AAM Interim Director Jennifer Chzranowski and Museum Trustees Diz Hormel (2024 Craft Show Chair) and Donald Wooters (2024 Craft Show Co-Chair) sat down with Laura Baring-Gould, the Featured Artist at this year’s Craft Show, to learn more about her creative practice and how it has evolved from large-scale public sculptures to craft, which Baring-Gould describes as “discrete, beautiful hand-held things.” The interview has been edited for length and clarity.  

Diz: The Museum is thrilled to have you as our featured artist for the 2024 Craft Show. Can you tell us about your background and how it influenced your work?  

LBG: As a young child I grew up in Costa Rica, Mexico, New York and California, and in the early 1970’s we settled in Alaska. As a family, we built cabins surrounded by cottonwood trees, started alternative schools, and spent time surrounded by infinite awe. Alaska was also a place where I experienced incredible community as people organized to protect wild landscapes and codify indigenous land rights. Trying to weave these together, I imagined an adult life as a scientist who would preserve wonder through public policy, so I studied sciences in college. But I felt greater connection and endurance in my art classes. Once I relocated to the East Coast I saw that people living in dense cities needed awe too. Art felt like an important and immediate way to do that.  

 

Jenn: How did you set out to do that as a young artist? Tell us more about your early work.  

LBG: At first, I gave myself five years to figure it out – I was waitressing, teaching, working as an artist assistant –and making things outdoors responding to the landscapes I could work in: lines of fallen birch trees or hundreds of pine-cones woven across a woodland park. These site-specific pieces led to large-scale work inside museums and galleries – illuminated boats suspended above 11 tons of salt in a converted wooden chapel, or a giant beehive made of wound straw in a museum abutting historically rich agricultural farmland. These projects were ambitious and required the help of many. Some were artists, others were not – but together we were transforming materials to make these magical spaces for people to understand something about the places they were in, but to also feel connected and inspired. As my practice developed, I was invited to create more substantial temporary and permanent public artworks. These pieces also required close collaboration with the local community so the work could truly be public as it honored what people feel connected to and care about.  

Don: You’ve done a lot of casts of pears. Tell us about the outdoor giant bronze pear. 

LBG: The public artwork I am most well-known for is a twelve-foot bronze pear that celebrates Dorchester, a community in Boston where the Clapps’ Favorite pear was first grown in 1830. It’s a cross pollination between the Bartlett, known for its hard skin, and the Flemish Beauty, resulting in a tough -skinned pear that inside was sweet as butter – which basically describes everybody who lives in that community.  

Diz: Can you tell us about your method for casting pears? 

LBG: The first pieces I made of pears were not ripe ones. I instead took slumping pears far past their prime and encased them in ceramic. After a two-week process of building up the ceramic, I fired pieces in the kiln, burning up the pear and leaving a hollow space in the ceramic. This negative space – the mold –gets filled with molten bronze. Once cool, I would crack off the ceramic to reveal the original pear –the same thing, but totally different. The entire process amazed me. 

My studio was filled with rotting fruit and small bronze objects when I was asked to propose a project for Dorchester. I obviously could not create a monument of a rotten pear, but I knew that the humble fruit and its stewardship might really resonate.  

Don: So how did you pivot to craft?  

LBG: While I was making these bigger artworks, I was also finding my own refuge in making smaller pieces that transformed impermanent objects into talismans of experience.  

I participated in my first Craft exhibition almost 20 years ago and loved the immediate connection people had to these bronzes and how they felt in the palm of a hand. I loved, too, the idea of taking ephemeral objects – sewn children’s caps, bamboo baskets, fish traps, or even a magnolia branch with a bird’s nest, and casting them into permanent metal.  

Diz: These pieces are so tactile. You just want to hold them. They have a solidity and permanence, but at the same time appear so delicate. How do you bring out that juxtaposition?  

LBG: It is important to hold something and have it affect you. It’s important that people at weddings have held my pieces and shared them with those they love, and equally important that others have died holding these pieces as well. While I am 

thankful for the bigger public artworks that exist out in the world, these objects can be with you.  

Jenn: It seems that your background in science continues to inform your work. Is that accurate?  

LBG: 100% yes – in every aspect of my work: I am a naturalist who collects and studies pears from heirloom trees and am amazed by the material science of bird’s building their nests. The entire process of casting, metal work, and patina are also all about material technology and experimentation. 

Jenn: After working with artists and organizing AAM’s Craft Show for the past 6 years, I know that the circuit can be grueling. What is it about craft shows that keep you coming back? 

LBG: I have been able to continue to be an artist because I unlocked the world of craft and found this essential community that values artists’ work. I love sharing my work with people, from small shows to the Smithsonian. And it is the work of organizations that hold it together – places like the Academy Art Museum– that bring people together to share stories and experience something special. The people who want to share the story and the people who want to receive the story. Even just one connection, one moment of magic. And that’s how I think lives are changed, right?

 

 

The Board of Trustees of the Academy Art Museum is delighted to announce the appointment of Charlotte Potter Kasic as its next Director.

