November 2018

Salem Community College’s
Paul Stankard
Honored as the First New Jersey
Community College Statewide Distinguished Alumnus

TRENTON, N.J.—On Friday, Nov. 16, as part of the Vision 2028 Leadership Summit, the New Jersey Council of County Colleges presented the first statewide Community College Distinguished Alumnus Award to Salem Community College Alumnus Paul J. Stankard.

The Distinguished Alumnus Award is presented to a New Jersey community college graduate who has made significant contributions in his or her profession and community that have brought honor to New Jersey’s community colleges and the State of New Jersey.

Stankard was recognized for his unparalleled contributions to the field of glass art and his alma mater.

In 1961, Stankard enrolled in the scientific glassblowing program at Salem Community College’s predecessor, Salem County Vocational Technical Institute. After graduating with a degree in scientific glassblowing, he spent 10 years in industry, where he became a master of fabricating complex instruments. In 1969, Paul started experimenting with producing glass paperweights in his garage while working in the industry to support his growing family.

It was when Stankard displayed his early paperweights at a craft exhibit on the Atlantic City boardwalk that Reese Palley, an internationally respected art dealer, saw his work and sponsored Stankard financially to move full-time into making glass art.

Over his 45-year artistic journey, Stankard has become an internationally acclaimed artist, pioneer in the studio glass movement, and is considered throughout the world as the father of modern glass art paperweights. His work is represented in more than 60 museums around the world, including The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Louvre in Paris; and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

He has received two honorary doctorate degrees, one honorary associate degree and many awards within the glass community, most recently the Masters of the Medium Award from Smithsonian's The James Renwick Alliance and Glass Art Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

He is an Artist-in-Residence and Honorary Professor at Salem Community College.

In 2001, Stankard founded Salem Community College’s International Flameworking Conference (IFC).  The IFC celebrates excellence in flameworking by exposing SCC students and conference attendees to many of the world’s leading glass artists using the flameworking process. Stankard became chair emeritus following the 18th annual IFC.

The award, a glass acorn atop a metal base, was designed and created through a partnership between Salem Community College and Camden County College. Salem Community College has one of the most innovative glass programs in the country and Camden County College has been a leader in New Jersey in training and educating students to work in the metal fabrication and advanced manufacturing industries. The award embodies the commitment of New Jersey’s community colleges to creativity, knowledge, innovation, and collaboration.

The New Jersey Council of County Colleges is the state association representing New Jersey’s 19 community colleges. As an independent, trustee-headed organization that joins the leadership of trustees and presidents, the Council is a resource that strengthens and supports the state’s 19 community colleges.

USA TODAY LIFE

ART OF GLASS

During the mid-1960s, Paul Stankard was blowing glass flasks, beakers, vapor traps, and sundry items for scientific laboratories.

Back in his own studio, a utility shed in Mantua, in the evenings and on weekends, he was creating small glass objects of visual delight.

Now celebrating a career that has spanned more than 50 years, Stankard, 75, enjoys a critically acclaimed international reputation as an artist of exquisitely breathtaking one-of-a-kind glass sculptures.

As Stankard shared in a recent email: “It has been and still is a fantastic journey.”

“Beauty Beyond Nature” is a retrospective of 63 objects and two botanical prints presented at the Museum of American Glass at WheatonArts in Millville. Running until Dec. 30, the exhibit is guest curated by Andrew Page, director of the Robert M. Minkoff Foundation, which has loaned the works on display. The traveling show has been seen at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington; Bergrstrom-Mahler Museum in Neenah, Wisconsin; Lowe Art Museum in Coral Gables, Florida; and the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Hence, this is a homecoming hosted by South Jersey’s premier museum, which has “the most comprehensive collection of American glass in the world” and is located about 32 miles from the artist’s studio.

Stankard said with no hesitation: “Wheaton nurtured my artistic maturity.”

