FOCUS
Painstakingly delving into Blunk’s rich visual
treasury with Nielson’s cooperation, Adams is
forming a retrospective called J.B. Blunk: Nature,
Art & Everyday Life, that will be featured at the
museum from April 21 to September 9; it will
offer insights on this Northern California Renaissance man who made nature-inspired utilitarian
objects as a way of shaping an artful life.
The exhibition aims to showcase how Blunk
drew inspiration from nature to create usable
artworks that included ceramics and sculpture.
Blunk used materials such as hollowed-out redwood burls for furniture, a variety of local clays
for pottery and local stones for jewelry.
Such designs became ubiquitous
in the Bay Area and part of
the region’s aesthetic, even
though people were rarely
aware of where it started.
“J.B. Blunk shaped
much of postwar art and
design in Northern California, yet had very little exposure,” Adams says. This exhibition
will, for the first time, display a wide
range of his objects, photographs of site-specific
works and essays about his work and include
interviews with people who knew the artist well.
“We won’t be trying to re-create his home,”
Adams says, but by telling the story of the house
and highlighting certain works from it, the
exhibition will demonstrate “how he learned
as he made, and the way that he was able to
scale his ideas and apply them to a broad range
of materials.”
Although he was not widely known, Blunk’s
impact — via the house — continues to widen.
Joshua Tree sculptor Alma Allen, who is two
decades younger than Blunk and has never met
him, was clearly influenced by the older artist’s
work; his pieces will be showcased alongside
Blunk’s at the Palm Springs Art Museum later
this year. Since 2009, emerging international
artists such as Max Lamb, Gemma Holt, Jacob
Tillman, Jay Nelson, Rachel Kaye, Rainer Spehl
and Harry Thaler have been invited to live and
work at Blunk’s house, channeling the artist’s
ethos at the source.
“The Planet,” a huge redwood burl sculpture
commissioned by the Oakland Museum in 1968
and installed there in 1969 just weeks before the
building was completed, is another influential
piece and one that illuminates the artist’s process. Like a modern-day
Michelangelo, Blunk let
the material reveal what it
could be shaped into and,
working with chisels and
chainsaws, “he carved out
voids for seating within the
natural form. ‘The Planet’ is
both a design object and art,”
Adams says. It is also an interactive
piece that children can clamber into and
are encouraged to play with.
“It helped Blunk develop his style,” Adams
says. “Later large-scale seating sculptures he cre-
ated were all meant to be touched, sat on and
engaged with.”
Placed in the foyer of the museum, “The
Planet” signals the museum’s interest in local
materials and crafts, and “many generations of
museumgoers have come here to sit on it, run
their hands along it, and it is an important part
of Oakland, really,” Adams says. “It is not just
an object; it is a seating sculpture and an expe-
rience that blurs the line between the natural
and the crafted.” museumca.org n
Top left and right: Interior views of J.B. Blunk’s hand-built home in Inverness on land gifted to him by
sculptor Gordon Onslow Ford. Middle and inset:
Blunk’s signature ceramics; bottom: images of Blunk
with his first wife, friends and his daughter Mariah
Nielson, and under an arch he carved from solid wood.
