For 3 decades the Farm’s neighbor (2.5 miles to NE), the Pilchuck Glass School, sold annual auction event table centerpieces to raise funds (the highest bidder taking home the table’s flowers in a vase).  In planning the next year’s auction in 1988, Babo Olaine and Mary Shirley answered William Morris’ 1987 end-of-auction challenge, “we are a glass school, we can do better than this” (referring to the vases that held each table’s flowers).  The next year’s auction tripled receipts, though the centerpiece vases were simple affairs intended to hold a “frog” for flowers – 75 handcrafted by the then young William Morris and the even younger, Dante Marioni. The vases were “craft;” not considered “art” by the legacy artists as they are multiple pieces of a single design.  In 2014 after several years of diversion into “non-vases,” centerpieces were discontinued.   A collection of the next to the last year’s “crystals” stand under the Farm’s trees as a tribute to the Poleturners and their hours of work in creating this series from 1988 to 2014; “poleturners” a descriptive noun donated to the English language by either Joe Rossano or Pike Powers (stories vary) that described the Calgary Alberta students who gave their time each year, for 20 years, to create the auction’s inventories.  To our knowledge, the Farm contains the only full collection of these centerpieces, 1988 – 2014.

https://dantemarioni.com/
https://www.wmorris.com/
https://www.plc215.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Pilchuck-Glass-School.pdf
https://shopstoriedobjects.com/blogs/news/spirited-glassware-lynn-read-of-vitreluxe
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/14/opinion/american-history-college-university-academia.html

History Farm Prose & Primary Level Question
Best answer:

H9051
H9053
Hx9055

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