Last year the FINNISH FOUNDATION NATIONAL awarded our first grant for the restoration of Richard's 1960 Arabia slides. Professor Val Cushing, Mitchell Cohen, Alex and May Hau, and Dixie Parker-Fairbanks have contributed their effort for the publication text, photographs and design.
Recently we have been given a $5,000. matching-funds gift towards 50% of the book printing costs.
We now need your important tax deductible help to secure this private grant. All gifts are greatly appreciated and will be acknowledged in the final publication.
Richard Fairbanks
Stoneware teapots produced at Arabia factory 1960.
C/14 reduction, chamotte clay, thrown body, lid, and spouts, pulled handle, white matt and brown gloss glazes, 7 x 7 x 4 in. (19 x 19 x 11 cm.)
Exhibited in Arabia Museum, 1994 ( to be included in forthcoming exhibit).
RESTORATION OF RICHARD FAIRBANK'S 196O
RECOVERED ARABIA SLIDES
Fairbanks's unrestored tower jar slide, 1960
Windmill Tower Jar, stoneware, 1960 Richard Fairbanks
2006 restoration by photographer Mitchell Cohen, Chicago
Our Foundation’s first major project is undertaking the restoration of Richard Fairbanks’s recovered slides taken of the body of ceramics he produced at Helsinki’s Wärtsilä-Arabia Oy ceramics manufacturing firm during his 1960 Fulbright year. It was during that year that the Pacific Northwest potter also became colleague and friend to legendary Finnish craftsmen Kaj Franck, Oiva Toikka, Francesca Mascitti-Lindh, Raija Tuumi, Liisa Hallamaa and Kyllikki Salmenhaara
From his notes at that time, Fairbanks produced approximately 150 stoneware pieces at Arabia; candlesticks, jars, coffee and teapots, plates and planters. Limited funds permitted only about 50 pieces shipped back to America that are an invaluable part of the current Fairbanks Ceramic Collection. The whereabouts of those pieces left in Finland remain unknown, with the exception of his record of those few traded with Arabia potter-colleagues, or given as gifts.
In 2000, Richard’s widow, Dixie Parker-Fairbanks, discovered in his teaching files, a treasure trove of slides that he had taken in Finland of both his work and his close Finnish friend and mentor, Kyllikki Salmenhaara. Along with recording his own work, he also made a number of photographs of rare Salmenhaara ceramics in her Arabia studio and home. This visual record is an important historical addition to the archives of both renowned potters.
After more that forty years in storage the slides are deteriorating quickly. Incredibly skilled professional Chicago photographer Mitchell Cohen, has undertaken the painstaking work of restoration with astonishing results. A generous grant from the Finlandia Foundation National has made much of this effort possible.
As restoration is completed, Fairbanks’s strong, and beautifully evocative images, will be the focus of a book on Fairbanks and Salmenhaara's ceramics of that period. Noted Emeritus Professor Val Cushing, of New York’s Alfred University, also a friend and colleague of Salmenhaara's, is contributing an essay on their association and the history of his university’s highly regarded ceramic department.
An exhibit from the Fairbanks collection of the existing ceramics by Fairbanks and Salmenhaara, produced at Arabia at that time, along with a selection of ceramics by Professor Cushing from the same 1960’s period, is being organized by the RFAP Foundation to coincide with the publication of this new book.
Venues and dates will be provided as arrangements are completed.
Emeritus Professor Val Cushing, Alfred University, New York
It would be an honor for me to be associated with these two artists. They are both gone but their work lives on and remains powerful examples of what can be achieved when artists combine experience and mastery of skills and techniques with creativity, imagination and a clear philosophic point of view. How I wish the three of us could meet and talk together and share the love we all have for what we do. An exhibition of our work in the same space would be a conversation between us and one, I believe, others would understand and enjoy.
Val Cushing
(to Dixie Parker-Fairbanks)
June 29, 2005
Val Cushing
Pitcher
10 ½” h. 6” w. stoneware, GF reduction,
blue gray matt glaze with incised drawing underneath.
Richard with Kyllikki Salmenhaara, Ellensburg, Washington 1976
