Artist's latest commission for Smithsonian is a 'masterpiece'

ALICE THORSON
The Kansas City Star

People love the little ceramic Santas that Irma Starr makes for the bookstore at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

And many purchase her reproductions of 17th-century English slipware in the museum's famous Burnap Collection. Starr, who works out of the studio behind her Loose Park area home, knows all the historical techniques - combing, feathering, marbling and slip-trailing - necessary to duplicate the pottery's distinctive brown and orange designs on ocher backgrounds. And she's been doing it for 30 years.

Starr is "one of the greatest living practitioners of these traditional decorative techniques," according to Catherine Futter, the Nelson's new curator of decorative arts.

She often is commissioned to make commemorative plates in the English slipware style, celebrating everything from Father's Day to important anniversaries - of people, institutions and organizations.

In 1999 she was invited to create an ornament for the annual White House Christmas tree; in 2000 Hillary Clinton commissioned her to make a commemorative plate for the Clintons' 25th wedding anniversary.

While visiting Washington, D.C., three years ago for the White House Christmas tree fete, Starr introduced herself to Kenneth Trapp, director of the Smithsonian Institution's Renwick Gallery of the National Museum of American Art.

The result of the meeting was yet another prestigious commission: to create a commemorative plate for the Renwick's 30th anniversary in 2002.

"I knew her work, I know the Nelson-Atkins well and the Burnap Collection, Trapp said in a recent telephone interview. "This is going to be a magnificent piece."

"What I like about it," he added, "is Irma making works of art in clay that reference the history of clay, but she brings that past tradition forward to the present."

Starr and Trapp worked together to come up with the plate's design. The aim, Trapp said, was to commemorate "an American architectural landmark as well as the Renwick's commitment to the American craft movement."

At his suggestion, Starr worked up an image of the exterior of the Renwick building, a handsome Second Empire-style structure designed by James Renwick Jr., architect of St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City.

Starr made sketches and two small prototypes before beginning the arduous process of creating the design on a 32-inch-wide charger.

Three months of working from 6 a.m. to late at night included some tense times.

"There were so many moments when it could have cracked and been destroyed because of the size," observed Futter. "Most chargers are a half or a quarter of this diameter. It's technically a masterpiece."

Starr's technical command sparkles in her highly detailed treatment of the building's individual bricks and roof tiles, its Victorian lampposts and the wrought-iron fence out front. The sculptural ornament gracing the windows and door lends itself perfectly to reproduction in white slip, applied like cake icing.

Tiny dots of white slip animate the commemorative text on the rim of the plate: "1972 The Renwick Gallery 2002 Smithsonian American Art Museum."

It is, as Trapp predicted, "a magnificent piece."

Last Saturday Trapp got his first look at the finished work during a visit to Starr's studio for a celebration barbecue with friends and members of the Nelson staff.

All of Starr's designs are licensed through the Nelson. "She's the creative genius," says John Hamann, bookstore manager. "We make suggestions, and she takes the ball and runs with it."