American Style Magazine Fall 2000

The mural hanging over the lunch counter at One Cottage Street in Easthampton, Mass., shows a group of men and women grinning, waving at diners and huddling together, as if posing for a family photograph. A look under the mural and into the room shows much the same scene, only this time it's real. Well-known furniture makers Silas Kopf and William Hewitt sit in the center of the cafeteria holding court to a group of artists and clients. There's joking, wild gesturing and peals of laughter. Another furniture maker, William Sayre, walks in and hails the two as the "mayors of One Cottage Street." You get the idea - this is a friendly place.

Everyone knows everyone else. After lunch, as you stroll through the five-story brick building, you see the artists at work. Studio doors stand open. Artists run in and out, conversing in the halls. The sweet scent of fresh-cut wood and the light, rhythmic sounds of planing and sanding fill the air.

It's a surprisingly quiet building when you consider that 60 of New England's best known artists work here, a third of whom are furniture makers. There's Stephen Daniell, who is part furniture maker and part inventor, who puts the finishing touches on a child's headboard, round in the shape of a full moon, surrounded by a row of stars that twinkle as the child sleeps. There's Mason Rapaport, who takes veneered woods and bends them into sleek elliptical tables and audaciously curved chairs.

Then there's Janna Ugone, who creates contemporary paintings on low-fired earthenware lampshades. There's Lynn Latimer, who carves colored glass with iridized surfaces to create exotic glass African-inspired masks, bowls and plates. And there's Eileen Jager, who blows, casts, sandblasts and paints glass to create goblets that seem to worship the light.

There's so much talent under this one roof, you can only wonder what drew all these artists to this drab mill building in central Massachusetts. "It just happened," shrugs Richard Kubasek, the building's manager, who didn't plan to create an artists' enclave. He explains that when the 168,000-square foot building needed tenants, artists came.

Actually, there is more to the story. One Cottage Street was built in 1849 as a button factory. By 1976, the garment industry had moved south, and owner JP Stevens decided to gift the building to Riverside Industries, a service organization that serves 150 disabled individuals. The nonprofit group needed only two floors, so to maintain the huge structure, it had to rent out the other three.

Soon after receiving the mill as a donation, Riverside Industries began converting the former mill complex into artist studios.

Fully occupied since 1992, artists still "call up every day, looking for space in the building and it's just not there," says Riverside Industries Board Member Kathy Hall.

Furniture makers David Powell and John Tierney were among the first to inquire about leasing space for their new furniture design and construction school, Leeds Design Workshop. For it, the building was perfect - high ceilings, open rooms, wood floors and eight-foot high windows.

Drawing as many as 21 students at a time, the school taught budding furniture makers the value of hand-craftsmanship, making works one at a time and developing an original design style. Powell had trained in England under Edward Barnsley, who descended from English Arts & Crafts furniture makers Sidney and Ernest Barnsley.

While the school is now gone, some of Leeds' students, such as Tony Clarke, Bruce Volz, Hewitt, Kopf and Sayre, stayed in the building, setting up their own studios.

"A lot of people here went through Leeds, and if they didn't, they were aware of that community, " says Silas Kopf, who came to Leeds as a resident in 1977, following a two-year apprenticeship with furniture designer Wendell Castle. As he explains, once word of the building's creative synergism began to spread, artists everywhere wanted to be part of it.

When asked about the painting in the lunch room, Kopf winks and says, "It helps knowing the artist." He's a jovial, self-effacing man, who makes light of his status as a world-known master of marquetry, the art of decorating wood surfaces with thin wood veneers of various grains, textures and colors.

Silas Kopf hand-finishes a coffee table with marquetry detail on top. The magazine, note pad and pencil are part of the marquetry.

While his work recalls Florentine Renaissance artistry, Kopf's interpretation is quite contemporary. On a maple and rosewood fall-front desk, he creates a dozen faces with outstretched hands, offering a sign of peace. Wrapping around the desk's front and sides, the identical faces line up one next to the other, giving the viewer the dizzying sensation of standing in front of a mirror with a dozen facets. But then at the focal point of the desk, the faces meet, nose to nose, palm to palm.

So striking is Kopf's work that he receives commissions from top collectors and clients throughout the country. In fact, he went to Bill Gates' mansion in Washington where he created, on the doors of Gates' home theater, Art Deco ushers who welcome visitors to their seats.

Creating this caliber of work, Kopf's studio could be anywhere - certainly closer to his clients and galleries in New York City. Yet he chooses to stay where he has been for the last 23 years. "Partly it's a tribute to the hospitality of the Pioneer Valley," he says. As if on cue, Hewitt enters the studio, hauling over his shoulder the largest straight-edge ever seen. He drops it off, and then tosses a "thanks" over his shoulder. The furniture makers have been friends since meeting at Leeds in 1980. Now they're studio neighbors.

"Among woodworkers it's a give and take situation. It's hard to have everything," says Hewitt, referring to the sharing of materials, expertise and talents throughout the building. "There's no real competition. I show my clients other people's work. If they're not going to buy from me, they're going to buy from someone. It might as well be someone that I know."

It's a concept that's not likely to be touted by the Harvard Business School but that's what makes it so refreshing.

In the Leeds tradition, Hewitt works in his own distinctive style. "I like to give people the sense that they're not looking at furniture but something else," he says, showing examples of furniture inspired by architectural forms. Hall and coffee tables, with steel cables running through them, resemble bridges. Vanity drawer towers look like skyscrapers. A fall-front desk is patterned after the Taj Mahal. Another fall-front desk resembles a turreted castle, complete with a drawbridge that opens and closes by pulling on gargoyle-shaped weights, made by Elizabeth Solomon.

