston Singletary's glass art is on view at William Traver Gallery through Feb. 2. From left are "Raven Personified," "Old Man Mask" and "Eagle Personified." Now showing at the William Traver Gallery, 100 Union St., through Feb. 2, Singletary will be featured in a solo exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum in May. - Photo Credit: Gilbert W. Arias/Seattle Post-IntelligencerPreston Singletary belongs to two tribes -- the Tlingit nation into which he was born on his mother's side, and the tribe of contemporary glass artists he grew up among.

At 39, he's one of the key figures in a movement that began in Seattle and has inspired Native American artists across the country. Singletary uses glass to express his Tlingit heritage, merging the ancient art of glass blowing with even more ancient artistic practices of his people in order to create a 21st-century version of tribal aesthetics.

He also served as artistic consultant and featured artist for "Fusing Traditions: Transformations in Glass by Native American Artists" that opened at San Francisco's Museum of Craft & Folk Art in September and will open at Los Angeles' Craft and Folk Art Museum Jan. 8 and remain till March 16.

Curated by Carolyn Kastner and Roslyn Tunis, "Fusing Traditions" is a terrific show, featuring 19 artists who are leading lights in what is fast becoming a revolution in Native American art practice.

If ever there was an exhibit with Seattle's name on it, this is it. Seattle is where most of these artists came to link up with glass and find kindred spirits for their explorations. Eleven of the 19 live in the Northwest. Nearly all have been to Pilchuck Glass School as students and/or instructors. Many contributed to the Pilchuck Totem Pole, erected at Pilchuck last year in honor of the school's founders, John Hauberg, Anne Gould Hauberg and Dale Chihuly.

Even so, no museum in the region has agreed to host the show, which will be on tour through spring 2005.

Singletary isn't bothered by this. He thinks it's more important for the exhibit to appear in places where Native American glass is news.

"No form of glass art is neglected in Seattle," he said.

Singletary's "Crest Hat," 2002, of blown, sandblasted glass. courtesy of William Traver GalleryHe should know. He grew up with it. In high school he began a lifelong friendship with glass artist Dante Marioni, whose father, glass artist Paul Marioni, frequently took the boys to the hippie experiment in the woods that became Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood. First generation artists in the studio glass movement were frequently at the house.

For Singletary, glass was fun but not a career option. He wanted to be a musician. "I like all of it, funk, rock, folk, jazz," he said.

After high school, he balked at the prospect of college. Dante, fighting a similar anti-college battle at his house, was sympathetic.

"He got me a job as night watchman at the Glass Eye (a production glass studio in Seattle)," said Singletary. Within a couple of months he had moved onto the floor, blowing Christmas ornaments and other less seasonal decorations.

Glass was beginning to take off, and Singletary found himself along for the ride. "I found out I was good at it," he said. He liked the glass, but he loved the company.

No other form of contemporary art is such a clan venture. In glass, you can't go it alone. You either buddy up or get left behind. With music blaring and heat pouring out of the furnaces, glass artists root for each other, criticize, applaud and collaborate.

"A day didn't go by that I didn't learn something important about the way artists work," he said. Without meaning to, he ended up in school. Instead of grades, there was instant feedback. If you didn't learn fast, you were off the team.

In 1984, after two years of glass factory work, he became a gaffer or assistant to glass artist Ben Moore, who had his own studio, a favorite hangout and place to blow glass for some of the best glass artists in the world.

At Pilchuck, Singletary met Tony Jojola, a Pueblo Indian artist featured in "Fusing Traditions" who is one of the founders of the Taos Glass and Arts Education program, which opened in 1998 with support from Chihuly.

Jojola encouraged Singletary to research his family background and find a way to express his tribal heritage in the tribal context of contemporary glass.

In Alaska, he met David Svenson, the only non-Native artist included in "Fusing Traditions" and only at the insistence of his students, Singletary included. "David opened up elements of Tlingit style for me that I hadn't seen before," he said.

One day, back in Seattle and blowing at Moore's, Singletary thought the hot glass bubble hanging precariously in front of him looked like a Tlingit rain hat woven in cedar bark.

Eventually, he turned that shape upside down, transforming it into a vase that all by itself would strike a familiar chord in Tlingit circles. He didn't stop there, however. Using a sandblasting and stenciling technique he developed himself, he carved Tlingit designs on the outer surface.

As Ramona Gault observed in a 1998 cover article in the magazine, "Indian Artist," the result is a "conical shape that opens upward like a lily, its undersurface carved with an animal image that is split like a Rorschach inkblot. When a light source is positioned above the vessel, the carved image is cast in shadow on the surface where the vessel sits."

Today, his colors are dramatic, from crisp black and reds, black and blues to the palest browns that simulate old bone for rattles.

Singletary is grateful for the Indian artists working in glass who came before him, including Larry Ahvakana, Joe David, John Hagen, the late Conrad House, Marvin Oliver and Susan A. Point, as well as his contemporaries, such as Ed Archie Noisecat, who carved the masks Singletary used as molds in his Traver exhibit.

"I see this thing getting bigger and bigger," he said. He wants to help found a Native Glass Studio in Seattle, a longhouse with a glass furnace under the smoke hole. He'd like to be part of a Native American band. And he'd like to see what comes next, both for glass and for the wide variety of American Indian art.

"I'm a Pilchuck product," he said. "Pilchuck not only taught me glass but brought me closer to my cultural identity. I guess you could say I was in the right place at the right time."

P-I art critic Regina Hackett can be reached at 206-448-8332 or reginahackett@seattlepi.com.

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