Collector and friend

Since 2005, Robert M. Minkoff, a commercial real estate developer and philanthropist in Potomac, Maryland, has amassed a collection of 135 pieces by Stankard. In an email, the collector wrote, “I've always been fascinated by paperweights and other encasements in glass art, but when I discovered Paul Stankard's virtuosic botanical compositions within glass volumes, I set out to not only acquire his most exquisite efforts, but to trace his progress from his earliest efforts to all the breakthroughs to collect his most masterful achievements."

According to the curator, “This Paul Stankard collection is unique and definitive in its effort to be complete and to document an evolution over the years. It also marks a friendship” as Minkoff and Stankard share a deep respect for nature.

In the museum’s “Jewel Box Gallery,” the intimate show is not strictly chronological but arranged by the various categories of the artist’s forms.

With its 10 window cases, the presentation of Stankard’s signature small-scale work gives the visitor a feeling of looking at the Fifth Avenue windows of Tiffany & Company. His two largest pieces are the eight-inch orbs presented in freestanding vitrines. So the artist’s craftsmanship may be fully appreciated, flashlights to highlight details for better viewing are available at the nearby front desk of the museum.

Just outside the gallery is a small sample of his early blown-glass scientific pieces, including student work done at Salem Vocational Technical Institute (now Salem Community College) in Carneys Point that has not been previously exhibited. At the opposite side are two beautiful glass plate prints (vitreographs) that Stankard had made in North Carolina while working collaboratively with Harvey Littleton, a celebrated pioneer of the American Studio Art Glass Movement.

On a recent tour, Kristin Qualls, director of exhibitions and collections at WheatonArts, emphasized this exhibition documents “Paul’s amazing work that has evolved and developed over time with practice and patience of technique, ideas, and content.” Unquestionably, Stankard is an integral figure of the first generation of then emergent Studio Glass Movement that elevated glass as a contemporary fine arts medium.

Stankard was born under the astrological sign of Aries with its element of fire, so it seems appropriate that he is a master of flamework, a process that uses a propane-powered torch to melt thin rods of colored glass creating still life designs for his distinctive paperweights, botanicals, orbs and various glass assemblages.

Whitman and the wild

Stankard’s formative childhood years were spent in southeastern Massachusetts before his family relocated to Wenonah 60 years ago. Yet in spite of his distinctive Boston accent, he is strongly rooted in South Jersey and respects the significant glassmaking tradition that goes back to the 18th century in Salem County and continues to this day.

“Glass is the second largest employer in Millville,” according to Qualls.

As a Jersey guy, he is also inspired by the region’s native flowers and has an enduring admiration for the poetry of Walt Whitman.

Stankard gives considerable credit to Reese Palley, the Atlantic City art impresario who ran a Boardwalk gallery and successfully sold his earliest small glass giftware animals. Palley encouraged him to follow his desire to go to “the creative side.”

The artist recalled Palley, his first dealer, “celebrated and emotionally supported my efforts.”

Just as Stankard was preparing for the arrival of a fourth child, he made a life-changing decision with the endorsement of his wife to leave glassblowing at Rohm and Hass in Philadelphia and pursue a career as a full-time artist. Since 1972, there has been no looking back; his technical facility has certainly bolstered his subsequent success.

Though the exhibit reveals the breadth of Stankard’s accomplishment, he acknowledged, “I dedicated my life to make paperweights. “

His challenge was to take the Millville Rose, the first uniquely American paperweight dating back to the mid-19th century, and create a more personally relevant object. On display are 18 paperweights representing three decades since the early 1970s.

While he strove to design botanical portraits, the initial resultant images were rather simplified. As the vegetation becomes more illusionistic, the flowers are actually interpretive and referential. Regardless, many may think they are real blossoms encased in the high-grade soda-lime glass.

His mastery of technique is a tour de force in glassmaking. Says the artist, “I want people to go beyond the wizardry of whether it is real or glass. It is about respect for living things.”

'Labor is prayer'

Unlike the traditional 19th-century paperweight that is seen just looking down at it, Stankard offers a more all-encompassing point of view. His small-scale sculptures are admired from both the top and bottom. They cannot be touched at the museum, but mirrors provide an opportunity to see the various artworks from varying vantage points.

