Merrily Tompkins Over Yonder

摘要

With a career that spans more than three decades, Merrily Tompkins is one of the Pacific Northwest's most imaginative and original artists and metalsmiths. But for some time now consideration of her work has been flying under the critical and curatorial establishment radar. That's a pity when you consider the depth and accomplishment of her work. Tompkins came on the scene with an active and impressive early career. In 1970, she won "Best of Show in Metals" at the Bellevue Art and Crafts Fair-she was only 23-and the award included a one-person show at the University of Washington's Henry Gallery the following year. Two years later she earned the "Best of Show in Metals" in the Tacoma Art Museum's annual competition. The Bellevue and Tacoma shows were then a couple of the region's most important proving grounds for the new upheavals of Funk and Pop Art migrating up from the San Francisco Bay area into the Pacific Northwest. Clearly, Tompkins was up to something very early on. Between 1970 and the late 1980s her work was included in a number of notable group exhibitions, including shows at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. (1972 and 1973), the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York (1973 and 1975), the Bronx Museum (1978), and in the Washington State Governor's Invitational Exhibition (1972 and again in 1980). In 1979, she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. During the 1970s and '80s she showed across the country and regularly throughout the Pacific Northwest. In the mid-1980s she had a number of solo exhibitions at Seattle's Linda Farris Gallery that received extensive critical review. Yet, although she was included in the Tacoma Art Museum's relatively recent (2001) 'Torch Songs," a very good regional jewelry survey exhibition, the last time her work has been seen in any depth was in her 1999 solo show, "Fire in the Hole," at Seattle's short-lived Esther Claypool Gallery. In 2004, a modest group show of contemporary Pacific Northwest metalwork, "Jewelry as Sculpture," was organized for Gallery One, a space in downtown Ellensburg, in eastern Washington. But even in her adopted hometown, Merrily Tompkins's work was not included. So let's back up and see what we've been missing.