Marjorie Voorhees

creative awareness | arts & culture | makers’ movement

Marjorie Voorhees, born and raised in Sierra Valley, lives in Sattley 2 miles away from Country Class Collectibles at Sattley Cash Store that she has managed for the past seven years. She grew up in a family with 12 children; all of her siblings play music or specialize in some creative endeavor. Voorhees herself was the art director for her local high-school paper. Her father was a prominent member of a Northern Paiute tribe. She has always been intrigued with colored glass, ever since she was a little girl. “I used to find colored bottles behind the house from old dumps and was just fascinated by the blues, greens, dark umbers,” she says. Then when she got older, she took a stained-glass art class in Manteca in 1990 and has been honing her craft ever since then. Voorhees specializes in a traditional copper-foil or lead-style glass, like Tiffany-style lamps or stained-glass barn quilts done in lead — as opposed to a torched- or fused-glass process — and specializes in custom, commissioned glasswork, restoration and her own designs. In looking at two floor-to-ceiling stained glass windows on either side of a doorframe that feature two large, multi-colored trees, I am taken by the attention to detail and the level of quality. There is a variety of colors in the eye-catching work. Voorhees shares that she used at least four to five colors to make the water and three to four greens to make the trees. “The trees were challenging for me,” she says. “The picture was 2 inches tall and I had to make it much larger than that.” She admits that trying to scale images is half the fun and that it keeps it interesting. Her favorite part of doing stained-glass art is selecting the glass after conceptualizing a project. She says she tries to make it look as realistic as possible. She first draws the picture and then cuts the glass and fits it, like pieces of a puzzle. One of her stained-glass projects featured an eagle and the precision it took to match the feathers to their true colors, was challenging, she admits. “I love doing wildlife, nature, whatever is reflected in my lifestyle. I’m a very outdoors person,” Voorhees says, adding how she loves to snowshoe and cross-country ski in the woods behind her house. One of her other favorite commissioned projects was a restoration of a Catholic church in Sierra City. It took her a month to source the glass, hand cut it and create it. “I used to do 60-inch-by-84-inch landing windows in Cincinnati [working for Wooden Nickel Antiques],” she says. She cut the plate glass, sent out for the bevels and worked in a team of four to install it and enjoyed the process of conceptualizing it and watching it all come together. When living in Cincinnati, she also taught stained-glass art classes at a local university. “I fell in love with that town; it was all art and music,” she says. However, she moved back to the Sierra Valley in 2005 to be closer to her mother and started taking commissions and creating her own stained glasswork. It takes her around a day to do barn quilts or a couple of weeks to do cabinet windows or custom projects. Another one of her favorite past projects was making Frank Lloyd Wright-style windows for a customer in Graeagle; her clients were so pleased with how the windows turned out that they hired her again. Commissions are 25 to 30 percent of her business. She also has booths at craft shows such as Calaveras County Fair & Jumping Frog Jubilee and autumn Ocktoberfests in the area; she was also a featured artist on the recent annual Sierra Valley Art & Ag Trail.

Voorhees admits that she is quite busy with the store, though, and making stained glass art is time-consuming. The store sells a lot of Native American crafts — pine-needle baskets, turquoise jewelry, minerals and gemstones, along with other collectibles and artifacts. But as a professional stained-glass artist for 25 years now, her stained-glass work is the No. 1 selling item in Sattley Cash Store. | sierracountyartscouncil.org, @SattleyCashStore n

BY KAYLA ANDERSON

FROM LEFT: Marjorie Voorhees earlier work. Landing windows that Marjorie Voorhees created when she lived in Cincinnati. A bighorn sheep and wolves art piece. | Courtesy Marjorie Voorhees

Gatekeeper’s Museum | Tahoe City | Oct. 12-March 5 10 a.m.-5 p.m. | northtahoemuseums.org

Piper J Gallery | Truckee | Oct. 12-30 11 a.m.-5 p.m. | piperjgallery.com

Lake Tahoe Community College | South Lake Tahoe | Oct. 12-Dec. 9 11 a.m. | ltcc.edu

Lake Tahoe Community College | South Lake Tahoe | Oct. 12-Dec. 9 11 a.m. | ltccartgallery.com

Gatekeeper’s Museum | Tahoe City | Oct. 12-Nov. 9 10 a.m.-5 p.m. | northtahoemuseums.org

Marcus Ashley Gallery | South. Lake Tahoe | Oct. 14-15 12-5 p.m. | (530) 544-4278, marcusashley.com

Truckee Roundhouse | Saturdays 1-1:45 p.m. | truckeeroundhouse.org