Rather than exotic or remote flowers, he gave the paperweight a new tradition by focusing on native flora. His work has “organic credibility,” but “I conceal in that imagery more personal illusions.”

Several years ago, Stankard reminisced about a childhood love of pulling clumps of grass out of the ground: “You would have this clump of roots, dirt, insects. Most of the time it was more interesting under the earth than above the earth. So clumps have been a fascinating area of exploration.”

On view there are numerous sculptures with suspended clumps and a fantastic array of roots that included what he has termed his “root people.”

His art has been described as “crafted blossoms suspended in stillness.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Transcendentalist philosopher from Massachusetts, wrote, “The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.” In the beautifully illustrated catalog that accompanies the exhibit, Stankard similarly proclaims, “I have a whole series of trails and woodland experiences I visit regularly (Chestnut Branch Park in Mantua) ... I marvel at what you can see, standing in the woods, being completely quiet, observing. I find a spiritual sense of timelessness.”

A Benedictine inspirational message is positioned directly above his workbench: “Laborare est orare” (labor is prayer).

He calls Whitman his studio's "patron saint.'' Stankard cites a line from “Leaves of Grass” as a guiding principle that has personal resonance: “A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.” This may have added meaning, since the artist has suffered from dyslexia and is an experiential learner.

Artist as teacher

In mid-June Stankard taught a workshop on flameworking at Salem Community College. He regularly shares his expertise and talent with a younger generation of aspiring artists.

His work has inspired Leslie Kirchhoff, 27, a Los-Angeles based artist who creates Disco Cubes, high-end ice cubes with real herbs and edible flowers suspended in the center of frozen purified water for cocktail drinks.

In a telephone conversation, she discussed her childhood in Wisconsin seeing fish in perfectly clear frozen water, describing this as “beauty suspended in water in nature.”

In 2007 Stankard made a deliberate decision about his artistic legacy. He destroyed approximately 400 pieces that he described as “experiments or failures.” By then, his art had received significant critical acclaim and achieved considerable market success. Nonetheless, he decided to edit his work, because he” didn’t want something that was unsatisfying to represent me.”

Stankard continues to work in his Mantua studio every day. He also enjoys spending time collaborating with the technicians at Wheaton, who are challenging him to go larger in scale.

“I am a workaholic,'' he said. "I am very comfortable in the studio kicking around. “

Fred B. Adelson is a professor of art history at Rowan University.

If you go

'Beauty Beyond Nature: The Glass Art of Paul Stankard' is on view through Dec. 30 at Museum of American Glass, WheatonArts and Cultural Center, 1501 Glasstown Road, Millville. Visit www.wheatonarts.org or (800) 998-4552 or (856)-825-6800. Tuesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

American Craft Magazine

the PARIS REVIEW

American Craft Magazine

Who Needs Education?
Interview with Paul J. Stankard by Monica Moses
December/January 2015

Every artist does, whether it's formal or not.

Paul J. Stankard is a fellow of the American Craft Council, the author of two books, a devoted teacher, and an internationally recognized glass artist with work in more than 50 museums worldwide. He achieved all of this despite never having studied art at the university level; he trained in a vocational glass program and determined much of his own subsequent education.

Stankard has a special interest in education for artists – especially those relying on their own resources. We asked him to suggest tools for artists eager to grow, with or without formal degrees.

For your students at Salem Community College, you made a list of 100 glass artists respected by the glass community and you discovered, after researching their backgrounds, that almost all of them had BFA or MFA degrees. What does that say about the difficulty of rising to the top for a self-taught artist?

Whether one is self-taught or a graduate of a formal arts program, rising to the top of your field and being recognized for doing significant work is difficult. It’s a major accomplishment. Very few reach this level. Formal education isn’t required to reach upper-echelon status as an artist or craftsperson; however, artistic maturity is.

