The Curator's Eye

The annual fifteen-thousand-dollar Neddy Awards for Northwest artists are always a big deal, but the biggest event in Neddy history is Tacoma Art Museum’s new show, Honoring Fifteen Years of Neddy Artist Fellows, complete with an eighty-page catalog.

Artists in the spotlight are the eight 2010 Neddy nominees (including painter and City Arts art writer Joey Veltkamp) and this year’s winners, Margie Livingston for painting and Richard Marquis for glass. Curator Rock Hushka calls attention to Venice-trained Marquis’ Point of Diminishing Eggs. “It encapsulates two things about his entire career. First, his technical mastery of glass – complete technical control.”

Secondly, Hushka continues, “the brass cages are found objects – he finds them on eBay.” The eggs inside take more than a mouse click to obtain. “He takes very slender rods of colored glass, stacks them into a little square, fuses them and then pulls them into long canes. He chops the cane into little slices, and somehow wraps them and then blows them into egg shapes.”

Trained by the no-nonsense glass masters on the island of Murano in Venice and with works in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum, Marquis is serious. But his whimsy caught Hushka’s eye. “Those things are so damn funny. You can wonder whether glass is more brittle than eggshells. And putting an egg in a cage before it’s hatched – for a while there’ll be room. The title is a pun on perspective – an art-historical joke woven in for good measure.”

Marquis typically refuses to say what his work means. “What it means to me,” says Hushka, “is that craft is not dead.” •

FOCAL POINTS

Richard Marquis’ birthplace: Bumblebee, Arizona

What happened to him in the Summer of Love (1967): He won the Eisner Prize for Design, enough money to build his own glassblowing studio

Marquis’ Summer of Not So Much Love: 1969, when he won a Fulbright to study with the mean-spirited glass masters of Murano Island, Venice

Years during which he returned to Venice: 36

Subsequent Fulbrights and NEA grants: 6

Highlights, 1971–73: Wore Earth Shoes, thought they’d last; visited Pilchuck Glass School, thought it wouldn’t last

Number of years later that he won the Pilchuck Libensky Award: 23

Lifetime Achievement Awards Marquis won between ages sixty and sixty-one: 2

Song played while he accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award in Adelaide, Australia, in 1995: Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days”