Currently serving as Executive Director of the Barry Art Museum at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, Charlotte is an accomplished administrator and visual artist, whose medium is glass. During her tenure as Glass Studio Manager and Programming Director at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, she pioneered the field of performance glass. An avid educator, Potter Kasic founded the Assistantship Program at the Chrysler and taught glass and new media courses at universities and summer programs such as Penland School of Crafts and Oxbow School of Art.

Daniel Weiss, Museum Trustee and Search Committee Chair, notes, “We are extraordinarily fortunate to have Charlotte as our new Director.  She is an experienced and accomplished leader with an exciting vision for the future of the Academy Art Museum.” He added, “During the search, the Museum benefited from the exceptional leadership of Interim Director Jennifer Chrzanowski and we are well positioned for the years ahead.”

In accepting this position, Potter Kasic said, “As I step into this new role, I am particularly excited to reconnect with my artistic roots and engage with the Museum’s studio programs and to foster an enhanced  dynamic relationship between classes and the exhibition schedule. This holistic approach to programming is integral to my vision for expanding the Museum’s educational and cultural impact. I am also thrilled by the Museum’s ambitious and thought-provoking programming, such as the upcoming exhibition, ‘Bugatti: Reaching for Perfection’. The Museum’s trustees and staff are passionate, dedicated and committed professionals. Together, we will ensure that the Academy Art Museum continues to thrive as a center for creativity, education, and community engagement.”

The Academy Art Museum announces its most ambitious exhibition to date, Bugatti: Reaching for Perfection, opening with a special gala preview on December 5, 2024. The exhibition will open to the public on December 6, 2024, and run through April 13, 2025. It will feature rare automobiles, sculpture, and furniture by the Bugatti family, along with other objects and ephemera related to the renowned marque. In addition to furniture borrowed from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Bugatti: Reaching for Perfection will showcase works from two important private collections never-before seen together: eight bronze sculptures from the Arsidi-Scuderi Collection of Lugano, Switzerland, and five vintage Bugatti cars and other automotive elements from the North Collection of the Eastern Shore, Maryland. Highlights include two grand prix race cars, two Type 57 touring cars, and a miniature “Baby.”

A Multigenerational Story of Modern Creativity and Innovation

The exhibition will explore the rich artistic and technological legacies of the peripatetic Bugatti family, beginning with patriarch Carlo Bugatti (1856-1940). His fin-de-siècle furniture designs, which debuted at international expositions in London, Paris, Milan, and Turin, are noteworthy for their fanciful combination of materials: ebonized wood inlaid with copper, brass, ivory, mother-of-pearl, and vellum, which he often decorated with leather tassels, geometric marquetry, and painted designs. Sons Ettore (1881-1947) and Rembrandt (1884-1916) inherited their father’s artistic passion but pursued different paths. 

Rembrandt had a tragically brief career as a sculptor, producing deeply empathetic and impressionistic portraits of animals. Ettore, meanwhile, became a celebrated automobile designer and manufacturer. According to automotive scholar and guest curator Ken Gross, Bugatti’s technical advances were inextricably linked to—even indistinguishable from—their formal beauty: “Everything about Bugatti was artistic: the cars, their advertising, and the enduring joie de vivre associated with the marque.” The cars that he and his elder son, Jean (1909-1939), designed came to epitomize the speed and dynamism of modernity.

Visitors to the exhibition will be able to immerse themselves in the Bugatti family story as they view the furniture, cars, sculptures, photographs, advertisements, and other ephemera. These pieces and the stories behind them will provide a deeper understanding of the family’s creative passions, their pursuit of perfection, and their place within the history of cultural modernity. “Although Ettore Bugatti famously declared, ‘Perfection is never reached,’ he obsessively pursued it throughout his career,” said senior curator Lee Glazer. 

Expanding Access and Audience

Maryland’s Eastern Shore is a major destination for car collectors, thanks to the annual St. Michaels Concours d’Elegance. Bugatti: Reaching for Perfection aims to attract concours attendees and car collectors who are not necessarily regular Academy Art Museum visitors. Special “hoods up” days and other programs will offer behind-the-scenes experiences and special access to subject-matter experts.  

The exhibition supports the museum’s commitment to education, outreach, and inspiration for all. With no admission fee, Bugatti: Reaching for Perfection will be accessible not only to car enthusiasts and collectors, but to art and design lovers, and the broader community, including students and residents of the mid-Atlantic region and the Eastern Shore.

Save the Date

The exhibition opens with a gala preview on December 5, 2024, and will open to the public on December 6, 2024 and run through April 13, 2025.

Sponsors

We are grateful to the following organizations for making this exhibition possible. Preliminary sponsors include lead sponsor Blue Point Hospitality with additional support from Arlington Associates, Benson & Mangold, Boxwood Estate Winery, Brown Advisory, Chuck Mangold, Jr./Benson and Mangold, Easton Utilities, Eben Finney/Brown Advisory, Grayce B. Kerr Foundation, J.P. Morgan Private Bank, McHale Landscape Design, Shore United, The Oaks, Tidewater Inn and Wye Financial.