Teachers, metalsmiths to be honored in retrospective

Here’s an interesting factoid: Virtually every significant artist working in metals during the course of the last 50 years has learned the medium at a university or art school.

If the studying took place at UW–Madison sometime during the last almost 30 years, the artist learned very well indeed, since the teacher probably was Fred Fenster, Eleanor Moty or both.

A tribute to these master metalsmiths, now retired, will open at the Chazen Museum of Art on Saturday, April 29. Focusing on the 28 years that Fenster and Moty led the art metals program here, the exhibition will feature both a retrospective of their work between 1972-2001 and pieces by 25 MFA graduates who studied with them. Works include hollowware, jewelry, wearable sculpture, poetic/narrative objects, conceptual installations and more.

Fenster and Moty couldn’t have been more different as practicing artists. Fenster trained at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. He is known for fusing European Modernism with Arts and Crafts style. The result is a clean, functional line that reveals his commitment to functional forms. He says that he prefers to work in pewter, although he is a master of silver and gold as well. Last year he was awarded the American Craft Council’s highest award, the Gold Medal. In addition, he has received the Hans Christensen Sterling Silversmith’s Award in 2002. In 1995 his “Fred’s Pin” was offered as a premium to patrons who bought $500 worth of tickets at American Players Theatre in Spring Green. In 1999 he was awarded a UW System Alliant Energy Underkofler Award for Distinguished Teaching, cited especially for encouraging his graduate and undergraduate students to learn from each other as well as from him.

Moty studied at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. Known for paring down her work to its essential form, Moty credits landscape with being an ongoing inspiration for her, perhaps due to her upbringing on an Illinois farm, she says. She began her career in the 1970s by incorporating industrial techniques and often working in untraditional materials. During the 1980s, she began to use cut crystal and also explored new ornamentation methods. Inducted as a fellow into the American Craft Council in 1998, she also has received several fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts Craftsmanship.

Different artists though they are, as teachers both Fenster and Moty stress quality crafting, technical innovation, integrity of form and well-conceived design. Their students thoroughly absorbed those values. One of them, Susie Ganch, started her undergraduate career with a geology major. She took her first metalworking class in 1992 and received her MFA in 1997. She currently heads the metal/jewelry program at Virginia Commonwealth University.

“Fred and Eleanor have a lasting legacy of teaching, honoring, perpetuating and influencing the field of metalsmithing and jewelry making through not only their own work, but also through their contributions to education — that has resulted in other people making their own contributions to the field. By producing my own work as well as by teaching, I am engaged in continuing the ideas and philosophies they taught me,” she says. “I apply on a daily basis everything I learned from them, everything from technical information to how best to teach my courses and run my program.”

Ganch will join seven other former students of Fenster and Moty for a panel discussion of their influence on the field of metalworking, and on the students themselves. The event will take place at 9:30 a.m. on Saturday, April 29, in L140 Chazen. Another discussion participant will be Paulette Werger, who received her MFA in 1984. Today she is a full-time metalsmith at a cooperative studio in New England. She says that the UW–Madison metalworking program gave her a real-world feel for the discipline.

“Through their open sharing of information about our field, they instilled in me a persistent curiosity about how things work, as well as a commitment to teaching and making art,” she says.

Fenster and Moty will open the exhibition with a free public lecture about their work at 5:30 p.m. on Friday, April 28, in L160 Chazen. A reception will follow their remarks.

The exhibition will be on view through Sunday, July 23. For more information or for details about related events, visit http://www.chazen.wisc.edu/.