ARTIST STUDIO BY MEGAN KAMERICK
Patina Gallery co-founder Ivan Barnett followed his own inclinations from craft to art and back again
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photo in Ivan Barnett’s studio shows when his love of the West took hold. In it he’s five years old, standing with his father under a Taos portal, wearing one of those kids’ cowboy hats from the 1950s. “I have visceral memories of it,” says the sculptor and longtime Santa Fe gallery owner. “This place was still pretty rugged.” It was 1952, and the Westerns he had watched at home in Pennsylvania had suddenly become real. Little Ivan wanted nothing more than to slip into that world. Luckily his father was a historic illustrator who had all kinds of costumes and props that allowed him to keep playing cowboy once vacation was over. “I wasn’t told, ‘You need to get a real life.’ It was, ‘Strap on a holster and go out and play.’ ” So instead of college, he opted for the Philadelphia College of Art. Then he was drafted during the Vietnam War to work in a military recruitment office in Washington, D.C. “My first job was to airbrush Nixon’s teeth and make them whiter,” he says. Barnett went on to build a successful art career in rural Pennsylvania at a time when the American craft movement was on fire. He made weather vanes, collages, and mobiles, some of which were purchased by sculptor Alexander Girard for the collection that anchors the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe. “I would make a design and it would be in 25 stores with my name on it, but I was getting bored with that,” Barnett recalls. “Boredom for me is a bad thing, because then it’s too much like a straight
142 TREND Fall 2017/ Winter 2018