Joel Philip Myers: A Group of Associated Memories by Ken Saunders Gallery

Published by Ken Saunders Gallery 230 West Superior Street Chicago, IL 60654 www.kensaundersgallery.com

ÂŠ 2013 Ken Saunders Gallery All Rights Reserved Printed and Bound in the United States of America 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 First Edition May 2013 With Essays by Ken Saunders, Bruce Pepich, and James Yood Design and Additional Text by Deborah Kraft Photography by Doug Schaible and John Herr ISBN: 978-0-9885301-2-6

Published on the occasion of the exhibition JOEL PHILIP MYERS: A GROUP OF ASSOCIATED MEMORIES May 2 - June 4, 2013

It is a pleasure and an honor to present a survey of work by Joel Philip Myers encompassing a forty year period during which Joel has been one of the leading figures in the Studio Glass Movement; designing for Industry, investing in the education of at least two generations of the glass artists as Distinguished Professor of Sculpture at Illinois State University and by creating sublime bodies of work that have constantly pushed the boundaries of blown glass. My first exposure to Joel Philip Myers came at a very large and important exhibition in 1995 that included the preeminent artists working in the Studio Glass Movement. At the time I was very struck by the quality of the examples from the Contiguous Fragment Series that were on display. With their references to landscape and the natural world Joel managed to transform his glass vessels into expressive yet quite representational paintings. What I didn’t know at the time was that Joel had already worked through the Contiguous Fragment Series, exploring all that he felt the process could yield. Joel was already seeking new forms and techniques in which to create. But unlike most of his peers working with glass, this search wasn’t about technical evolution and the honing of finely developed skills. Instead, Joel maintains an academic’s rigor and discipline in his decision-making. From the beginning of his involvement with glass Joel has brought an aesthetic consideration to his creative process that informs and elevates his work. In 1995 Myers presented Ghosts of War, one of the most poignant and powerful installations ever created in glass. The installation is startling for the way Myers has given the violently battered and misshapen forms such an expressly figurative quality. The many dozens of objects crowded onto their pedestals evoke huddled masses of refugees, marching towards oblivion. The Ghosts of War would inform the Dialogue, Color Study and Enticement Series, which, though much more decorative than the large installation were nonetheless much more experimental in their forms and references to the human figure. In his latest work, the Canvases, Myers has veered back towards the representation of nature in his surface decoration. The forms are reduced to basic qualities, four flat surfaces upon which the artist works his imagery. The three works presented in our exhibition are the only works never to have been previously exhibited. Joel Myers has remained deeply committed to the vessel, working in a fairly reduced vocabulary of forms and making no bones about the necessarily utilitarian character of that form. Joel has managed through decorative and nondecorative elements to imbue his works with an incredible range of meaning capturing in one series nature’s grace and in another mankind’s numbing inhumanity. For Joel Philip Myers the decorative qualities of the medium of glass have never thwarted the artist’s efforts to create provocative sculpture. It remains a thrill to follow the artist’s discourse with his medium. Ken Saunders April 12, 2013

Myers with his winning design for the New York Society of Illustratorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Poster Competition for the Police Athletic League, 1953

Myers, trained first in Advertising Design, spent several years working in graphic and package design before beginning studies in Ceramics both in Denmark with Richard Kjaergaard and at Alfred University, Alfred, New York.

Courtesy of Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, West Virginia 9

Interior Implosion Vessel, 1966 8 1/4 x 8 1/4 x 8 1/4 inches

Myers has said that he used his time as Design Director for Blenko Glass to hone his technical skill, but that he kept a strict mental separation between his work at Blenko and his own artistic pursuits.

