north dakota

Trash or Treasure Event At Plains Art Museum, Fargo

It’s that time of year again — the Plains Art Museum is having their second annual Trash or Treasure event.

Hubby and I attended the event last year & had such a great time we were hoping it would become an annual event. Sue Petry of the Plains Art Museum says that along with being a fund raiser for the museum the event raises awareness of collecting and celebrates it. “We had a couple of great finds: a book someone found in a closet in an old house was worth $1,500 for example. People really enjoyed learning more about the things they collected,” she said.

I know we did.

This year’s event began three weeks ago with their weekly lecture series, which are free to the public. I’m not only all about “free stuff”, but as the series focuses on collecting, well, I’m so there.

Last week, October 2nd, the session was The History & Collectibility of North Dakota Cable Pottery, with University of North Dakota Ceramics Professor Donald Miller. The session began with a viewing of UND Clay: The Cable Years, a documentary produced by the UND Television Center, covering the history and legacy of the ceramics department at the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks.

UND School Of Mines Stamp

It’s a fascinating story involving a chemist, the first state geologist, and founding dean of the School of Mines, Earle J. Babcock, who teamed up with an artist, Margaret Kelly Cable; both of them believing that the seemingly limitless supply of North Dakota clay would be a means of economic development, allowing North Dakota to create a pottery industry to rival Ohio and other states with a large pottery industry.

Under Cable’s direction, North Dakota clays & glazes were researched, examined, tested & perfected as part of the School of Mines. Ceramics classes were open to more than UND students, family members of faculty and local citizens were also involved. Because of this, UND School of Mines pottery has many levels in artistry. You have works from the many talented instructors (such as Cable; her sister, Flora Cable Huckfield; Frieda Hammers, Margaret Pachl; and Julia Mattson), talented students such as Laura Taylor Hughes (who went on to start Rosemeade), and average, everyday, folks with not-so-much talent.

Due to the number of years the UND School of Mines was open, from 1910 to 1963, you have many influences: Art Deco, Art Nouveau, and the Arts and Crafts movement. Popular designs feature regional interest such as crocus, prairie rose, wheat, flickertail, ox cart, cowboys, buffalo, horses, & Native American images.

1926 North Dakota Products Vase By Cable

One of the most famous examples of regional designs is the North Dakota Products vase. In 1926, Governor Sorlie asked Cable to create a single vase depicting an amazing number of North Dakota Products: corn, wheat, flax, clover, pigs, chickens, turkeys, cows, sheep, bees, potatoes, sugar beets, lignite coal, Dakota Maid flour, a pumpkin, a flickertail, a wild rose, a lump of clay and a cream can. Cable not only met the challenge, but did so with a stunning example of sgraffito (in which the blue glaze is scratched away to reveal the white of the pottery). While there was quite a demand for replicas of the presentation vase, Cable only made four of these beauties and denied all other requests. Donald Miller brought along one of the four North Dakota Product vases (the one which had belonged to Governor Sorlie). A collector next to me told me that it would likely fetch $25,000.

There I was, inches from it.

Some of the most coveted pieces are called bentonite pottery. Bentonite pottery, created by painting on a slip glazes of red, brown, creme, result in monochromatic yet vibrant works, such as these by Ruth Schnell, a Grand Forks resident who began UND ceramics classes when she was 46.

Bentonite Pottery By Ruth Schnell

Along with the usual conditions issues with pottery, there are several things to know to look for in UND pottery. Authentic pieces will bear the cobalt blue School of Mines stamp — even the most uninspired pinch-pot can fetch $50 to $100, as long as it bears the proper UND School of Mines stamp. Not all pieces are stamped thus; some have a more simple UND stamp. Artist names can be confusing; not all student records exist to cross reference, some women signed their husband’s name, and Cable herself signed her Prairie Pottery pieces with “Maggie Mud.”

Good references are University of North Dakota Pottery: The Cable Years, second edition, by Donald Miller, the heavily illustrated UND POTTERY: a History and Comparative Study of the Art Pottery, by Ken Forester, and the UND North Dakota School of Mines pottery collection website will be adding additional images and information. There’s also The North Dakota Pottery Collectors Society, which has their own “Road Show”.

