Ali Fujino
Discourse-Issue-23

In the spirit of supporting a new art gallery venture in the town of Tieton, Washington, the Drachen Foundation became very excited about the idea of putting together the first contemporary art kite exhibit to raise funds for the Highland Food Bank.

Boxx Gallery is owned by Michele Wyland, a Yakima, Washington entrepreneur and philanthropist who has been instrumental in supporting the small community. The idea was simple. Take their small corner shop, renovate the inside to become a contemporary art gallery, and solicit artists to sell their works and donate 30% to the Highland Food Bank! A number of local artists have volunteered hundreds of hours to build the new place. The shows have featured local artists working in all types of media including photography, ceramics, prints, paintings, metal arts, and jewelry.

Karen Quint designed Boxx to be an empty but welcome space to be used by the community, and there are plenty of ideas on the table. “At the moment, there are proposals for a show of handmade boxes, poetry readings, an artist- made kite exhibit with children’s activities, and the annual art exhibit of all the neighboring schools,” she said.

The ultimate goal of Boxx Gallery is to bring attention to the needs of families in the Upper Valley. “There are hundreds of families that depend on the distribution of food made possible by Northwest Harvest and the dedicated volunteers of the Highland Food Bank,” Quint said.

In all the years that Drachen has been a part of the Mighty Tieton community, we had not really had the opportunity to have a kite exhibit! Here was our opportunity, so we agreed to curate a show at the Boxx. I began to put the show into perspective, determining the theme to be paper and bamboo. This made my selection of artists extremely easy: Greg Kono of Seattle, Washington, Scott Skinner of Colorado Springs, Colorado, and Jose Sainz of San Diego, California. I asked each to make 8-12 medium size kites. All the artists, except for Greg, had worked in both ripstop (sewing) and paper/bamboo (cutting and pasting).

The results were stunning. Works were shipped in. Greg did the inventory of the items, and I continued to work out the installation details with manager Karen Quint. On June 3rd, Greg and I made the 2.5-hour drive from Seattle to install the works. Installation took only one day and was incredibly easy thanks to Greg who envisioned and built specially designed floor and table stands on which to place the kites, thus liberating them from being encased in frames. (The kites that were framed looked equally great!) Having the kites on stands made them appear to fly, allowing the visitor to walk around the art.

Since none of the artists could attend the opening the next day, I asked kite artist Kathy Goodwind to stand in for the group. There is no better kite ambassador to help answer questions and give insightful stories about the world of tethered flight. It was great to have the collaboration, which Drachen has always felt was important.

To our surprise and delight, after only three days of exhibiting ( Saturdays only 11am-5pm), the show was almost sold out! Pricing was competitive and affordable, allowing local visitors to purchase original works of art. After the first Saturday showing, we were asked to bring more works into the gallery, and Greg rose to the occasion. The red dots continued to mark the labels of artworks, indicating “sale.”

But the art of kites is more than just sales. It is about the individuals who make the art.

Note the personal statements by each of the artists that follows. Their art is an expression of their experiences, growth, and development throughout their careers. The Scott, Jose, and Greg that we met in our early years and the kites that we fell in love with have evolved. They are the same people, but their art reflects decades of influence from interacting with the kiting community. In much of the work, I can see influence both in design and production from the likes of Nobuhiko Yoshizumi, Mikio Toki, Anna Rubin, Pierre Fabre and George Peters, just to name a few. And then there are the personal experiences that each individual has incorporated: Scott in his appreciation of American patchwork and fascination with printing on paper, Greg from his childhood and family farm, and Jose with his collaborations at Burning Man over the last ten years. This is what makes the art of an artist.

But let us have them say it in their own words.

SCOTT SKINNER ARTIST STATEMENT

As an artist, I have been a dedicated kitemaker, flier, collector, teacher, and philanthropist of the sport with the Drachen Foundation in Seattle for three decades, but in recent years I have concentrated on creating art kites – kites emphasizing beauty and originality.

Having studied kites, I knew what images were lasting: geometric ones. I became a student of traditional American patchwork quilts. My collection of books on the subject grew to a meter high. There was always a detail in a quilt that could be exploited for kitemaking; as an example, a wave detail. I was inspired to marry traditional American quilt designs with Japanese kite shapes and motifs using fine handmade papers and natural bamboo materials. – Scott Skinner

JOSE SAINZ ARTIST STATEMENT

I have been making and flying kites since 1989. My fascination with kites started when I was introduced to them by a friend at work. My friend would go out in the afternoon and fly his beautiful stunt kite in tune to the music. I went out with him several times and marveled at the way he could make his kite dance to the wind. Soon after I bought my own kite and got hooked.

Realizing I had to find my own motifs to make a mark, I continued to look to my heritage and decided to recreate the Aztec calendar for my 1992 AKA kite. Because the design was complex, I needed to make a large kite: “Azteca,” a ten-by-ten-foot hexagon with fifty-foot tail. The image came from a 26-ton stone monolith dug up in Mexico City in 1790 and now on exhibit at the anthropology museum there. The site of the find was the fifteenth-century Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan.

Over the years I have attended and displayed my kites at numerous national and international kite festivals around the world. I have been a member of the Kite Art Committee for the American Kitefliers Association and am a member of the board of directors of the Drachen Foundation.

My greatest enjoyment in kiting is sharing the sky with all the wonderful friends I have met over the years. May we meet again under the sky some day! My works in this exhibit show how I approach the use of specialty papers and bamboo. I love to collaborate with other artists and working with henna artist Sandy Marie Brame from Belfair, Washington is illustrated in my shield kite. – Jose Sainz

GREG KONO ARTIST STATEMENT

I enjoy creating functional works. Nothing gives me more satisfaction than seeing something I built perform the way it was meant to. Kitemaking is an art form that I have been pursuing for over 15 years. Flying the kite is the final process to my art. I’ve heard that a kite does not have a soul until it has been flown at least once. As a Japanese- American I choose to explore the culture and materials used by my ancestors. Bamboo and washi (Japanese hand- made paper) are materials that I most often use, which are excellent for making kites and have been used for centuries in Japan due to their strength and light weight.

My approach to kitemaking is to unify all parts of the kite in harmony. I pay as much attention to the framework (bamboo) as I do the sail (washi) when building my kites. I strive to make the back of my kites just as aesthetically pleasing as the front. In flight, the sun backlights the kite, highlighting the framework through the sail. The challenge for me is to not overbuild the frame to the point where it will not perform, yet have enough substance to hold its shape in flight. For color I prefer to use fabric dyes, inks and watercolors to reinforce the transparent qualities that I seek. Unryu, Japanese for “dragon cloud paper,” is one of my favorite papers to use because of its unique characteristic of having long strands of mulberry fibers running throughout the sheet.

Figures, past experiences, and elements from nature are reoccurring themes that I often use in creating my kites. Most of the images from my latest series of kites came from my trip to Oaxaca a few years ago. The images depict some of my closest friends, mentors, and experiences that still inspire and appeal to me. – Greg Kono

Many thanks to the Boxx Gallery and the dozen-plus volunteers who made this exhibit a success! ◆

Feature in Yakima Magazine:

www.yakimamagazine.com/2016/05/27/art-food-community-the-boxx-gallery-in-tieton/