Down the hall is Solomon's studio. There she paints intimate interiors and quiet landscapes in oil, besides sculpting and working on projects for other artist's. In fact, she painted the mural downstairs. The family-style portrait has special meaning to her. Before coming here, 14 years ago, she discovered that an artist's life can be lonely and isolating. Here, she says, "I'm very supported."

A visit to
Chartes
Cathedral
near Paris
sparked
Eileen Jager's
passion for
glass.

Here, she
forms a
glass rod
in flame.

It's that feeling Mason Rapaport sought when he came to the building nine years ago. The young furniture artist was anxious to launch his career and work alongside talented high-caliber artists. But he faced one problem. He didn't own any equipment. As luck would have it, three artists were renting space in their woodworking machine room, known as Rhino Woodworking. This, he says, "sealed his fate." It enabled him to work, sell and build up enough capital to be on his own.

Now Rapaport is widely recognized for elegantly shaped furniture that curves in unexpected ways. For instance, the outside backs of one set of dining room chairs are spherically shaped and bow slightly outward. The side legs and arm are made of one boomerang-shaped piece. The artist strategically places curly maple and figured cherry veneers to create intriguing surface patterns.

Mason Rapaport in his studio

In mid-conversation, a fellow furniture maker walks in and asks Rapaport for advice. He stops what he's doing, looks over the problem and offers his opinion. Afterward he says, "It's like continuing education. You can walk down the hall and ask a question and get three different answers. There is a tremendous amount of camaraderie here."

That's what brought Janna Ugone to the building. "I wanted something similar to the feeling that I'd had in college - a lot of studios with artists working in different media. In school, there was such energy around me, and a lot of nice people with dedication to work of a certain quality," she says. In 1985, she rented an 800-square foot room and began applying her expertise in jewelry, ceramics and illustrating to making aesthetic, yet functional, lighting. Fine details, such as sculptural hardware and shades that resemble frescos or paintings that seem extracted from Egyptian tombs, earmark her work.

Using a palette of ochre, sage, slate and terra cotta, Ugone paints hieroglyphic symbols of nature on parchment and low-fired earthenware surfaces. "I love details," says Ugone, whose lamps often have as many as 42 parts. Backed up with orders from galleries nationwide, she has expanded her studio to 5,000 square feet, which still isn't large enough.

One of Ugone's former employees, Evelyn Snyder, now works with two other artists, Peter Feitner and Christy Knox, at Kaleidoscope Pottery. The artists create high-fired stoneware called Leafware. Plates, bowls and dinnerware are slumped into molds. Before drying, the artists press leaves gathered from their garden into the clay. In the kiln, the plant material burns off, leaving a fossil-like impression.

Evelyn Snyder of Kaleidoscope Pottery uses a dental tool to remove impressed leaves from an unfired bowl after the glaze is applied.

Learning from other artists in the building has been instrumental for Snyder, who is both a potter and a sculptor. Being at One Cottage Street, she says, is "similar to being at graduate school." Working with such artists as Ugone, Jager and Solomon has enabled her to expand her skills. When the opportunity comes up, she does the same for them. "For instance, Lynn Latimer came up here and made some clay forms just a few weeks ago," she says. "Certainly if I had a glass question, I would go down there and ask her."

Latimer describes this sharing as a "cross-pollination of ideas." Artists are always looking to expand their horizons, she says. Sometimes this means learning new techniques or finding new resources, such as a welder, a caster or someone who knows something about glue. Here, she says, you never have to look far.

Lynn Latimer cuts and layers peices of glass, then heats them to their melting point until they fuse together, forming one sheet.

Entering Latimer's studio is like opening a dazzling jewel box. Myriad colorful carved-glass bowls, platters, boxes and objects dance in the natural and incandescent light. They are made of iridized glass that is fused, carved and slumped. There is a hint of exotica in Latimer's work. Into glass, she carves a complex language of calligraphy that refers to cultures throughout the world, without referencing one specifically. Her shapes are lyrical, inspired in part by paintings by Paul Klee and Joan Miro, and she brings intriguing depth and texture to her work by combining opaque and translucent glass.

Another glass artist, Henry Richardson, pops his head in, just to say hello. He has just returned from the Sculpture Objects and Functional Art (SOFA) Show in Chicago, where he exhibited a six-foot-wide hollow crystalline sphere. Latimer asks how it went. "Great," he answers. "But it's so weird, everyone want to touch it. It defies all common sense. Everyone want to touch this ball of broken glass." He smiles, obviously satisfied.

Henry Richardson in his studio placing a fractured glass piece into a sculptured table base, one of over 500 that will be required for this table.

Had Richardson's studio been in another building, his sculpture might not have been made. The doorways in his own space were too narrow to accommodate such a structure. However, Kubasek, the building's manager, allowed him to build it in an open area next to the loading dock.

For nearly four months, the artist worked arranging broken glass into a giant mathematically calculated sphere. All the while, furniture makers, artists and craftspeople throughout the building made a pilgrimage down to the basement to see this much-talked-about sculpture. Of course, once there, they had to touch it. Many returned several times to check on Richardson's progress and to urge him on. Ultimately, the artist titled the sculpture "Tikkun." The word comes from an old Hebrew phrase that relates to the artist's "belief that societies which inspire and welcome individual acts of grace become more considerate, more kind, more tolerant, more open."

Funny, it seems to describe One Cottage Street. To that, Richardson says it can be interpreted in different way. Though he adds, "It never would have been made without the support and help of the people in this building." That's what One Cottage Street is all about. It is one sphere, where artists of all kinds connect through a core belief that many hands and talents are greater than one.

Riverside Industries'
Job Placement Program