BIG NIGHT

Okay, it’s taken me awhile to get a grip!

But let me express my huge, heartfelt thanks to every single one of you who flooded the Rio Saturday night, August 25, for the Celebrating James event. You made it such an amazing success!

You came from all aspects of James' life: friends, neighbors, far-flung family members, comic book and monster movie fans, yoga classmates, artists, artisans, art instigators and collectors, art buddies, chess buddies, food buddies, travel buddies, trivia buddies, harbor buddies. The list goes on and on!

They stashed me in the front row, so I couldn’t always tell what was going on behind me. But I was blown away when I stood up from my seat and got a load of the size and scope of this crowd.

It all went by in a blur for me, as you can imagine. But now that a photo slideshow of the event has been made available online, bits and pieces of the night are starting to come back to me. I also get to see who all was there — and just how jam-packed the Rio was.


Just wow!

It will take me awhile to process all these images (visually and emotionally). But here's an early favorite from the front rows. I don't know what we were all laughing at, but that's the kind of night it was — full of tears and laughter, usually at the same time.

There wasn't a dry eye (or nose) in the house when Joe Ferrara sang his aching rendition of "For Good" (from Wicked), with James' smiling face beaming down on us all!





James’ Swedish relatives (brother David Aschbacher, his wife, Maria, niece Helena Ashbacher Malm,and nephew Tobias Wallster) took the stage to honor “Uncle Jimmy.” They were among the biggest hits of evening!

 The one and only Wallace Baine led the crowd in a champagne toast to James!

Lime Green Productions cohort Donna Mekis was there with Marcia and Bruce Mcdougal. She spoke about all our many adventures together!

And two more Lime Green co-conspirators, Ann Ostermann and Jana Marcus! Thank you, ladies for your tireless efforts on behalf of my Art Boy!

So pleased to see Robbie Schoen from Felix Kulpa Gallery out and about (foreground, front row). Go, Robbie!

I'm so sorry I didn't get a chance to speak to every single one of you — I'd have had to get myself cloned. But I'm so grateful to everyone who was there. And you know who you are!

Big kudos to the intrepid fearsome foursome of Lime Green Productions — Ann Ostermann, Linda Bixby, Jana Marcus, and Donna Mekis — for pulling off this extraordinary event.

And above all, thanks to all of YOU who helped me give my Art Boy the celebration he deserved!

Big thanks to photographer Jade Loftus! (And thanks to Jana Marcus for helping us access these pics!)

And even more heartfelt thanks to everyone who came to celebrate my sweetie. James would have loved it!

Thank you, Santa Cruz! You people rock!


(Above, right, a view of the poster table. Thank you, Karen Kefauver!)

WHAT'S IN A POT? (BIG CREEK POTTERY II)

Despite drenching rains (geez, what next, a plague of locusts?), the Big Creek Pottery show went on at the MAH over the weekend. Settling in for a four-month run (through july 17), the exhibit features 70 gloriously functional pots from Bruce and Marcia McDougal's personal collection—their own work (like Bruce's pitcher, right), an abundance of student work, and several pieces by the master craftsmen and women who taught workshops at their school over the years. These include diverse work from such iconic ceramicists as John Glick, Michael Cardew, Warren McKenzie, Toshiko Takaezu, John Reeve, Jim and Nan McKinnel, Michael Casson, Karen Karnes, Cynthia Bringle, and a few other names I'm sure I'm forgetting.

While personal styles vary widely, what all the pieces in the show have in common is their functional aesthetic. Insisting that their students learn the basics of pottery-making—from building their own kickwheels to throwing and glazing clay, to a variety of firing techniques—the McDougals and their guest instructors promoted the ideal of beautifully hand-crafted work wedded to utility. The work in this show is a testament to that ideal, a happy blurring of the distinctions between humble pottery and "fine art." These wonderfully glazed platters, jars, bowls and covered pots, elegantly shaped pitchers and vases, command as much respect as any other artwork you'd find in a museum gallery, yet they're just itching to hop down off their pedestals and get to work in a functioning kitchen.

(If I had to pick my personal best of show, it would have to be Bruce McDougal's playful pair of goblets. They're about 8 inches tall, wide-bowled, and glazed in deep midnight blue, but Bruce has unleashed his inner cartoonist with the stems: two sturdy little figures bear up one goblet bowl; the other stem is a jaunty little robed wizard.)

Visitors should also prepare to be amazed at how the Solari Gallery has been transformed with a few new coats of paint, in colors personally selected by Bruce and Marcia. Gone are the plain, white gallery walls, replaced with a palette of the vivid, earthy, folk art colors—curry, deep brick, pea-soup green, aqua—that the McDougals surround themselves with every day.

These colors not only provide a suitably warm setting for the pots, they make an effective backdrop for the 140 vintage black-and-white photographs from the heyday of the school (open from 1968-1983) which is really the heart of the show. Simply as a time capsule of '70s-era commune life (not to mention the hairstyles and clothes), these photos would be worth the price of admission! Kudos to guest curator Karen Thuesen Massaro for amassing this wealth of material (including a display box of old BCP flyers, brochures, and several other pieces of fascinating paper ephemera, as well as correspondence from some of its esteemed visitors) into a coherent, thematic, and relatively chronological exhibit. Check it out this week on the First Friday Art Tour.

The flyer that launched a thousand enrollments

(My only suggestion: move the identifying labels to the front of the pedestals. Too many of them are posted around on the sides, which makes them harder to see, especially if there's a crowd in the room.)

INCANDESCENT MOMENTS

New MAH exhibit celebrates the alchemy of fire, clay, and imagination that was the Big Creek Pottery School

Bruce and Marcia McDougal have always thrived on "the excitement of the moment." Ask what this means, and Marcia offers a typically direct and resonant response: "Like the first time your baby smiles at you."

The McDougals' lives as artisans, craftpersons, and local cultural icons have been full of such incandescent moments. Potters, jewelry-makers, teachers, hoteliers, international travelers, collectors of doors from all over the world, longtime proprietors of the Davenport Cash Store and Bed and Breakfast, they have been at the heart of cultural life in Santa Cruz County for close to 50 years. But it's their role as founders of the fabled Big Creek Pottery School, up Swanton Road, from 1968 through 1983, that is currently drawing them once more into the spotlight. The McDougals, their work, and their school are the focus of a major retrospective opening this week at the Museum of Art and History: "Big Creek Pottery: A Social History of A Visual Idea."

The exhibit is guest curated by Karen Thuesen Massaro, herself an accomplished ceramic sculptor, educator, and Santa Cruz County Artist of the Year for 2003. Massaro moved to Santa Cruz from Wisconsin in 1980; she was never a student at Big Creek Pottery, but she remembers seeing enticing ads for the school in "Ceramics Monthly" magazine as an art professor in the Midwest. But it wasn't until she curated the exhibit, "Time and Place: Fifty Years of Santa Cruz Studio Ceramics," for the MAH in 1997, that she met the McDougals in person. Interviewing them for that show, she became fascinated by both the history and influence of BCP. (Read more)

That's Marcia and Bruce today (above), still intrepid, and full of ideas and enthusiasm. Here's a photo from the multi-media MAH show of Bruce evaluating student work hot out of the kiln at BCP, 1970.

The Big Creek Pottery exhibit opens at the MAH this Saturday, March 26, and will be on view through July 17. (Click here for more info.) The show includes 70 pots and some 140 vintage photos, so plan to spend some time and take it all in.