History of Yuma- by Ben Mitchell, shortened by yours truly

[Lauren McAdams Selden]

I took this historic information directly from an article by Ben Mitchell, Senior Curator of Art at Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture in Spokane, Washington.  I simply shortened the article, but did not change the phrasing.  To view the complete article, it is published in the book written for the Yuma Symposium 30^th anniversary.  You can find it on the following site.

 

“…Sitting at the confluence of the Gila and Colorado rivers just north of the Mexican border,… Yuma, Arizona, seems a wholly incongruous place for nourishing this vital, long-running gathering of master artists, teachers, and students. Assembling in midwinter over three short February days, participants share presentations and lectures, demonstrations, food and dance, and a celebration of a shared commitment to the arts.

In the summer of 1971 the potter George Tomkins arrived in Yuma with a freshly minted Arizona State University MFA from Arizona State University’s ceramics program and an artist residency gig at Yuma’s small Arizona Western College. He found studio space at the corner of 2^nd Street and Madison Avenue in the former Gandolfo Annex, a nearly empty, shambling, two-story adobe and wood structure with a rickety balcony hanging off the second story front in the then nearly deserted downtown Yuma. The following summer two friends from ASU, Tomkin’s girlfriend, the potter Pamela Neely, and Peter Jagoda, a sculptor, also fresh from the ASU Art Department, drove down from Tempe. Soon after arriving in Yuma, Neely and Peter promptly took up studio space with George in the Gandolfo. George and Neely―she goes by Neely as a first name now―married in 1972… The three also arrived in town with a friend already there, Louise Tester, then the Director of the Arizona Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Louise Tester’s importance to Arizona’s cultural history from the 1950s until her death in 2004 merits its own essay, but a short parsing of her generous life is important to this story.

In 1962 Tester helped found the Yuma Art Center, first housed in the Sanguinetti family’s complex, also on Madison Avenue… A deep, enduring friendship grew between Tester, Neely and George Tomkins, and Peter Jagoda, and her support for their idea to invite artists and students to Yuma for workshops and presentations was fundamental.

When three small, ramshackled but quietly beautiful historic houses sitting all in a row just up the block from the Gandolfo Annex on Second Street came up for sale in the 1970s she told Peter Jagoda, “You need this house!” Jagoda says, “When Louise said that, you knew you were going to do it.”  He bought them, and those three homes, and later a small historictienda next door that he and Neely and George Tomkins bought together in 1979, became the Yuma Symposium’s headquarters and social center. Neely and George Tomkins own the old store today and it houses their shared pottery shop and Neely’s studio, with George’s studio out back.  (This is where some participants camp during the conference.)

In the early 1970s George Tomkins and Peter Jagoda were both teaching at Arizona Western College and they began bringing visiting artists to town as a way to expose their students to a wider world… George at first began bringing down clay people, beginning with Jiggs Pierson from Santa Barbara. The second year Peter Jagoda organized a papermaking workshop with Don Farnesworth, Jules Heller and Bill Clark, and the following year Neely Tomkins coordinated a leather workshop with Lloyd Davis, a saddle maker from Tucson (who, Peter Jagoda remembers, “Just blew everyone away!) and Roger Asay. In the years following, jewelers and metalsmiths began visiting, because of Peter Jagoda’s involvement with Summervail, including Joe and Betty Harris, Dave Pimentel, Bruce Clark, and Eleanor Moty. As Jagoda, who became the Symposium’s official director from 1980 to 1995 (Neely Tomkins took over in 1996 and is the director today) says, the idea was, “Really pretty simple. I had spent some time at the Summervail workshops and seen how much creative energy was released once you got the right mix of artists together. . . . And I realized that there’s a direct correlation between how much someone is enjoying himself and how much he’s learning. The idea of the Yuma thing is simply to get people to relax and to do both.” Undeniably, the celebrated Summervail gathering is the true template for the Yuma Symposium. It was the working archetype for the democratic, open, highly spirited, cross-disciplinary, anti-academic event that Peter Jagoda and Neely Tomkins knew the Symposium could become.

