Breathing Life Into Art

The names Frank Lloyd Wright and E. Fay Jones often appear together in discussions of the sleek, sculptural architecture both created.

If the names Dale Chihuly and Ed Pennebaker aren't so often intertwined, they should be. Like Chihuly, the artist whose organic sculptures graced Crystal Bridges Museum last summer, Pennebaker breathes life into hot glass.

And like Jones, Pennebaker claims Arkansas as home, starting his glass studio in Salem in 1985 and working for many years in the woods of Carroll County near Osage. In the ensuing three decades, he's also earned national attention as Jones did. Early American Life magazine included Pennebaker's studio, Red Fern Glass, in its directory of Traditional American Crafts from 1987-2000, an honor bestowed on a handful of artisans who work in traditional media. During that time period some of the museum shops that carried his work included the Smithsonian.

"I think being chosen to be in the White House Crafts Collection most pleased and surprised me," Pennebaker muses. "Because the artists were chosen from all over the country, it is a very select and prestigious group to be in."

Perhaps it was a move to a new studio in Clinton that encouraged Pennebaker to mount a kind of retrospective of his art. Whatever the inspiration, concurrent exhibits at the Peel Mansion and Compton Gardens in Bentonville will showcase pieces from what he calls his "vintage collection."

"These are pieces that were made 1985-1999 when I was primarily making reproductions of early American glassware from the 18th and 19th centuries," he explains. "There will also be around 60 to 70 ornaments; they may be in the gift shop. There will be about 18 smaller sculptures at Peel Mansion and four to six larger sculptures outside at Compton Gardens. The vintage pieces may have been seen before but not for a long time except at my studio."

Pennebaker says he started working in glass in 1981, when he was an artist-in-residence at the schools in Liberal, Kan.

"The high school art instructor there had access to a glass studio and got me interested," he remembers. "The process of working with hot glass was so intriguing; it was such a challenge. I think it was the challenge that inspired me, and continues to do so. There is always room to learn and grow with the material."

In 1996, Pennebaker says, he began making sculptural work which he called "clusters."

"They were groups of glass pieces attached together," he explains. "They developed into lighted chandeliers, which became my major production item from 1999 through the present. To date I've made 639 chandeliers."

And then, in 2008, Pennebaker took off down an environmental side road, making mixed media sculptures that use glass -- sometimes blown, sometimes cast, fused, hot worked, or cold worked -- in combination with steel, stone and found objects.

"I like to reuse discarded items and scraps," he says. "Part of that is the environmental side of me and part is the side of me that sees the aesthetic qualities of an item that has wear and tear showing on it."

And he says he's heading down an even more unusual path next -- "a series of works inspired by leftover construction materials, the location of the new studio (near where a tornado went through in 2008) where we have been cleaning up a lot of debris, and the current political climate."

"I'm thinking the theme of these new works using found demolished materials combined with glass will be something like 'chaos vs. order.'"

NAN What's Up on 07/15/2018