When I first discovered that most of the artists on the list I developed for my students had formal art degrees, I viewed it as a teachable moment. My students and I discussed the potential advantages of studying art in a university setting. From my perspective, as someone who did not attend art school, the advantage is that university students, from day one, are exposed to excellent work from the past, encouraged to develop concepts for discussion and critique, and asked to approach the material and concepts from the perspective of self-expression. Perhaps the most important asset is having their work critiqued within a creative community.

This background prepares BFA and MFA students to embrace the contemporary American craft movement – to bring fine-art expectations to object-making. Makers like me, who came to artmaking from a vocational background, have a foundation in hand skills and technique. Early in my career, when I met artists and craftspeople with an art school background, I was impressed with their art vocabulary and knowledge of art history, and sensed they had more creative freedom as a result.

Ultimately, though, the art world’s expectations for significant work are the same, whether an artist is academy-trained or self-taught. And to do significant work, you need to combine an impulse to be creative with an education directed at your passions and interests, however you obtain it.

How can a self-taught artist increase the probability that he or she will become a master?

For any artist to reach master level, you have to live a lifestyle of constant growth and exploration. The ideal is what I once heard an education professor refer to as “self-directed learning.” In self-directed learning, motivation is crucial, because you are on your own. There is no one standing over you to encourage you to keep going or to give instructions on your next step. Self-directed learning is most beneficial when it’s motivated by a goal – a reason to continue learning for the long term. Clear goals, along with curiosity, push creative people to explore what may seem like disparate ideas and experiences that they then internalize into a focused, individual point of view.

My self-directed learning journey began in earnest in 1972, at the beginning of my full-time career as an artist, when I was listening to an interview on National Public Radio about the role of the artist in society. One comment touched me. The speaker said, “In order to do excellent work, you have to know what excellence is.” She went on to say that experiencing excellence in all areas of the arts – decorative arts, painting, sculpture, literature, poetry, music, architecture – will help you build a broad foundation to inform your work. This was an epiphany, because I intuitively knew that to be a master paperweight maker I had to educate myself beyond the world of contemporary paperweights. I had to find ways to bring my interests and ideas to the paperweight category. This discovery inspired me to seek out knowledge that would complement my creative journey. I began studying antique French paperweights to determine how to build on that tradition, closely observing the details of native flowers to interpret them in glass, and listening to great works from the Western canon on audiotapes.

Tell us three books you would recommend that emerging artists read and why.

The Story of Art, by E.H. Gombrich

There are times when the material I’m reading goes over my head and I have to read (or listen) a second time. The Story of Art was an example of this. I persisted and sensed the value of the information, working past the frustration and questions about whether parts of it were important. As I continued reading, I felt fortunate to have been exposed to this wonderfully well-written arts survey. Trust me when I say it’s worth the effort and time needed to understand Gombrich’s overview of art history.

The Story of Art gave me a sense of pride in knowing that, as a maker, I was continuing a great tradition that contributed to the well-being of society, whether or not my work was applauded.

As an add-on, I encourage makers to look at Sister Wendy’s 1000 Masterpieces by Sister Wendy Beckett with Patricia Wright. The captions explaining the artworks are clear and succinct, and offer a very informative and poetic way to experience great work.

Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, by David Bayles and Ted Orland

Art & Fear is a straightforward, easy read geared toward artists at the beginning of their journeys. The book is rewarding because it touches on the many unique variables that studio artists deal with daily, such as worrying about failure, wondering whether they’ll develop new creative ideas, and finding the emotional stamina to survive as a professional artist. Most creative people are fully absorbed by their own artistic vision and can feel overwhelmed by their struggles. Art & Fear connects its readers to a variety of problem-solving scenarios and advice about artmaking. As someone who spent much of my adult life in the studio, I found it reassuring to know that others share my fears. The authors offer practical advice for maintaining goals and a sense of self-worth.

Another way I overcame my insecurities to succeed in the arts was by reading biographies and autobiographies on other creative people, such as The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Walt Whitman: A Life by Justin Kaplan, and James Joyce by Richard Ellmann. It’s inspiring to read how other people overcame adversities – often far greater than I have faced – and still created significant work.

Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson

Walter Isaacson, in an insightful way, illustrates Jobs’ commitment to quality, innovation, and creative problem-solving. Jobs balanced a creative vision with good design while protecting the integrity of his products with a strategic indifference to the demands of the marketplace – demands that he ultimately reinvented. He invested his emotional energy in creativity and educated the public to have higher expectations for what technology could deliver. After a lifelong commitment to quality in my work, it was sweet to read how Jobs applied his commitment to excellence and originality, and to realize how it changed the world.

Where should self-directed artists go online to educate themselves?

For experiencing a broad range of artworks across multiple disciplines, I recommend visiting Google Art Project, Khan Academy, Artsy.net, and Daily Art Muse.

Additionally, every major museum has portions of its collection and additional resources available online. For students of glass, the Corning Museum of Glass website is a tremendous resource that offers historical as well as contemporary glass works.

TED Talks are another one of my favorite online educational resources. If I’m doing something tedious in the studio that doesn’t demand my full attention, I’ll listen to TED Talks on my iPhone. From my perspective, three standouts among the thousands of great videos are Nancy Callan’s “21st-Century Glassblower,” Salman Khan’s “Let’s Use Video to Reinvent Education,” and Ken Robinson’s “How Schools Kill Creativity.”

In your latest book, Spark the Creative Flame, you wrote “You have to identify what you care about and develop ways of learning that will correlate your studies with your artistic goals.” How should an artist go about identifying what he or she cares about?

I cannot answer that question for other people. I can only describe how I connected my core interests with my aptitude.

As a child, I loved playing in the woods and building things with my hands. But as an undiagnosed dyslexic in the 1950s and ’60s, I had no success in the school system. Because I was viewed as a failure in that setting, I had low self-esteem. Fortunately, I followed my natural aptitude for working with my hands and pursued a trade at Salem County Vocational and Technical Institute (now Salem Community College). In the scientific glassblowing program, I felt the value of education for the first time. As I mastered my craft, my need to be creative became more apparent. I sought ways to satisfy my creative need with my hand skills. When I encountered the Millville Rose paperweight, which was considered the crown jewel of the South Jersey glass tradition, I became very excited by the possibility that I could figure out how to make flowers in glass.

Looking back, I now see how my childhood love of nature and my talent for making things with my hands came together in a way that shaped my life in a very positive way. Though I didn’t know it at the time, my quest to pursue excellence in floral paperweights gave me a vehicle to reach my full potential as an artist and a person.

You’ve written, “The creative journey is fraught with endless anxiety” and that a healthy sense of self-worth can help an artist guard against jealousy and withstand criticism. How should an artist go about developing that sense of self-worth?

Enhancing one’s sense of self-worth is a personal effort. In my career, I’ve sensed a heightened sense of self-worth when I’ve discovered new ways to be creative. For example, after much experimentation and failure, I recently perfected techniques to suggest fuzz on the skin of fruit. Achievements like this sustain my ego, regardless of what is going on outside my studio. In other words, by focusing on my personal vision and spending my days developing techniques to execute that vision, my self-worth is predicated on personal creative successes, not on comparing my work and achievements with others’.

Where can the self-directed artist find community, to avoid feeling isolated?

It’s important to be connected to a creative community. You can form beautiful friendships; furthermore, conversations, seeing others’ work, and visiting artists’ studios can broaden your perspective and advance your artistic maturity.

Living and working in southern New Jersey, I have benefited from proximity to WheatonArts, the galleries and museums in Philadelphia – even Washington, D.C., and New York City. I recommend that emerging artists connect with local cultural centers and public-access studios and attend gallery openings and museum exhibitions. And it’s more than just showing up. To take full advantage of these experiences, you need to actively participate in and engage with the cultural organizations in your region.

These organizations thrive on active participation, and the more of yourself you share, the greater the benefit to your artistic growth.

Monica Moses is editor in chief of American Craft.