From Taliesin to Taliesin West: Summer 2022 Taliesin West Trip

Last fall I was brought down to help install the sculptures which made up our portion of Chihuly in the Desert, and this June I was tasked with helping send them back to Chihuly Studio in Seattle. You can read my thoughts from the first trip here.

The summer heat was certainly a challenge throughout my 4 weeks in Arizona, but the weather was not without its charms. One evening the campus was surrounded by storms, whose clouds and bolts of lightning were visible across the valley without a single raindrop on us. Another morning a perfect rainbow accompanied a slight mist. As my visit progressed, I noticed that some cicadas eventually added to the usual sounds of crickets and quails, emerging ahead of monsoons later this summer.

This summer we have interns on site who will be working with us to better document and organize our archival and fine arts collections. Here are two highlights I was pleased to come across in our collections storage space which both relate to my work in Wisconsin.

This is a print of the 1881 painting Christ in the Temple by Heinrich Hofmann. It is one of only a few items tied to the Hillside Home School I building, which acted as a dormitory for the school’s boarding students. Frank Lloyd Wright designed it with William Lyman Silsbee at age 20 for his aunts Nell and Jenny Lloyd Jones who ran the school. The print was a gift to the school from William Channing Gannet, a Unitarian minister who know Wright’s uncle, Jenkin Lloyd Jones, minister at All Souls Unitarian Church in Chicago. It can be seen on the wall in this photo from the Wisconsin State Historical Society.

This portrait of Olgivanna Lloyd Wright attributed to apprentice Eugene Masselink is notable for the background, which plays on a Japanese screen which Frank Lloyd Wright installed on a wall in the Taliesin Living Room. The late 18th century Rinpa school screen depicts a maple tree in front of a stream that winds through a gold leaf ground. Rather than a 1:1 depiction of the screen, Masselink chose to experiment with its appearance, enlarging it and focusing more on the winding river than the tree’s gnarled and mossy trunk.

KYLE DOCKERY cares for the Asian art, Wright designed furniture and other historic objects at Taliesin where he has been the Collections Coordinator since 2017.