Sgraffito Vase By Margaret Kelly Cable

Because of this Trash or Treasure lecture series event, I learned much about UND pottery. I have Andy Maus, Mark Ryan, and Rusty Freeman of the Plains Art Museum to thank for that. They are the folks who choose sessions and select lecturers. Maus says the team, “attempts to reflect the diversity and interests of our collecting community and those curious about collecting. As a regional museum, we do whatever we can to reflect the interests, talents and diversity of our community through all of our programming.”

The Trash or Treasure event continues at 7 P.M. tonight, with Discovering the Past Through Objects: Adventures of a Real-Life History Detective, a lecture by Wes Cowan. Yes, the Wes Cowan of History Detectives. He and Danica M. Farnand of Cowan’s Auctions, Inc. are the headliners at Friday night’s VIP Appraisal Dinner and Saturday’s Appraisal Fair.

That means I have three “dates” with Wes Cowan this week!

If I was nervous last year, you can only imagine how much worse it is this year… It’s not like I have any UND pottery to take along.

Intellectually, I know I shouldn’t be intimidated. But it’s Wes Cowan! The kids and I have huge crushes on him. (The kids think I’m cool and want me to get Cowan to autograph a photo or something. How nice that I can really blame it all on the kids!)

The lecture tonight is free and open to the public. And there’s still time to get tickets for Friday & Saturday’s events. As an extra bonus, those attending can watch me stammer & sound like a school girl when talking with Cowan.

I’ve joked before that I am collecting my hometown, a brick at a time. It’s not particularly serious, but I’ve got a couple loose bricks that came from demolishing jobs in downtown Fargo. My desire for the bricks comes from my admiration and memories of the buildings that the masonry came from. The AOUW Grand Lodge was where I worked for several years, and the Idelkope Building was where I bought my comics from a guy that looked kinda like Santa Claus. Everyone’s got their reasons, and I’ve got mine. It’s not like I’d ever be able to get an entire building, even in a full lifetime of brick-borrowing.

Keith Johnson has a personal reason to collect, too. In 1980, Keith’s son Lonnie passed away, and as a living tribute to his son Mr. Johnson began collecting and restoring his town.

Today, June 22nd 2008, Ayr, North Dakota celebrates the 125th anniversary of its establishment, shortly before statehood and shortly after the railroad arrived. At 2pm, a parade will crawl past Johnson’s collection. Adjoining the main street of town, a small dirt road passes between a number of small but nicely restored buildings. These are the objects of Keith Johnson’s collection.

The collection records more than just Lonnie’s life — Keith Johnson’s buildings are the core of his community’s history. The town’s original one-room schoolhouse is restored, including desks and a (mildly frightening) mannequin schoolteacher; outhouses are out back, but are sadly no longer available for public use. Those arriving to Ayr via rail would have disembarked at the Great Northern Depot, now no longer anywhere near the rail-line but still kept company by a Burlington Northern caboose. The Ayr Store Company was a place for provisions, but it is the ice cream shop and the barber that really made Ayr a modern ‘city’ hidden in central North Dakota (although I’m not sure these buildings are original to Ayr at all). The collection includes the original fire bell — a huge iron triangle, suitable for calling the cowpokes in for dinner, but far more purposeful to a remote rural community as a call for the fire volunteers. An Arthur (ND) firetruck sits nearby, not quite ready to leap into service if there were a fire. Our favorite was the gas station — a beautifully repaired and well-decorated canopy service station outfitted as a Mobil stop. You can see more pictures of Johnson’s buildings here.

The buildings are closed and locked (an appointment with Johnson can be arranged for a more detailed tour), but the windows give a good view of Johnson’s restoration. Each building is furnished inside and out with appropriate originals and replicas of period accountrements, from leaded shades on lamps to original signs and advertisements on the walls. While I wouldn’t call any of the vignettes a museum-quality display, that is hardly the purpose. Keith Johnson was one of the lucky few people with the resources and room to actually have a collection of buildings. There are real, functional small towns in North Dakota with fewer habitable buildings than Johnson’s collection contains, and the collection garnered a nomination from the North Dakota State Historical Society in 2007 for his work. Keith Johnson’s dedication and love for these old buildings makes his collection one of the funnest I’ve met, and his willingness to share it with visitors by eschewing fences and gates is a boon to people interested in the history of these rural communities.