1. Fuel Shock
From the kiln to the gas pump,
artists feel the squeeze.
otters Bebin Cypher and Paco Sutera are taking a
“petroleum sabbatical” from the Ann Arbor Sum-
mer Art Fair this year.
Cypher and Sutera, who live near Wimberley, Texas,
have exhibited in Ann Arbor for about eighteen years. But
Sutera says it takes them four to five tanks of gas to get
their van to Michigan—and with gas hovering around $3
a gallon, a fill-up costs $90. So they’re looking at a
round-trip gas bill approaching $900.
“Our sales have been down for several years,” says
Sutera, “and with gas prices what they are, we decided to
take this year off”—something that the fair’s sponsor, the
Michigan Guild of Artists and Artisans, allows its exhibit-
ing members to do.
Cypher and Sutera’s “sabbatical” is exceptional, but
every artist on the fair circuit is feeling the pain of rising
energy prices. To see why, just walk by the Ann Arbor
District Library surface parking lot that runs between
South Fifth Avenue and Division Street. From Monday
through Saturday of fair week, the lot is filled with huge
cargo vans. Artists need them to lug raw materials to their
studios and then to haul thousands of pounds of finished
works to art fairs all over the country.
Paul Eshelman, a potter from Elizabeth, Illinois, says
he puts about 20,000 miles per year on his 1997 van trav-
eling to and from art fairs. He gets about fifteen miles per
gallon with a show load of about 1,000 pounds. In the past
he also drove the van back and forth to his main supplier
in Chicago—until the stress of hauling all that clay ruined
the van’s engine. Eshelman, who will exhibit on Ingalls
Mall in the Ann Arbor Street Art Fair, the Original,
switched to UPS for day deliveries—but he says that cost,
too, is “a lot higher than it used to be.”
Metal sculptor Bill Secunda of Butler, Pennsylvania,
has put 250,000 miles on his 1995 Dodge diesel pickup.
He says he needs diesel power to haul the 5,000 pounds
of life-size bison, bears, moose, and elks he’ll bring to
Ann Arbor’s South University Art Fair. With his pickup
running thirteen miles per gallon, he’s looking into re-
placing it with a box truck that he can adapt for camp-
ing in when he’s at a show. But rising fuel prices could
kill that plan—at seven to eight miles per gallon, the
box truck’s extra fuel costs could swallow up the sav-
ings in motel bills.
Artists are hit by rising energy costs before they
ever hit the road. Those whose work requires
fuels such as propane or natural gas get a double
whammy.
Stan Baker of Ann Arbor has been a potter for more
than twenty-five years. But for the first time in his career,
he’s fretting about the cost of firing his kiln.
In the past, propane, his primary firing fuel, was a bill
“I never thought about,” says Baker, forty-six, who ex-
hibits on Liberty Street in the Summer Art Fair. But the
July 2006 ANN ARBOR OBSERVER 1
July19-22
2006byPeggyPage
Requiemfor aCity
Frank Relle’s nightscapes of tears.
Relle’s work draws its force from a
combination of aesthetics, tech-
nique, and a historic moment.
rank Relle was searching for meaning.
After graduating from Tulane University in his
hometown of New Orleans, he spent seven years
“trying to figure out my life” by writing and photograph-
ing. He set out to sail around the world but made it only to
Spain. He went to Canada, Maine, Montana, California.
He worked on Mississippi River boats. He even did a stint
with “the bright lights and fancy people” of Manhattan as
a photographer’s assistant for magazine, advertising, and
album cover photo shoots. He met celebrities such as
Britney Spears, rapper 50 Cent, actor Nathan Lane, author
Maurice Sendak, and rapper Jay-Z. Yes, he met Beyoncé,
too.
Although New York was a great learning experience,
the Crescent City lured Relle home for keeps in 2004. “I
figured I should start doing my own work,” he recalls.
“But I wasn’t sure what that was.”
Then a friend in construction asked him to photograph
a house, specifying that the shot should be taken in the
late afternoon. Relle liked what he saw and took the next
chronological step: he began photographing houses in Or-
leans Parish neighborhoods as night fell.
Then came a storm named Katrina. Relle, who’s twenty-
nine, evacuated. Afterward, he says, “I was torn about re-
turning. I didn’t want to appear to be capitalizing on the
storm as so many people have.” But a friend told him,
“Go back. You are tied to this story.” So five weeks after
the levees broke, Relle began a new series of photo-
graphs—on the city’s lost homes. His search for purpose
was over.