Myers at Blenko, observing the production of a vessel

Dr. Zarkoff Installation, 1966

Hand Form, 1972

Left to Right: Harvey Littleton, Joel Myers, Henry Halem, Marvin Lipofsky

Black Vessel, 1980

Many years ago, we visited Provence when the lavender fields were in bloom. The blue fields waving in the wind like fragrant seas, the intoxicating scent of lavender inspired me to look into the art of perfume making. Perfume is the essence of the beauty of the flowers from which it is made, and I was inspired to make worthy vessels to hold exquisite and rare perfumes. A heavenly scent should be contained in beauty. -Joel Philip Myers

Scent XXXX, 1976 10 3/8 x 2 1/8 x 2 1/8 inches Scent XXX, 1975 7 1/2 x 2 3/16 inches Scent XX, 1975 7 3/4 x 2 1/4 inches Scent X, 1975 8 1/8 x 2 3/4 x 2 3/4 inches

Myersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Contiguous Fragment series spanned from 1978-1993. The pieces are painterly-abstract landscapes created in response to memories of his time spent in Denmark. He was often influenced by the colors and forms present in the poppy fields on the land surrounding his Danish home.

Ording Fields, 1988 17 1/2 x 13 x 3 3/4 inches

Arctic Summer, 1990 15 1/2 x 15 3/16 x 3 7/8 inches

Kimono, 1990 15 7/8 x 15 3/16 x 3 7/8 inches

Dark Days in Ording, 1991 16 1/2 x 15 1/8 x 5 1/4 inches

Boogie II, 1981 10 1/2 x 7 3/4 x 7 3/4 inches

Mid Summer, 1987 18 1/2 x 16 1/4 x 3 13/16 inches

North Sea, 1985 29 3/8 x 8 7/8 x 4 1/2 inches

While Myers shied away from using his work to make political-rather than strictly aesthetic-statements for most of his career, his work on Ghosts of War arose out of his studies on the first World War, which he took up after he made the decision in 1993 to end his Contiguous Fragment series. The result of this new effort, developed in 1995 after two years of consciously abstaining from creating work for exhibition, was a massive installation featuring an acromatic assortment of bottle forms. Some of these bottles, personified by gesture, are speared at intervals by metal spikes and glass shards. Some appear to be twisted, fractured, and crushed, barely able to stand up straight, as though they support an invisible weight not made easier to bear by the congregation of their disfigured companions. After this series, Myersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work presented conceptually lighter fare, while many of the technical and aesthetic issues he tackled here would serve as a springboard for his next three series, Dialogues, Color Studies, and Enticements.

Three new series of works by Joel Philip Myers are the result of over six years of investigations undertaken since he finished his long-standing Contiguous Fragment series in 1991. The Contiguous Fragments were filled with rich collage like arrangements of color and texture that float and entwine. The flattened round and oval forms of these vessels provide large areas for compositions, equivalent to a canvas or a piece of paper. Myers’ new Color Studies Series forms a bridge between the earlier Contiguous Fragments and recent works. The Color Series is made up of smaller bottle forms whose exteriors bear soft abstract shapes of potent hue that spread, meeting others in wash-like veils of intensity. Myers’ use of color revels in sensory delight while recalling the watercolors of Emil Nolde and the poured paintings of Morris Louis. In the Color Series, the brilliancy and inventive structural forms closely relate to the Venetian glass of the 1940s through the 1960s and constantly remind the viewer of this expressive tradition. While Myers’ earlier works were inspired by his reaction to nature and the landscape, his other new series derive from his response to the conditions of humanity. In the Enticement Series, Myers depicts his response to human desires, foibles and longing for beautiful things. These spare bottle forms capture beautiful faceted segments, presented as a jewel secured in an elaborate setting, with the depth of a semi-precious stone. Similar to a beautiful object submerged in ice, these intense glass elements are encased in these glacial vessels. These Enticements attract, but also remind us that beauty can be fleeting or difficult to obtain. In the Dialogue Series, Myers presents arrangements that resemble canisters or bottles, but which suggest human discourse and relationships. The flasks bend toward each other, implying a dependency in order to function. The forms pair off in small gatherings reminiscent of social situations, from people conferring at meetings to neighbors conversing over the backyard fence, from jury deliberations to the gossip at a cocktail party. In some of these groups, each form is a different shade of the same color, suggesting emotional states and intensities of feelings in others, the interconnected bottles are decorated with swirling lines of color that pass along from surface to surface, carrying designs from one to the next, visually representative of the exchange of ideas and of the ways people function in social groups. Myers has steadfastly made work in glass that relates to the utilitarian tradition of the medium. However, in these three new series he moves past function into a realm offering him a greater degree of personal expression than previously seen. His containers refer to utility but also suggest human figures by incorporating features that recall torsos, next next and shoulders. While these works related obviously to functional glass, they also use abstraction to depict our responses to beauty and the ways we relate to each other inspired by the human condition, Myers captures the human accomplishment and frailty, but also the essence of what makes our species intriguing. Bruce Pepich

