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The Capable Artist
(originally published in GASNews, September/October 2001

            The single most valuable insight that I received in my prolonged, state-subsidized career as a graduate student came from Richard Harned, head of the glass program at Ohio State University. I was tremulously facing graduation and the inevitable expulsion from the comfortable routines of graduate school (normally a two-year degree program that I managed to extend to six). Caring critics and peer groups, facilities and technical support, information and resources had all been supplied, along with a monthly stipend, and I was trying to imagine a future in which I could arrange that for myself. A friend and I had hit upon the idea that we would start our own school, which, we reckoned in our majestic naiveté, would both avoid the awful future of getting a job and ensure access to a glass studio. At some point during my last year in school while we were plotting this caper, I realized that there were a few pieces of the puzzle that were missing. For instance, I had never made a budget before. I had never written a business plan, or been involved with starting a non-profit. I had never applied for a building permit, solicited funds from donors, written a curriculum, or mounted an exhibition. I knew nothing about designing and building the necessary studio equipment – which, when I took a closer look, seemed awfully complicated. At some point I panicked and the phrase “hare-brained” attached itself to our scheme.
            Richard’s gift to me that year was his belief in the protean potential of the artist.  His idea, communicated both in theory and in practice, was that an artist exists in society as a problem solver, a fount of imagination, and a creative fixer for a wide variety of problems. An artist could program a Partlow controller, draw up a project budget, understand a combustion gas train, design a production line, build a furnace, and write promotional materials. What an artist did, in essence, was figure things out. An artist lived in the tradition of Daedalus, the magnificent artificer who designed both the maze and the wings with which to escape from it. Richard argued me out of the dualistic anti-technological bias that I had received as a legacy of an earlier pop culture (nature=good, science=bad). In his conception an artist had a hardier sensibility, to which no field of knowledge was foreign.
            This enhanced sense of capability powered me through the post-graduate school learning curve of the next couple of years. It shaped my belief that part of my charge as an artist is to apply creativity and sensitivity and energy to the problem at hand.
            This summer, G.A.S. held a wonderful conference in Corning. It was a great success by any measure: the quality of the program, attendance, fundraising events, member feedback, community relations. It did not resemble the staid, canned conference experience of, say, orthopedic surgeons. The program and the events were planned and staged as a response to a very particular site, skillfully utilizing the best of what Corning had to offer, creatively integrating our own organizational traditions into a specific locale. The people who worked on the conference – from the local co-chairs and their volunteers, to the G.A.S. staff and Board – came up with inspired solutions to a welter of problems that presented themselves, in the process expending a great deal of creative energy. The artists involved in putting on this event – in this group I include not just the more visible speakers and demonstrators, but the exhibitors and the people who worked behind the scenes – rose to the occasion to enhance the experience for everybody.
            G.A.S. was founded as an organization for artists and remains so. In working for G.A.S., there’s a dynamic between the can-do competence and the willingness to cooperate that I find exhilarating. It’s the self-reliance of artists who have the power of discovery and creativity to draw upon and who place a high value on cooperation that makes our conferences the very special events that they are.

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