In 1980 Jagoda invited Helen Shirk to Yuma; Shirk is a major American metalsmith and runs the San Diego State University jewelry and metals department. Learning of her workshop, that year Mike Croft brought a van-load of his jewelry and metals students from the University of Arizona, and Dave Pimentel brought a couple of van-loads of his metals students from Arizona State University—and so with the presenters, participants, and students now arriving in Yuma from a wider geography, that year’s gathering is officially reckoned the “first” Yuma Symposium… But Symposium folk had all that fun in the greater context of the serious, substantive learning packed into two and a half days of presentations, demonstrations, lectures, exhibitions, and endless conversation.

From even the earliest days, it all begins with registration on Thursdays at Lutes Casino on Main Street. Lutes, owned by the same Yuma family for over 60 years, directly across the street from the beautiful new Yuma Art Center and only two short blocks from the former Jagoda compound on Second Street, is an utterly unique, fully eccentric, history-soaked repository of local memory… Registration is out back in the shade of the patio, and during registration there is the annual Pin Swap—for years now participants have been creating pins in their studios and bringing them to swap, and sometimes to sell. Longtime participant and former presenter Betsy Douglas has accumulated a huge collection that will be exhibited at the 2009 Symposium. Thursday night closes for many participants with the dinner at Lutes—like a reunion each February for many artists who have been attending the Symposium over the years—followed by orientation and the introduction of the presenters at the historic Yuma Theater, part of the Art Center complex and an historic Art Deco jewel.

Friday morning registration at George and Neely Tomkins’s studio and shop is followed by a full day of presentations by the invited visiting artists… today the Symposium can include up to twenty visiting artists and over 300 participants. Though the early Symposiums focused more on ceramics, metalsmithing and the crafts, the event has grown to include painters, printmakers, photographers and other artists working in many media, bringing together artists and students who explore and celebrate the arts across disciplinary divides.

Friday’s full day of visiting artists’ presentations is followed by the reception for the exhibition of presenters’ work at the Yuma Art Center, with the Student Show and the Pin Auction, not to be confused with Thursday’s Pin Swap. Then, because we’re not done yet, everyone repairs next door to, for “Show Your Stuff”—it was earlier called “Multiple Slide Abuse”—a chance for participants and students to . . . well you get it.

There are presentations by invited artists again all day Saturday, followed by the annual “National Saw, File, and Solder Sprints” competition. The “National Saw, File, and Solder Sprints,” another institutional borrowing from Summervail and managed for many years by the metalsmith Lynda Watson, is simple: Three-person teams, complete with costumes and thematic names; a starting line; a relay sprint to a bench with basic tools. The fastest team to saw, file, solder, and size a ring from a sheet of raw metal—the ring must be wearable and fit one of the teammates—wins. Complete with ingeniously crafted handmade trophies for the winners, the competition is serious, ferocious—and fun. Also in the early years, Saturday’s dinner was communally prepared by Neely Tomkins, Jane Gregorius, Teresa Burgher, Eleanor Moty, Lynda Watson and community friends who brought fresh tortillas, rice and beans, and other good homemade foods… Today it’s a catered affair in the beautiful historic Post Office on Main Street just south of Lutes Casino, now the headquarters of the Gowan Company, one of the important community supporters of the Symposium.

George Tomkins says, “but I'd say that from the first, the Symposium has been about friends, seeing old ones and making new ones.  It’s about showing that a lot of very talented people who are intensely involved in the arts and who hold all kinds of ideas about what art should be are also great folks to be around.”

Bruce Metcalf wrote: ‘Craft is contingent to the moral sense and should symbolically express sympathy, care, helping and self control.’  By these standards too, Yuma is Craft.  Yuma takes care of it own, remembers from year to year, forgets your indiscretions and adopts your students and spouses and children.  All without fanfare or smugness or even any particular efficiency.”

In many ways it is a ‘family’ of artists collaborating with the local community in a long-term learning experiment.

[Brigitte Martin]

Quote: "The “National Saw, File, and Solder Sprints,” .... is simple: Three-person teams, complete with costumes and thematic names; a starting line; a relay sprint to a bench with basic tools. The fastest team to saw, file, solder, and size a ring from a sheet of raw metal—the ring must be wearable and fit one of the teammates—wins. Complete with ingeniously crafted handmade trophies for the winners, the competition is serious, ferocious—and fun."

 

Costumes ? Thematic names? Sprints ? Awesome! How much fun.  Enjoy :-))