Originally from the publication accompanying “Dialogues, Enticements, and Color Studies” at Marx-Saunders Gallery, 1999

One of the truisms regularly noted about contemporary glass sculpture is that it usually retains and reflects its historic link to functionality. Rooted in the production of domestic objects such as the bowl, vase, goblet, plate, etc., contemporary glass is often seen only to aspire to modify and extend those forms, hanging on to a kind of vessel-logic its practitioners are loath to relinquish. This seems at best only partially true. What is fails to consider is that vessels themselves are not always abstract shapes and independent of human form, but are actually often anthropomorphic in design. A bowl can be an extrapolation of cupped hands, and a bottle, with a neck, body and a base, a variation of a vertical human being. This rarely seems more the case than with an artist like Joel Philip Myers. He has been making vessels for some forty years, and, particularly in his recent examinations of the bottle-form, has imbued them with so much personality and presence as to make them seem capable of movement. After all, bottles don’t have hips, don’t engage one another in conversation, and don’t regard us quite as equals. But Myers’s bottles do; this one seems haughty and insouciant, while that one appears modest and reticent. This one independent and that one saucy, etc. It is our nature-and Myers is superb at evoking and manipulating this-to read a kind of body language in everything that surrounds us, and to people our world with things. These dialogues can remind us of Watteau’s scenes of the commedia dell’arte with Pierrot, Harlequin, and Columbine engaged in their never-ending pursuit of love and raillery, as if Myers’s work needs only a nudge from us to come fully alive. His ‘single’ vertical vessels, the Color Studies, seem more like soliloquies, sober in profile, and subtler in their interrupted shape and concentrated pursuit of color nuance. Like battered remnants of classical statuary, these bottles hold their pose, and in stoic muteness offer their tale for us to read. Myers does approach abstraction in a more overt way in his recent Canvas series. These squat and squarish vessels are very forceful and blunt, minimizing or eschewing curvature, and hinting at some kind of interior life or function. In this series Myers returns to one of his most admired contributions to the history of modern glass, his very accomplished ability to reuse fragments of glass in new and unexpected profiles. Shards of broken glass litter every glassworker’s studio; here, as in his well known Contiguous Fragments series, Myers very subtly takes these decontextualized bits, chunks of glass divorced from their original function, and embeds them in a new setting. They seem inevitable here, always intended for just this spot. This is no form of recycling, but something more poignant and generous, a discovery of unexpected affinities, a willingness to work with materials that is surprisingly moving. Some kind of netting or webbing gives the surfaces of these pieces their canvas-like slightly pitted texture, tying them together, no matter how disparate their source. What Myers does with fragments is a particularized reinforcement of what he does with vessels-he brings them toward a new profile, allowing them to reveal and extend their being, into realms that are curiously familiar and profound. James Yood

Originally from the publication accompanying the exhibition “Harlequins and Canvases” at Marx-Saunders Gallery, 2003

Color Study #12, 2001 23 1/2 x 5 1/2 x 5 1/2

Color Study #26, 2003 21 x 5 12 x 5 1/2 inches

Enticement #21, 1997 16 1/4 x 5 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches

Enticement #10, 2001 20 1/2 x 5 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches

Enticement #12, 2001 20 1/2 x 5 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches

August Night in Ording, 2013 21 1/2 x 7 1/2 x 8 inches

Study in Mauve, 2013 8 1/2 x 10 1/2 x 20 1/2 inches

Awakening, 2013 8 x 8 x 19 1/8 inches

Canvas #15, 2004 18 x 7 1/2 x 7 1/2 inches

Canvas #13, 2004 17 x 6 x 6 inches

Myers with the Emporer and Empress of Japan at the World Craft Councilâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s International Conference, Kyoto, Japan, 1978

