Food services manager Richard Pleasants gets a haircut from baker Kim Oberhammer while interim maintenance guy Chris Ellenbogen paints a fireplug red. It’s nonstop at this place.

Penland School of Crafts had a groundbreaking ceremony for a new dormitory on Thursday, August 25. The three-story, 8,200 square-foot facility will provide flexible housing options for up to 42 students in 19 bedrooms. The building is designed to be energy efficient and accessible, and to provide support for year-round programming at the school.

The schematic design was prepared by Chapel Hill architect Dail Dixon with construction documents and construction oversight handled by Bowers, Ellis, and Watson of Asheville, NC. The building will be built by Davie Construction of Advance, NC.The building will be located downhill from the balcony side of Heaven’s Above.

Construction of this building is being made possible by a loan from the U.S Department of Agriculture Rural Development Community Facilities Loan Program through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Left to right: Pamela Hysong, USDA; Jean McLaughlin, Penland director; Marvin Hutchison, USDA; Scott Klein, Penland facilities director; Laura Taft Paulsen, Penland trustee; Mike Watson, Bowers, Ellis and Watson; Carl Carney, Davie Construction; Rob Pulleyn, Penland trustee; Blair Bricken, Bowers, Ellis and Watson; Clay Mooney, landscape architect.

CLICK HERE to see a very short slideshow of current Penland fungi.
Photos by Betsy Dewitt with ranting commentary by Robin Dreyer.

No Flash? Too bad. Here’s a link to the slightly inferior YouTube version.

Here is a 3-minute slideshow from our Annual Benefit Auction, which took place on August 13-14. You can also navigate through the slides one at a time by using the arrows in the lower right-hand corner. If you are using a Flash-challenged device, you can also watch it on YouTube (but it doesn’t look as good).

Penland’s 25th Annual Benefit Auction was a brilliant success. Thanks to all of the artists, attendees, staff, and the 200+ volunteers who made it a great weekend and an amazingly smooth event.

Revenue from art sales: $333,716
Fund-A-Need revenue: $34,750
Total revenue for the weekend: $514,069
Total attendance: 527

We sold 223 pieces of work in the four auctions for an average of 104 percent of retail value.

Total revenue was $33,884 higher than 2009.

We are collectively thrilled!

Marlene True and her students express their deep and abiding love for rivets with the rivet cheer, led by Marissa Saneholtz in this video from Arley-Rose Torsone.

Ingrid Schaffner

Curator and arts writer Ingrid Schaffner will give a talk at the Northlight building at Penland School of Crafts at 8:00 PM on Sunday, August 22. Titled, Crafting Exhibitions, her talk will be a survey of her work as a curator, covering her interests in feminism, photography, and historic surrealism. Andrew Glasgow, the former director of the American Crafts Council, will lead a discussion with Schaffner and the audience after her talk. Schaffner is the senior curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and her talk takes place during her participation in Penland’s new Andrew Glasgow Writers Residency.

Ingrid Schaffner has been working in contemporary art since the mid-1980s and has developed an exceptional body of work around three themes: surrealism, collecting, and photography. Among her many projects, Deep Storage was a major international survey of 50 contemporary artists which represented issues and images of collecting, storage, and archiving. Other exhibitions include Pictures, Patents, Monkeys, More … on collecting, Richard Tuttle, In Parts, 1998-2001, and The Photogenic: Photography Through its Metaphor. She has numerous publications on 20th century art, art reviews in Artforum, and catalog essays.

Directions to Penland are here.

The editor of this blog was out of town for a few days and now we are all going nuts putting on the annual benefit auction so there hasn’t been much time to post. But we didn’t want anyone to miss this great drawing that instructor Arthur Gonzalez made on the chalkboard in the Pines last session. Click on this one to see it bigger.

And while we’re on the subject of Arthur, here’s a Penland iron T-shirt that he modified for sale in the end-of-session scholarship auction. Thanks, everyone, for a great session.

