ROCHESTER: A LITTLE ABOVE AVERAGE

Susan B. Anthony, Mt. Hope Cemetary, Rochester, NY

Sometimes my home town gets it right!

For those who may not already know, Rochester, New York, was home to Susan B. Anthony - her modest family home is a little museum and there’s a tiny park near her house with a bronze sculpture of Susan B. sitting with Frederick Douglas having tea (Douglas lived in Rochester too and published his NorthStar newspaper here.)

This week was Voting Day ( 2016 Presidential Primaries) and here at Susan’s graveside, women left small bouquets of flowers but even better, plastered their “I Voted” stickers all over her gravestone.  Now I ask you…is that not way cool?  I can’t think of anything better, any way more appropriate to acknowledge the gift that she and those early mothers, sisters and aunts gave us.

Now….VOTE…next November…and every chance you get.  People actually suffered for our right to mark that ballot.

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I want a “studio craft museum” here.  It makes sense historically and philosophically and (cross my fingers) financially.  We sit in the very cradle of craft renewal.  Roycroft is just up the road, Stickley is just a short jont uphill, and Shakers are not far away. Swedes settled Jamestown to build furniture in high end factories. Alfred University (school of ceramics) isn’t far away, Corning Glass is about an hour’s drive, School of American Crafts is here at Rochester Institute of Technology.  What could be more sensible?

THE NEW YORK TIMES article in today’s paper speaks to the huge imbalance between the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They make a strong case that all the $$$ and attention (attendance too?) is headed toward contemporary art. MOMA is booming; the Met is in trouble. 

O.K., I get it.  But people like making things and they love seeing what other people make and they fantasize that if only they had the time/studio/material they too could turn out beautiful stuff but in the meantime, they want to see, touch and add the handmade and unique to their own environments.  I believe this! I’m willing to try convincing other people to believe it. 

So what shall we name this new Rochester place? I’m thinking “Hands”…”Made by Hand”…”The Annex?”

"Taking Tea" bronze by Pepsy Kettavong, 2001

THE GENIUS OF JAMES JOHNSON

Jim Johnson died last month. Johnson was an Oklahoma boy (my home state) but he landed in Rochester, New York, in the early 1960’s and spent his entire career designing nearly-always-interesting-nearly-always-controversial buildings.  

The Johnson designed synagog on Penfield Road is maybe one of the most beautiful sanctuaries I’ve ever been inside. Temple Sinai is a modestly sized structure that’s nestled in the woods on a lot that probably nobody else wanted in the mid-1960s; train tracks run all too close to the parking area and Penfield Road is a neither- here -nor- there entry to country-suburbia, hardly the epi-center of a sophisticated Jewish support base. But there it squats. The recent addition of a covered entry gives the building a becoming Oriental flourish but mostly, from the outside, the architecture is entirely ignorable.

The magic happens inside the sanctuary. The two long side walls made of roughly formed concrete lean inwards; the ceiling is one giant window to the sky. Clouds float overhead; ivy grows up the walls toward the light. 

The altar is the place for brilliantly designed furniture by Wendell Castle who was proving to the world his special genius of freeform design.  These sit in the foreground of another total glass wall. Just outside this window wall are two skinny, building height pillars of concrete representing the tablets of Moses and finally, the woods beyond. 

Temple Sinai is about as perfect as any building can get. It marries exquisite form, materials, and setting in a way that inspires awe/worship/reflection. 

Temple Sinai, Altar/Interior (above)

Another of Johnson’s remarkable structures is the tiny catholic chapel in Naples, New York. Ugly as a mole on a witches chin on the outside, the inside of the chapel feels like a living, breathing Christmas tree that somehow you found your way to stand inside at its very trunk while glowing disc of colored lights dance around.  You need to experience it to believe it.

Johnson loved concrete.  His personal home - which is for sale right now  - is classic Johnson (concrete with swooping cedar shingled roof). The Mushroom House in nearby Fairport is another concrete formed building.  Another house backs to the woods off Clover Street and is a smaller and slightly earlier version of his own house. I could not live five minutes in any of these houses. They are cold, off putting spaces with little regard for human participation and family building. Nor do they particularly pay attention to the site in which they occupy. None of the three especially open to what’s outside their cement walls.

 But here’s the thing:  I don’t require an artist to make a masterpiece every time they enter their studio. One masterpiece in a lifetime - one brilliant  painting, song, poem or building - is enough to prove the evolution of humankind and that geniuses still walk among us.  

To have completed two or three? Johnson can rest easy; he got there.   

James Johnson personal residence, Penfield, New York—now for sale (above)

The Mushroom House, originally built for Robert and Marget Antell (below)