BORN: January 29, 1934, Paterson, New Jersey EDUCATION 1960 - 1968 1957 - 1958

BFA, MFA, New York State College of Ceramics at Alred University, Alfred, New York Studied Ceramic Design with Richard Kjaergaard Kunsthaandvaerkerskolen, Copenhagen, Denmark

1951 - 1954

Parsons School of Design, New York, New York Graduated with honors in the Department of Advertising Design

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE 1997 - Present Professor Emeritus Department of Art Illinois State University Normal, IL 1970 - 1997

Distinguished Professor of Art Department of Art Illinois State University Normal, IL

1963 - 1970

Director of Design, Blenko Glass Co., Milton, WV

1960

Package-Graphic Designer for Frank Gianniota Assoc., Industrial Design Consultants, NY

1959 - 1960

Package-Graphic Designer for Lippencott & Margulies, Industrial Design Consultants, NY

1958 - Summer

Graphic Designer for Bjorn & Bernadotte, Industrial Design Consultants, Copenhagen, Denmark

1954 - 1957

Package Designer for Donald Deskey Assoc., Industrial Design Consultants, NY

COLLECTIONS The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Canada Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Va. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, Ca. Koganezaki Glass Museum, Kamomura, Japan Bergstrom-Mahler Museum, Neenah, WI The Museum of Ceramic Art at Alfred, New York State College of Ceramics, Alfred, NY Lancaster Museum of Art, Lancaster, PA North Lands Creative Glass, Lybster, Scotland The Lakeview Museum of Arts & Sciences, Peoria, IL Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine Arts, Racine, WI Lakeview Museum of Arts and Sciences, Peoria, IL Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI The Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Champaign, IL International Minerals and Chemicals, Corp., Skokie, IL Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC Museum of Art and Design, NY West Virginia Arts and Crafts Fair, Inc., Charleston, WV West Virginia State College, Charleston, WV Carrell Reece Museum, Johnson City, TN Wichita Art Association, Wichita, KS Illinois Collection for the State of Illinois Center, Chicago, IL Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH North Carolina National Bank, Charlotte, NC The Chicago Art Institute, Chicago, IL The Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, WV Boymans van Beningen Museum, Rotterdam, Holland Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga, TN Musee Des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, France The Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama, Japan Antonio Prieto Memorial Collection, Scripps College University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI Indiana State University, Terre Haute, IN Western Illinois State University, Macomb, IL Murray State University, Murray, KY Museum Bellerive, Zurich, Switzerland Illinois State Museum, Springfield, IL The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY

COLLECTIONS...contâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d The Archie Bray Foundation, Helena, MT The Lowe Art Museum, Coral Gables, FL Australian Crafts Council, Sydney, Australia The Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY Rosska Konstslojdmuseet, Gothenburg, Sweden Johnson Wax Collection, Racine, WI Musee Du Verre, Liege, Belgium Museum fur Kunsthandwerk, Frankfurt a/M, West Germany Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE Museum fur Kunst und Gerwerbe, Hamburg, West Germany Museum der Stadt Dusseldorf, Dusseldorf, West Germany Lobmeyr Collection, Vienna, Austria Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, Wausau, WI Kunstsammlungen de Veste Coburg, Coburg, West Germany The Evansville Museum of Arts and Science, Evansville, IN Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, Edwardsville, IL Morris Museum of Arts and Sciences, Morristown, NJ Kestner Museum, Hannover, West Germany Kunstgewerbemuseum, Berlin, West Germany Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit, MI The St. Louis Museum of Art, St. Louis, MO Wurttembergische Landesmuseum, Stuttgart, West Germany Musee du Verre, Sars-Poteries, France Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, Hokkaido, Japan The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, NY The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA The Museum of Decorative Art, Prague, Czechoslovakia Musee de Design et dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Arts Appliques/Contemporains Laussane, Switzerland The Los Angeles County Art Museum, Los Angeles, CA The Holmegaard-Kastrup Glass Museum, Fensmark, Denmark The National Museum of American History-Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C. Glasmuseum, Ebeltoft, Denmark Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, PA Jesse Besser Museum, Alpena, MI Glasmusem Alter Hof Herding, Herding, Germany