‘A place by itself’ Deer Isle’s Haystack Mountain School of Crafts marks 50th season

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Most of the year, he talks up Tiffany and handles all manner of decorative arts – pottery and lamps and glassware that will be sold by one of the world’s most famous auction houses for prices that have lots of zeros on the end.

But for these three weeks, Greg Kuharic has taken off his hat as a Sotheby’s vice president. Donning a wildly colored T-shirt and a pair of shorts, he’s just one of 85 students in this session of Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle.

So intent is he on shaving a bit of clay from one pumpkinesque vessel – “a genetically altered vegetable,” he labels it, tongue in cheek – that Kuharic doesn’t seem to notice the million-dollar view of the ocean through the panoramic windows behind him. But be assured that Kuharic knows exactly where he is for every minute of this sojourn.

“My heart skipped a beat when I crossed the bridge” to Deer Isle, he recalled with a big smile. “It’s perfect.”

Talking about the instant bonding that comes with being a student at Haystack – located on a woodsy campus off Sunshine Road, no less – Kuharic makes it sound a bit like the ultimate summer camp.

“By dinner Sunday night, everybody’s best friends,” he explained. But it’s clear that while a three-week stay here may be a bit of a vacation for Kuharic, who hasn’t made pottery professionally for several years, studying at Haystack is serious stuff for some serious artists.

It’s the 50th season at Haystack – a milestone for the crafts school founded in 1951 – which draws hundreds of artisans and aspiring craftsmen and women every year from across the nation and around the world. Many of its students and instructors have gained national prominence in their fields such as internationally known textile designer Jack Lenor Larsen and glassblower Dale Chihuly, who has been featured on PBS.

Giving tours of the campus, Haystack Director Stuart Kestenbaum lingered in the pottery studio, and with good reason. This was the craft that brought him to Haystack in 1975 as a young man.

Kestenbaum recalls he learned new firing techniques, “but what was also important was to be around other people working, people of different backgrounds,” he reflected. “I hadn’t really had my work in front of other people. I saw other people work from clay, learned from other people in class. It’s kind of a charged environment.”

That environment was – and continues to be – marked by the “openness to participation,” as Kestenbaum puts it, of founding Director Fran Merritt, who died last winter.

“Fran had a great ability to work with people, to get them involved and have them discover the answers. There was a certain twinkle in him – he didn’t predict conclusions,” Kestenbaum explained.

Later, Merritt would be on panels when Kestenbaum was with the Maine Arts Commission.

While Haystack has grown in prominence, it has retained “the scale of the place. You could have a world-class school of a model scale. That was exciting,” he said.

Kestenbaum finds interesting the worlds the students come from, and where they go after being influenced by Haystack.

New York resident Alice Simpson came to Deer Isle with 25 years of experience in graphic design, a talent she used to make brochures and other materials for major corporations.

“Then I started making books at Haystack in 1992. I didn’t even know what a book was,” Simpson said during a break from the class in artist’s books she’s taking this summer with Susan Share.

She’s come to Haystack every year since then, “and every year my life has changed. The second year I got rid of my dining room table,” she said. She bought a glass-topped table on which to make her books, and has since gone on to rent space in the Center for Book Arts Gallery in New York City.

Simpson has left a world where books are mass-produced for one where “my books are primarily hand-painted. I wanted to do things by hand,” she said.

She has begun teaching and showing her books, and nearly every one she has created at Haystack has been displayed at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.

Many of her books are about dance, including the noted “Tango Bar.” Some have been purchased by the Lincoln Center’s Jerome Robbins Dance Collection.

This year at Haystack, Simpson is working on a book about a vaudeville dancer from the ’20s and ’30s, and another about the rumba.

Like the other students, she appreciates having the studios open 24 hours a day.

“I stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning,” she said. “I also stay here and work on weekends. I never knew I had this in me. I’m just so in love with Haystack.”

Serving artists during the six sessions each summer is one thing, but Haystack also has a commitment to the local community, Kestenbaum noted.

A student craft institute brings in 72 students from around the state for three days.

“They’re selected by art teachers from Madawaska to Eliot. It’s an opportunity to see a place really dedicated to making art. They’ll come back – some become teachers themselves and then come back as students” in the regular program, Kestenbaum said.

The class in clay, one of six offered during this fourth session of the summer, is taught by Jack Troy, a professor at Juniata College. An artist whose works are in collections at the Smithsonian, Troy wrote “Salt Glazed Ceramics” and “Wood-Fired Stoneware and Porcelain.”

