Deaccessioned, Stolen or Missing
An interview with Mills College ceramics professor Kari Marboe about her latest project with Museum Records & Research , MCAM’s new exhibition archive and permanent collection resource. The interview was conducted by Jayna Swartzman-Brosky (MCAM Program Director).
Jayna Swartzman-Brosky (J): Tell me about your practice.
Kari Marboe (K): My practice looks at site and ceramics and using those in storytelling, essentially. For the bulk of my practice, I will pick out a site such as the Folsom reservoir or David Ireland’s house and I’ll do a bunch of research on the artist and the place and the time-period that I’m interested in.
I’m thinking about what ceramics can do and how it can hold history and how it can be a material that tells a story.
J: What brought you to the archive?
K: This is my fourth semester of teaching ceramics classes at Mills [College] and being adjunct here is an amazing opportunity and I think one of the reasons is that there are many different resources I’m not only able, but encouraged, to explore and figure out how to incorporate them into our classroom settings.
Because I’m interested in archives, I had looked online at the [Prieto Collection of ceramics at Mills College] that I had heard lots about, because it’s a very specific collection of works that were collected by Anthony Prieto and Eunice, his wife, who were both teachers here. So, I’ve done projects with the students where we look at the actual piece of artwork, the physical piece of artwork, and I handle it and we talk about what was happening conceptually and what is happening technically and it is the best art history lesson. They learn more that day than any other day. It’s an excellent learning opportunity. I have done a couple of semesters where we looked at the archive and the physical pieces and through evaluations and a conversation I learned that the students love that; so wanted to continue it.
This semester, I was speaking with Luke (Turner) [exhibitions and collections manager] and Stephanie (Hanor) [MCAM’s Director] about how else could we could incorporate the archive. Luke suggested looking at some of the exhibition files and so we were brainstorming about, could we recreate a ceramics exhibition? There have been a few that had been put on. Could we help generate material to add to the object files of the ceramic items? If we know that something might be a ‘luster’ because we’re studying it and we know what temperature that might be and we know to not put it in the dishwasher, maybe that’s information that the object file doesn’t contain.
I don’t know exactly what we’re going to do next semester, but I think I want us to populate these object files. At the end of the day, that was what became the most exciting moment. That’s cool for me.
J: Can you talk about the project that you’re working on now with the collection?
K: Absolutely. When I was in here about the project for the ceramics class, somebody pointed out the index card box that was labeled ‘Deaccession, Stolen or Missing Artworks’. The fact that [MCAM staff] showed it to me, is one of the most lovely parts that I found about the museum so far, which is transparency and like a human-ness that sometimes doesn’t exist in institutions.
And I love that label for that box because those are three very different things. And when grouped together — just what a fun party?! Then I spoke to Stephanie one afternoon, she very kindly spent some time pulling from the database, all the pieces that are in the collection for which there are no images. And one of those pieces within this mix ended up being a Daniel Rhodes sculpture. And a very, very ugly Daniel Rhodes sculpture.
Daniel Rhodes was an American ceramic artist and educator and writer. He’s best known for Clay and Glazes for the Potter, which is a resource that almost every studio that I’ve been in has a copy of. It’s a very popular and helpful book.
During the summer he would come over to the west coast to teach summer classes for a few years in the fifties. When he retired, he went out and taught at UC Santa Cruz. He’s an interesting character to have in the Prieto collection because he’s from the east coast, but he has these west coast connections and the majority of the pieces in the Prieto collection are west coast artists. So, I saw that he was missing and what I thought was, how unusual it was for him to be in the collection, and then I also remembered that old book! I found my copy, like my personal copy, which I also found out was a gift from my aunt in 2000. So that was really sweet and the reason why I recognized his name.
J: Didn’t you say you were in high school at the time?
K: Yeah. Thoughtful aunt Jane. Can we give Jane shout out on this? Shout out to Jane.
The fact that it was missing was an exciting moment because then I ended up looking into the Prieto Collection and trying to figure out what the history of this object is, like: why did it come here? Just thinking about California, the history of ceramics. How did it get into this collection in the first place? When and where did that happen?
There’s a publication by a student who went to JFK (John F. Kennedy University) who wrote her thesis on the Prieto Collection and [Daniel Rhodes’] piece is highlighted as one of the most important pieces in the collection. But she only looked at a few pieces in the collection, and did a profile on each of the artists and had the sculptures photographed. So there’s only one photograph [in the archives] and this is the only information that I could find about this Daniel Rhodes sculpture: there’s the one photograph from the front and we have the height is 35 inches and the width is 13.5 inches. The photo is in black and white.
