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Lola Brooks is a Stellar Educator

Today is Lola Brooks‘s birthday! An artist metalsmith, a darling of collectors, a clotheshorse, and a stellar educator, Lola is currently sharing her vast knowledge with twelve lucky students for 8 weeks during this year’s spring metals concentration. Her workshop is entitled “All You Can Eat: The Blue Plate Special.”

On her birthday, we want to say some nice things about our friend and 5-time Penland instructor Lola Brooks!

So here are some quotes from friends new and old:

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“Lola is the best mentor there is. Period.”

-Sofie Albertsen, current student

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“Many who are awed by Lola’s incredible work don’t know what a wonderful and devoted teacher she is. I admire her honesty, her passion, and her talent. She brings so much to the field of jewelry and to Penland and we are always so lucky to have her!”

-Leslie Noell, Penland Creative Director

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“Lola is my new style icon.”

-Kimberly Jo, Penland Core Fellow and current student

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“Lola is the greatest because she helps people get to where they don’t even know they are going yet. She can see where a particular person’s creative ideas are and where they might want to go and she pushes them to get there even when they can’t quite see where they are headed yet.”

-Mary Lucking,  current student

It is a testament to Lola’s skill as an educator that 7 of the twelve students in this spring’s class have studied with her before. We’ll be sharing more about this wonderful workshop so stay tuned!

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A Very Good Swing in Penland Wood

There’s a beautiful new addition to the Penland Wood Studio, created during Ellie Richards’s spring concentration workshop “Freeform Furniture.”  Ryan Lutz’s bricklay laminated swing is here to stay, so next time you’re at Penland, be sure to try it out!

Here’s a review from wood studio coordinator Kyle Little, Penland’s wood studio coordinator,

It’s wild how we just don’t do the fun things we used to do as kids very often! I swung on it and it tickled my stomach and made me laugh out loud. Maybe we should all swing every morning and the world would be better off.

Thank you for this gift, Ryan! And for answering our questions:

How did you make this awesome swing?

It’s made using bricklay lamination. You pretty much make a ton of little trapezoids and then glue all those little trapezoids together kind of in a line so it’s like a skinny piece. So it’s made out of twelve of those skinny long curves and each one is routed to a template so it gets that nice clean shape. Then just put some rope in it and now we can have so much fun out of here.

What is it made of?

It’s made of maple and then the little colored sections are recycled skateboards.

It’s a prototype?

Kind of. I was using this to figure out the process of what I’m doing for my furniture piece. I wanted to make something smaller scale and Ellie suggested a swing and I thought that would be really fun.

What is the larger piece that this will lead to?

It’s a coffee table design and there’s a lot of curves in it. It will be a little more complex than this and definitely larger scale but maybe the same technique of a bricklay lamination.

How do you feel about leaving this swing here at Penland wood?

It’s so fun, it’s already gotten used so much. It’s nice to leave a little mark here that other people can enjoy.

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Jamaal Barber: Printmaker AND Illustrator

Congratulations to spring Concentration instructor Jamaal Barber on the recent publication of his illustrations in a new edition of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad from The Folio Society.

This celebrated novel tells the story of an African American girl named Cora and her escape from slavery using a literal underground railroad. It is a mind-bending tale that is both imaginary and brutally realistic.

“I always wanted to be an illustrator,” Jamaal said, “particularly a kid’s book illustrator, which is what really inspired me to start doing art in the first place. And I never thought I’d get the opportunity to be able to do a project like this. This is really my dream coming back to me after so long.”

“I wanted to take this challenge because a lot of my work is about blackness,” he said, “and my work also speaks a lot about history and how important it is that we properly contextualize what happened to get us where we are and to know where to go afterwards. So I do feel that it’s a big responsibility to celebrate the story and to tell it properly.”

For these illustrations, Jamaal combined his first love, woodcut, with his more recent interests in painting and mixed-media. “The book came right at that point where I’m starting to merge the two things and kind of create this beautiful mashup of the bright, colorful stuff and the original texture of woodcuts.”

When, after months of working and then waiting, he finally had a copy of this beautiful book in his hands, Jamaal smiled broadly and said, “Wow!” Then he said, “It takes a lot of work to be an artist, you know, and you don’t get many moments like, ‘I did it.’”

More on this great project here.