Students of a certain age were lucky to take Shop in elementary, junior high, and high school. I was one of the lucky ones and that’s how I dove into a life of creating, observing and curating exhibitions and books of turned wood art. Ken Spitzbard and his passionate wood collecting became known to me in that context. He brought his eye, his curiosity, and the vision of a collection to his hunt.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell if an object is wood. Todd Hoyer’s work in the Spitzbard collection is a perfect reflection of how wood artists incorporate form, finish, and mixed materials to convey messages.
In the 1970s, Baby Boomer woodworkers rediscovered using the lathe. They placed a strong emphasis on revealing the natural beauty in chunks of wood by peeling the bark away to reveal the inner cambium. Turning as a field surged way beyond use of the lathe from a roughing out tool to expressive virtuosity and stellar finishes. As the turners met and created community, they worked and shaped their pieces to present in Craft fairs and galleries which had focused on other media such as glass and ceramics. Public recognition and appreciation of this fresh wood movement led to the birth of many private collections.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell if an object is wood. Todd Hoyer’s work in the Spitzbard collection is a perfect reflection of how wood artists incorporate form, finish, and mixed materials to convey messages. These vertical forms create presence. Their finishes invite touch or demand distance. Simple wound wire creates tension and mystery in its chokehold. The artist is done; the viewer begins their journey.
Albert LeCoff is an art consultant and the Executive Director Emeritus and Co-Founder of The Museum for Art in Wood, Philadelphia.
My creative process is reliant on the need not to be dazzled and stalled by technique and the beauty of the material. For me, success is to move forward, balancing the manipulation of form and expression with the organic nature of wood.
Todd Hoyer
Twenty-five years ago, I crossed the threshold of Ken Spitzbard’s Connecticut home for the first time. It was an entry into a new and unfamiliar world. At the time, I was a graduate student at nearby Yale University, and despite my wet-behind-the-ears status, I’d been invited to join the curatorial team for an exhibition called Wood Turning in North America Since 1930, a collaboration between the university art museum and what was then the Wood Turning Center in Philadelphia (today’s Museum for Art in Wood). The previous summer, I’d taken my first slightly anxious turn at a lathe. The experience had confirmed for me that my contribution to the field, if any, would be through writing and research rather than making. I’d learned quickly in the ensuing months, thanks to the guidance of Albert Le Coff (founding director of the WTC), as well as my mentors at Yale. Until I got to Ken’s house, though, I had never seen so many pieces of wood art at once. For that matter, I don’t think I had ever visited the home of a collector before.
Ken knows very well what he likes, but his collecting decisions have never been driven by taste alone...He’ll buy something not just for its elegant silhouette or spectacular material, but also for how it fits into the arc of an artist’s career, and the trajectory of the discipline as a whole.
It was a great place to start. Our exhibition project was meant to be the first comprehensive account of wood art, surveying the field’s historical development, leading protagonists, technical features, and aesthetic vocabulary. Remarkably, and (as I would later discover) very unusually for a private collector, Ken was trying to do exactly the same thing, all on his own. As he walked me around his house, patiently explaining each object to me—Michael Peterson’s lyrical landscape forms, Todd Hoyer’s powerful materialized metaphors, William Hunter’s transcendent twisting spirals—I felt like I was talking to a fellow curator. Ken knows very well what he likes, but his collecting decisions have never been driven by taste alone. His undeniable passion for the material is channeled through an analytical mindset. He’ll buy something not just for its elegant silhouette or spectacular material, but also for how it fits into the arc of an artist’s career, and the trajectory of the discipline as a whole. Thus, although it is contemporary sculptural work that most fires his imagination, he also has representative pieces by foundational figures like Rude Osolnik and Bob Stocksdale. When he takes a strong interest in an artist like Christian Burchard or Galen Carpenter—or the whole Moulthrop dynasty—he collects both in depth and breadth, capturing every facet of their creative vision.
