Gary Noffke

Gary Lee Noffke was born in Decatur, Illinois and grew up in the small town of Sullivan, Illinois. His father worked in a shoe factory.[3] His German grandfather had a small farm and was still using a mule to plow his fields. His family being poor, Noffke made his own toys out of whatever materials were at hand, scavenged from the farm, the factory, and construction sites. With just a hand saw and a pocket knife, he created birdhouses, slingshots, hinged boxes, and bows and arrows.[6] To this day he makes his own tools.[7] At the age of 12, encouraged by his mother and a neighbor who was a landscape painter, he began drawing and painting in oils. His mother was later able to help pay for his education by working at, and then becoming the owner of, a shelter care home business.[6]

Noffke enrolled at Eastern Illinois University, getting his BS in 1965 and his MS in Education 1966.[4] In 1967 he went to the University of Iowa intending to study painting, but soon found himself attracted to metalsmithing. He had already been exposed to metal in a course he took from Garret de Ruiter while at Eastern Illinois University. For a while at Iowa he studied metalwork under Raoul Delmar but soon abandoned that school and moved on to Southern Illinois University at Carbondale where he studied with Brent Kington who was leading a revival of blacksmithing which lasted well into the 1970s. At Carbondale he met other up and coming metal artists such as Mary Lee Hu. He learned to forge steel[8] and was particularly impressed by a simple knife made by his mentor, Kington.[9] Noffke got his Master of Fine Arts at SIU in 1969.

While he still was studying painting, Noffke had been influenced by the abstract expressionism of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.[7] Just as these painters had attacked the canvas with swirls, drips, splashes, and smears, Noffke would attack the surface of his metal objects with obsessive and intricate detail consisting of stars, letterforms, arrows, crosses, dollar signs, eyes, and other obscure symbols.[10] These richly detailed surfaces, stamped, engraved, and carved into the metal illustrate a paradox evident in all of the artist's work. On one hand, each object presents a surface of inscrutable markings. On the other hand, each object is in the end just an ordinary bowl, spoon, knife, or some other purely utilitarian object.[11]

Noffke first taught at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida, and then at California State College at Los Angeles. In 1971, he took a position at the University of Georgia at Athens where he was to remain for the next thirty years.[3]

Noffke was awarded a faculty research grant in the early 1970s from the University of Georgia to explore the cold forging of fine silver from sheet. Expert opinion said that the hot forging of fine silver was impossible; but Noffke discovered an alloy that made it easy. He discovered that by eliminating some of the copper content in sterling silver he was able to cast his own billets of 969 silver. Still later he developed a method to forge gold from cast billets.[2]

In the years 1977 to 1979 Noffke, working with the University of Georgia and several other artists, put together three annual "National Ring Shows" featuring the younger generation of metalsmiths.[12] The shows did not rely on museums but were escorted around the country by the participants themselves. The idea was so successful, that The Lamar Dodd School of Art and the Georgia Museum of Art repeated the format again in 2011.[13]

For thirty years Noffke taught at the University of Georgia and then retired from active teaching. He built his own studio—and all the tools in that studio—in the hills near Farmington, Georgia. Some of those tools along with his refrigerator from the studio were featured in his solo exhibition at Charlotte's Mint Museum in the fall of 2011.[7] Richly and elaborately decorated, it is a perfect example of the artist's usual blending of surrealistic decoration and practical utility.

• 2005: Selected as one of the Fifty Outstanding Alumni of Fifty Years of Graduate Education by Eastern Illinois University[14]
• 2001: Elected to College of Fellows by the American Craft Council[15]
• 1990: NEA Visual Artist Fellowship in Craft[16]
• 1988: Master Metalsmith of the Year award by the National Ornamental Metal Museum[17]

From April to September 2011 the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina presented a major retrospective of the artist's work titled, Attitude and Alchemy: The Metalwork of Gary Lee Noffke. This was the first museum-organized project about Noffke in 20 years and featured over 120 pieces of his work, including silver and gold hollowware, flatware, jewelry, and objects forged in steel.[18][19]

A comprehensive list of exhibitions which have featured Noffke's work is shown below.

• National Ornamental Metal Museum
• American Craft Council
• Artist Blacksmiths Association of North America[45]
• North Carolina Association of Craft Artists

• Virginia Shields, William U. Eiland, Gary Noffke, Georgia Museum of Art, Ann Orr: silversmith, goldsmith, & enamelist, Athens, Georgia, Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, 1994, ISBN 0-915977-15-X
• Deborah Landon; Gary Noffke, American masters of hollowware in the late 20th century, Athens, Ga. : Georgia Museum of Art, 1997, OCLC Number: 39535972

Notes

Sources

• Dunas, Michael, Killing Time: The Work of Gary Noffke, Metalsmith Magazine, Fall 1987
• Simon, Marjorie, The Art of Gold, Metalsmith Magazine, Summer 2003
• Jeannine J. Falino, Allie Farlowe, Gary Noffke, Attitude and Alchemy: The Metalwork of Gary Lee Noffke, Charlotte, North Carolina, 2011

• Attitude & Alchemy: the Metalwork of Gary Lee Noffke, Editor Allie Farlowe, Charlotte, North Carolina, Mint Museum of Craft + Design, 2011.