That information, I’m getting excited about. It makes history. I love ceramics and parallel to that, I’m also preparing to teach a digital tools class next semester. And so, another part of my brain is thinking about how do we as fine artists harness digital tools and help them tell our stories. It’s hard because it’s a different approach to making. As I’m breaking it down for myself and I’m outlining what the course should include, one of the tools that I’m using is the 3d printer for clay, which is a really fancy extruder and it can do things that our hands can’t do.
The way that we communicate with it, is we input data and then it makes forms. So all of the sudden, I have this data from Daniel Rhodes — I have one front picture and then I have the high end [dimensions]. With the help of an architecture student we made a 3d model of the sculpture based on the photo and then because we can’t see the back of the sculpture — I didn’t wanna assume anything — the back is the equivalent of blank, right? And the front has textures on it. Once that file came out and I started printing it, I started thinking it would be so funny to return the piece to the museum.
I don’t know if you will let me do that. But, but that’s what I wanted to do. So, a Daniel Rhodes sculpture got into the collection, now it is missing, let’s use the information that we have to return it to the museum. The first iteration was this 3d printing based on that photograph.
Then I saw Arthur Gonzales, a nationally recognized ceramics artist also who teaches a California College of the Arts. I told him a little bit about what I was looking at and I asked Arthur if he knew Daniel Rhodes’ work. And Arthur said, ‘yeah, of course… A Daniel Rhodes’ looks like this,” and then, with his hands, he mimed a Daniel Rhodes sculpture and what it would look like. He started at the base and said, “you usually start a little bit small and then you go out and then you end up at the top and some sort of pointy form,” which actually does describe the photograph.
For the next iteration of the piece, I modified the 3d model to fit the gestures of Arthur’s hands. So, using those photographs, I like put in the angles. I’m just thinking maybe that was a truer to the form.
J: When we spoke previously, you described the process as like capturing an oral history. You‘re limited by the information that’s available to you, which includes people’s memories. That, and only having a flat image to describe sculpture, presents challenges.
K: When we talked about it, I hadn’t thought about that as a valid form of research before and it really opened up what research could be and it also opened up what the form could be for me and it got a lot more playful.
And then I saw national treasure, Nancy Selvin. She actually had met Daniel Rhodes and had him over to give an artist talk. I thought all of that data was appropriate and I’ll try to incorporate it into the next iteration. Because the photo is black and white, I asked her about what kind of brown the Daniel Rhodes sculpture would be and color is completely arbitrary. She ends up looking through all of her books and articles and cannot find a single color-photo of a Daniel Rhodes’ sculpture that’s in print. It’s really fun to try to get at color through language and memory and it’s an impossible task. I started doing some watercolor studies to try to find the Daniel Rhodes brown and then Nancy and I had this conversation back and forth through email and text messages about what that brown could be;, should be. My favorite line so far is, she called it an ‘uncool but cool brown.’
It was like a dorky brown but, cool in nature. So like, more blue. And then I have an artist friend who has has been dabbling in ceramics and used to do color matching professionally. She told me more information about brown as well, and how to get at the brown. She was saying that like Burnt Sienna would be helpful.
I was also dreaming of it being photographed in the same space as the other objects [in the MCAM Collection] like being given the same weight as the other objects. It’s this imperfect duplicate. Part of what I love about trying to recreate this piece is that I looked up synonyms for ‘duplicate’ the other day and a bunch of really wonderful ones came up.
As I’m approaching these iterations, I’m also thinking about what is it to be a forgery. That’s the first [synonym] that came up when Stephanie joked that we had to mark it as a forgery. But other synonyms include a ‘hoax’ or ‘sham’. And then there’s ones such as ‘dead ringer’ or ‘surrogate’. ‘Imposter’, ‘figment’, ‘actor’. What would it be then to say, in this iteration, your objective is deception… and also to explore the fiberglass that he might have been using. How to pair those: the data with the iterations of duplicates. ‘Echo’ and ‘actor’ are my favorite ones.
J: Has this project changed the way you think about your practice at all?
K: I think that this is the first piece that I’ve made, because of the iterations, that will have multiples or many different pieces to the whole. I haven’t done that before and I’m very excited about that. I mean, Nancy’s text messages alone are also so good.
J: What’s an example?
K: Well, she told me the other day that her maiden name was Brown.
