Handwork: Crafting the CounterCulture

CRAFTING THE COUNTERCULTURE

The exhibition features the early works of famed Bay Area studio maker Garry Knox Bennett and Santa Cruz/Taos, New Mexico feather artist Nicki Marx.  Both Bennett and Marx are considered historically important American designer-craftsman and had long, influential careers. Their early work, featured in the Handwork: Crafting the Counterculture exhibit, influenced the material culture of California and indeed the larger Nation during the 1960’s and 1970’s.

Garry Knox Bennett (1934-2022) was raised in the rough-and-tumble east bay town of Alameda during the time the Beat Poets were making literary waves in San Francisco.  Garry studied painting and sculpture at California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC) in Oakland, graduating in 1961. The next year, he and his wife Sylvia moved to Lincoln, California – a small agricultural town near Sacramento. Garry built his own home and started a dedicated art practice.

Five years later Garry and Sylvia moved their young family back to the Bay Area, and they discovered the 1960’s counterculture in full swing. In 1966, Gary and Sylvia founded ‘Squirkenworks,’ a design production studio in San Francisco and later a metal-plating business in Oakland, where Garry established his art studio. Bennett’s studio production during these early years included works in metal: jewelry, stylized pipes, fantastical clips and sculpture. Garry produced some of the first peace-pins worn by anti-war protesters.

Bennett crafted his first large-scale piece of furniture, “Lamp Cabinet” in 1973. Eventually, Garry’s practice developed into the production of finely wrought wood and metal furniture, lamps, clocks and other decorative objects - many with splashes of bold color and a touch of his sharp humor. Bennett’s masterwork is the finely crafted and conceptual piece, ‘Nail Cabinet’ (1979).

“If I made something for somebody, I didn’t want any money down. They didn’t know what they were getting. If they wanted a table, they’d get a table, or a lamp – I’d make a lamp, but in the end, they didn’t know what they were getting. I was making it for me.” - Garry Knox Bennett

By the 1980’s, Garry Knox Bennett had become the darling of design collectors, gallerists and museums on both coasts. His work is included in important museum collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City (formerly the American Craft Museum), LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) and the V+A (Victoria and Albert) in London. In 2011, Garry received the James Renwick Alliance Master of the Medium award.

 Nicki Marx (1943 – 2023) In 1977, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner called the feather artist “one of the most highly-charged, deeply creative craftswomen west of the Mississippi.” Though she had only been making art five years previously, by 1977 Marx had already had two solo museum shows, six solo gallery shows and had garnered wide media attention.

“Almost everything that I do is a mandala. For me, the process is transcendent, about a meditation and letting the energy flow through me. If that comes out in my work, I have been successful”. – Nicki Marx

Marx’s art practice started in the early 1970’s with a series of feather-based wearable pieces including dramatic necklace/breastplates, capes and vests, and progressed quickly to large-scale canvases covered with natural materials such as feathers, bark, shells, dried flower petals, claws, beaks and bones. The LA Herald Examiner noted in the 1977 feature, that “fellow sculptress Louise Nevelson wears a feather cape by Nicki Marx when she chooses to make a particularly regal entrance, and artist Georgia O’Keefe wears Marx’s breastplate of feathers titled, “For Georgia.”

“The process of creating is a spiritual experience for me,” Marx told California Today Magazine in October of 1974. “I sense a sacredness and beauty in Mother Earth and believe the greatest art is found in nature. Feathers, to me, are sacred – and flight and birds are a symbol of freedom.” She told the Palo Alto Times in 1976, “I don’t know where the ideas come from. They just appear without intellectualizing about them. When I’m really into my work, I feel like an instrument. The ideas are flowing through me but they don’t come from me.” In an interview with the Desert Sun, she put it another way – “I’m the vessel through which my work happens.” Marx moved from California to Taos, New Mexico in 1985 and lived and worked in her studio there for almost 40 years.

“Handwork: Crafting the Counterculture,” is curated by West Coast design specialist Katie Nartonis.