At the moment, Troy is leaning over to peer at a small piece being crafted by Liza Alley Fisher. It’s only the third day of class, but already the young woman from Brooksville has several different cups lined up on a side table.

“Going to arts school, I loved making pots,” said Fisher, who attended Sumner High School and Bennington College.

“I wanted the chance to learn with a really good potter, the chance to experiment and try different things and not worry about making a ton of work. Making cups is a great way to get ideas out,” she said.

There is also a program during the winter that has high school students from Deer Isle and Blue Hill working in the art studios. Other activities include the Open Door session over Columbus Day weekend, which allows Maine residents to take classes at reduced rates.

Free lectures are offered during the summer by visiting artists, and many scholarships are made available each year.

Potter Cynthia Bringle, who taught a session at Haystack earlier this summer, started out as a scholarship student in 1960, back when the school was at the original campus in Liberty.

Now owner of the Cynthia Bringle Pottery Studio in Penland, N.C., she was an art school student who appreciated the opportunity to study with potters from all over the country. She also enjoyed the chance to work with different instructors.

Bringle went back to Haystack its first year on Deer Isle and stayed the whole summer as a scholarship student.

“I did a lot of dishes, washed a lot of bathroom floors,” she remembered.

“The end of that summer, I went to Fran Merritt and told him I wanted to be the studio assistant for pottery the next year, and his answer to me was that he had never given it to a woman before. I said I can do the job, so he let me do it,” Bringle said.

The first time she went back as a full-fledged teacher was 1965, and now she has taught there at least eight times.

“Primarily what I am, though, is a potter,” she said, one who makes a living crafting pieces from coffee cups to architectural wall installations “and everything in between.” The art student who used to wash bathroom floors even makes bathroom sinks, on occasion.

Bringle has taught many places, but Haystack is “where I certainly got my beginnings in terms of trying to figure out what kind of work I wanted to do,” she said.

“People that have knowledge need to pass it on. Places like Haystack, that teach the crafts in a very nonthreatening way, are really important to people’s educations. The learning curve is not short. It’s long,” she explained.

The teachers are people who encourage the students to take risks in their art, to see what happens and work with it.

In a class called surface design, Barbara Goldberg teaches her artists to do shibori – a fabric work involving indigo dye, acid dyes and sometimes removing the color from pieces of cloth.

The fabric is bunched together with thread in such a way that it makes varied patterns when the thread is taken out.

Susan Vitantonio holds up a corner of cloth that looks like a little teepee. With the stitches out, “it will make a circle,” she said.

Sometimes the cloth is gathered and knotted, sometimes the threads go continuously.

“If it’s the aesthetics of what you’re looking for – or happy with – it’s an option,” Vitantonio said.

Looking on, one observer asked Goldberg whether the students were doing everything “right.”

“No, they’re not – and that’s terrific,” the instructor responded.

In addition to the three-week sessions during the summer, Haystack offers workshops for teachers each fall.

One teacher taking the artist’s book class is Sarah Tabor, who is in her 14th year at Bangor High School. She teaches art, printmaking, fabric design and sculpture.

“I love coming to Haystack,” Tabor said. “This is my sixth time in the summer, and I’ve taken 15 fall workshops.” She also was a teaching assistant at Haystack one summer for calligrapher Jan Owen and bookmaker Michael Alpert of Bangor.

Attending this summer on a grant, Tabor explained how writing an essay for the application made her think about what Haystack does for her.

“As a teacher, I need to make art. I can’t teach if I can’t make art. It sort of keeps me whole to make art. It’s good for my soul,” she said.

The focus this session is on commemorative books, Tabor said. She expected to work on a project about an aunt who decided to travel around the world during the 1930s, and another based on a story her grandmother wrote.

For Tabor, there is no place like Haystack.

“The food is absolutely wonderful, the people are great, there are absolutely no responsibilities. The atmosphere is just incredible – you can look out, see the water, see the sailboats,” she said.

“The rest of the world disappears. It’s a place by itself.”

The 50th anniversary of Haystack is being marked this month by an exhibit of crafts by selected Haystack artists at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art – Maine Coast Artists in Rockport. Also, a book about Haystack will be published this fall. For more information on Haystack, call 348-2306 or check the Web site at www.haystack-mtn.org.