kenny

 

Kenny Carder passed away last week. Hoe wife Lisa (who I work with) shared his obituary with me last night. I was helping a student on Thursday when Lilith told me about his passing. It hit me pretty hard in the moment. I just didn't see this coming.

I can't remember the exact first time that I met Kenny, but I think it must have been at he and Lisa's studio. When I first moved to Boone, I lived over on Baird's creek and Lisa and Kenny lived just down the road from me. Kenny had built their studio and added onto it many years ago. It is a gorgeous studio. I remember him showing me around the studio. I took a liking to Kenny instantly. He told me about growing up in Ohio and going to Bowling Green for school. He spoke fondly of his childhood and I could tell instantly that he was a worker and that he was a midwesterner at heart. We talked about Noah playing baseball and I could tell that he took a real interest in the people that he met. We talked about glass, metal, Penland, and him working for Harvey K. Littleton. I was in awe of his knowledge of process and the history of craft. 

Kenny visited the studio that I was renting when I first came to town and it was there that I saw him really light up. I was working on a forge and he gave me some colloidal silica to coat the liner with. I think he realized my love of tools when he stopped by and saw everything I had moved from Milwaukee. In the next several years we would get together from time to time, usually during the summer months. I remember us talking about the Land Cruiser that he had since I used to drive my FJ40 over to his place. He would be getting rid of building materials or tools and I would usually end up stopping by to pick things up. I was just in awe of what he built for he and Lisa. All of his glass tools were built by him and you could just tell that he got things done and made things happen. I loved talking to him. He stopped by my home studio several times when I moved there and we worked on developing a ceramic wheel modification together for Lisa. 

It's difficult to think that he's gone.  

Thoughts of Kenny have filled my heart and mind as I have thought about times I spent talking with Kenny. Kenny was so kind and generous and I truly valued the times that I got to hear about his time growing up in the Midwest and his time at Penland. I felt a deep connection to Kenny. He was good to me and I always felt encouraged by him. Maybe it was the midwestern boy connection, or the genuine love of making, or his resourcefulness to be able to build anything; Kenny was truly one of a kind. I was so so impressed by him and looked up to his brilliance. I feel so grateful to have known Kenny and to have had the opportunity to talk about making things and what it means to be a father and artist. 

Kenny will be deeply missed.

Ken Carder talks about being invited to work with Harvey Littleton. Oral history interview with Ken Carder by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, September 6, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 03:00.

Ken Carder: I went to school as an art student and didn’t get involved with glass until after I’d been in school on and off for a few years, and when I got interested in glass I had an opportunity actually to come down and work for Billy and Katie Bernstein—William and Katherine Bernstein for a summer kind of thing. So I left Bowling Green, Ohio and it came down to work for Billy and Katie as a apprentice, I guess you’d call it, and I worked there for three or four months, and before I was going to return back to Ohio, we went to Harvey’s studio to do cold working, because at the time a lot of the small studios, independent studios, around that part of North Carolina didn’t have really good cold shops for cutting and grinding. Everybody could blow glass but they didn’t have very good facilities for cutting and polishing and things. So a lot of people would go up to Harvey’s. Harvey was generous enough to let people come into his studio and use their cold shops. So Billy and I drove up about a half hour drive or so from where they lived over by Celo Lake [North Carolina]. We came up to Harvey’s studio to cold work and Harvey was was was in a ruckus about me wanting to get find a printmaker because his printmaker—he just started this process of printing off of glass plates was going to be leaving, and Billy introduced me and my last name is Carder, C-R-D-R, and Harvey got a big kick out of that because Frederick Carder was the gentleman that started Steuben and I think Harvey actually probably knew Fredrick Carder when Harvey was quite young. And he wanted to know what I knew about printmaking and I’d taken a couple printmaking classes, and I had done a lot of drawing so I knew a little bit about paper, so he hired me as a printmaker and this was huge because I had just gotten introduced to glass basically not much more than a year before, and I was really really interested to it and things, so the next thing I know I’m—you know, hired to work for Harvey Littleton, and I hadn’t even finish my undergrad degree and had only about a year or so experiencing glass—maybe just a little over a year, and then the next thing I know I’m in North Carolina working at Harvey’s studio and the printmaker ended up not leaving, so—her name was Sandy, Sandy Wilcox. She stayed and Harvey didn’t need two printmakers, so he put me in cold shop and then eventually into the hot shop, and I had some carpentry skills so I ended up being involved with building a new print studio, and that was this huge door that opened for me, because all of a sudden I’m working in Harvey’s studio and there’s these fantastic international visiting artists coming by to work and do prints and being in the hot shop, and it was close to proximity to Penland and there was a community of glass artists that were former residents at Penland: Mark Peiser and Katie and Billy Bernstein and Rob Levin and Steve Edwards and Harvey’s son John [Littleton] and daughter-in-law Kate [Vogel], you know, were in the area.

Ken Carder discusses the importance of the Penland School of Craft as an “environmental utopia.” Oral history interview with Ken Carder by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, September 6, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:55.

Ken Carder: Oh, it’s just, you know, you could go on for hours about why Penland’s important. Especially its involvement of Bill and Jane Brown in the early sixties and things it coincided with the resurrection of traditional craft materials coupled with the whole sixties idea of a certain type of independent thinking and what was happening in art schools around the country and what was happening with a younger population around the world essentially. You know, and Penland was this very idealistic place in the mountains of North Carolina where the surroundings were absolutely beautiful. And then you have an environment that’s basically a creative utopia. You know, where you got people working in all these different materials, and building equipment to work with these materials and the technology was being developed from the ground up, you know [laughs] literally from the dirt up, and it was a very inspiring environment, because when you get that many different creative minds in a very small location, things really bubble up and sparks fly and and it’s just amazing things that can happen, and that, you know, started in the sixties. So by the time I got there in the early eighties, it was a creative force to be reckoned with, you know, there was so much things going on in ceramics and metalworking and iron working and glass, and there was, you know, people that were working in photography and it was just a super creative environment.

Ken Carder discusses the importance of Bill Brown’s artists’ residency program at Penland. Oral history interview with Ken Carder by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, September 6, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:35.

Ken Carder: Let me mention one more thing—Bill Brown created this artist-in-residency idea at Penland, and it was—basically, the foundation of it was to bridge between working with a material and trying to develop that material to a point where you could sustain your livelihood from working with ceramics, or working with glass, or metals. It was a way—the residency program was a period where you could live and stay at Penland and build equipment and develop your skills and try to find in established markets where you could sustain your lifestyle being a creative craft artist. And when I say craft, it’s not necessarily—it’s just describing what would at that time been considered craft disciplines—weaving, ceramics, glass, metals, woodworking, things that we associate with like traditional vocabulary of craft and stuff. But that residency program was this grace period between either, you know, undergrad, grad school or whatever you were doing prior, if your goal was to be a working artist and sustain your lifestyle as a working artist, Bill had this vision where if you could give people that little break right there at the beginning and they were in a very creative environment where they could sort of network out and develop their work to a point where it was interesting and accomplished, then they could get over that hump. And once they got things started they could keep it rolling, and he was instrumental in that, and people that came through that decided to stay in the area because you know, but that point you’re a little spoiled because it’s a beautiful environment, but it’s also a very creative environment. And at the time land and property was still rural, western North Carolina, so the property values were not as inflated as they were in a lot of the more developed urban areas around the country and things, so it was very affordable also to stay in that area, and so a lot of people did. And then, you know, once those seeds were planted they grew.

You can hear these conversations in Kenny's words here.