Twenty-five years ago, I crossed the threshold of Ken Spitzbard’s Connecticut home for the first time. It was an entry into a new and unfamiliar world. At the time, I was a graduate student at nearby Yale University, and despite my wet-behind-the-ears status, I’d been invited to join the curatorial team for an exhibition called Wood Turning in North America Since 1930, a collaboration between the university art museum and what was then the Wood Turning Center in Philadelphia (today’s Museum for Art in Wood). The previous summer, I’d taken my first slightly anxious turn at a lathe. The experience had confirmed for me that my contribution to the field, if any, would be through writing and research rather than making. I’d learned quickly in the ensuing months, thanks to the guidance of Albert Le Coff (founding director of the WTC), as well as my mentors at Yale. Until I got to Ken’s house, though, I had never seen so many pieces of wood art at once. For that matter, I don’t think I had ever visited the home of a collector before.
Ken knows very well what he likes, but his collecting decisions have never been driven by taste alone...He’ll buy something not just for its elegant silhouette or spectacular material, but also for how it fits into the arc of an artist’s career, and the trajectory of the discipline as a whole.
It was a great place to start. Our exhibition project was meant to be the first comprehensive account of wood art, surveying the field’s historical development, leading protagonists, technical features, and aesthetic vocabulary. Remarkably, and (as I would later discover) very unusually for a private collector, Ken was trying to do exactly the same thing, all on his own. As he walked me around his house, patiently explaining each object to me—Michael Peterson’s lyrical landscape forms, Todd Hoyer’s powerful materialized metaphors, William Hunter’s transcendent twisting spirals—I felt like I was talking to a fellow curator. Ken knows very well what he likes, but his collecting decisions have never been driven by taste alone. His undeniable passion for the material is channeled through an analytical mindset. He’ll buy something not just for its elegant silhouette or spectacular material, but also for how it fits into the arc of an artist’s career, and the trajectory of the discipline as a whole. Thus, although it is contemporary sculptural work that most fires his imagination, he also has representative pieces by foundational figures like Rude Osolnik and Bob Stocksdale. When he takes a strong interest in an artist like Christian Burchard or Galen Carpenter—or the whole Moulthrop dynasty—he collects both in depth and breadth, capturing every facet of their creative vision.