Anne Lemanski, “Celestial Serenade,” copper rod, antique paper, artificial sinew

Compared to artists who create films, novels, and theater, artists who make paintings, photographs, and sculpture have a hard time literally telling a story. However, they can be very effective at making artwork that suggests one. That is the idea behind a new show at the Penland Gallery titled, All This Happened, More or Less: Five Artists’ Use of Implied Narrative. The title of the show comes from the first line of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel “Slaughterhouse Five,” and the artists are printmaker Susan Goethel Campbell, photographer Maggie Taylor, ceramic artist Shoko Teruyama, and mixed-media sculptors Anne Lemanski and Stephanie Metz.

Susan Goethel Campbell, “Aerial #2,” relief print with perforations

Susan Goethel Campbell is represented by dark, monochromatic prints that have been perforated in patterns derived from data sets that represent wind patterns and other phenomena. Maggie Taylor has a series of digitally constructed dream-like images. Shoko Teruyama is showing functional and sculptural ceramic forms decorated with elaborate, mysterious scenes involving different animals. Anne Lemanski has created a series of animal sculptures built on wire armatures that are covered with paper and other materials that create social and political commentary. Stephanie Metz makes felt sculpture like none we’ve ever seen before. Included in the show is her series of felt skulls that purport to represent different species of Teddy bear.

The show is pretty stunning. It will be up through September 19.

You can see a slide show of most of the work from the show on the Penland Gallery webpage.

Stephanie Metz, “Ursulus Victuspedis (Teddy Bear skull),” felted wool

Susan Goethel Campbell’s website

Anne Lemanski’s website

Stephanie Metz’s website

Maggie Taylor’s website

Shoko Teruyama’s website

We are very sad to report the death of our friend Marcia Macdonald, who passed away on July 21 after a long struggle with cancer. Our thoughts go out to her friends, family, and her husband Steve. Marcia was wonderful jeweler, a superb teacher, and a brilliant human being. She was smart, funny, beautiful, talented, hard-working, generous, and full of life. It’s almost impossible to believe that she is gone.

Penland’s program director Dana Moore, who was in close contact with Marcia during the last year, said, “So many of us have lost so much this week with Marcia’s passing. Nobody could have loved life more or have instilled more passion in students, colleagues, and friends. The pain of her loss is matched only by our gratitude for having known her.”

"Fat Old Chicken" a brooch by Marcia Macdonald

Marcia taught regularly at Penland beginning in 1993. She also taught at Arrowmont and Haystack. Her work appeared in many publications and exhibitions and received numerous awards. She was a former board member of the Society of North American Goldsmiths.

In addition to her work as a jeweler, during the last year of her life she managed the sales gallery at the Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art in Greensboro. Laura Way, who is Green Hill’s director, sent us this note about Marcia. “Her short time working with us here, bringing her great vision AND organizational skills to our shop, was a special time for all of us—getting to know and love her—her honesty, creativity, intelligence, generosity and sense of humor. Every day she was here, she made it a special day.”

"Simplicity"

Marcia donated this piece to this summer’s Penland benefit auction. It’s a bit of a departure from her earlier work, and it came with this note: “The past year has presented me with some serious health issues. This has affected me on so many levels, how could it not also affect my work? Cherishing every moment, trying not to sweat the small stuff, simplifying my life, and doing exactly what I need and want to be doing at any given time are my current goals. This piece represents structure, strength, cell growth, and a shiny little window of hope.”

"Necklace for Marcia" click to see it bigger

In November, the metals community came together to create a necklace for Marcia that brought together elements made by more than fifty artists. Although it is magnificent, it is only a token of the love and affection that she inspired.

The Society of North American Goldsmiths (SNAG) has set up a memorial page on their website, which includes a series of tributes from her friends. And here’s a link to Marcia’s obituary in the Greensboro paper.

Goodbye, Marcia, we will miss you.