Relle will exhibit about thirty images in his booth
on Ingalls Mall in the Ann Arbor Street Art Fair,
the Original. About half will be post-Katrina
streetscapes of boarded-up houses with forlorn porch
chairs, mud-soaked cars, and starkly lonely storefronts that
are now condemned.
He exhibited the
post-Katrina photo-
graphs for the first
time at the New Or-
leans Jazz & Her-
itage Festival from
April 28 to May 7. “I
didn’t think anyone
would want to buy
them,” he remembers.
Expecting only muse-
ums to express inter-
est, he hadn’t even
priced the pictures.
But viewers thanked
him. Many cried. “I met
people who had owned
these homes and lost
them. They would ask,
‘Can I buy it [the pho-
to]?’ But this had been
their life. How can you
ask someone to buy their
life?” Relle gave those photographs away.
Before then, he had exhibited at only three art fairs.
But he left that one “overwhelmed” by more than 200 or-
ders for prints.
What makes these pictures so powerful is not just their
historical value, their personal significance, or even the
communal guilt and shame of so many of us who watched
the suffering from the comfort of CNN. Relle’s work
draws its force from a combination of aesthetics, tech-
nique, and a historic moment. Relle says his photos evoke
his way of “looking at life and the way the city deals with
struggle. Before the storm many of these houses were al-
ready dilapidated. New Orleans has always been a city of
life and death, even in its celebrations. The music we are
known for came from funeral parades.”
Since much of the city was without
power when he returned, Relle began
the post-Katrina series using portable,
battery-powered lights that tinted the
darkness with unusual hues: high-
pressure sodium for yellow-gold,
mercury vapor for green, and the last
of daylight for fill. He used color
film and a medium-format camera
for these long exposures (which are
much too long to include people).
He scans his negatives and repro-
duces the images digitally, but lim-
its his use of Photoshop to classic
darkroom procedures like selective
lightening and darkening—he
doesn’t resort to the software to
fix sloppy technique.
His home page, frankrelle.
com, shows a desolate, elegant
street corner bathed in gold.
Relle says the shot was almost
ruined by the approaching headlights of a National
Guard truck sent to investigate the strange lights in an
off-limits neighborhood that he snuck into. The city as a
whole is much more open now during the day, but it be-
comes less accessible at night. And parts of the city still
lack power.
Relle hopes to turn the series into a book. “I feel lucky
to make this work that is so very personal. Most free-
lancers are shooting things they don’t care about, like
weddings and commercial work.”
Eventually when bulldozers flatten these precious
scenes he documents, he knows he will have to move on
to other subjects. He has started to photograph cities he
visits for art fairs, including Ann Arbor.
But until then, Relle continues writing his silent song
for a lost love.
F
photo frank relle
P

2. 2 ANN ARBOR OBSERVER July 2006
cost of a 2,380-degree glaze firing has
doubled—from $20 to $40—during the
past two years. At sixty to eighty glaze fir-
ings a year, his annual propane bill is now
running $2,400 to $3,200.
“I plan for it now,” says Baker, a 1978
graduate of Community High School. “I
have to make arrangements with the gas
company for a special payment plan. I
pack kilns tighter. I now make a lot of lit-
tle things like cups and vases to fill the
small spaces.
“The glaze firing is the money firing. If
you spend more money to heat the kiln,
you have to increase the ware in each kiln
load.”
The cost of firing has even become the
subject of scholarly research. Alfred Uni-
versity in Alfred, New York,
has one of the nation’s old-
est and largest university ce-
ramics programs, founded
in 1900. Associate professor
Linda Sikora, the new chair
of Alfred’s division of ce-
ramic arts, is working with
a group in the university’s
engineering school on new
kinds of electric kilns that
will bisque “green” pots in
half the time of a standard
kiln and slash the costly
high-temperature glaze fir-
ing from twenty to five
hours.
She just got back her
first test pots. Sikora says
the glazes matured and had
the distinctive look of an
electric-fired piece. The col-
ors were “great—chrome
green, a mixed-oxide black,
yellow—but they were
bright, maybe too bright.”
Sikora usually fires with a
combination of fuel oil and
wood. She plans to experi-
ment with the mixture of
the clay body and the glaze
formulas for future test pots for the experi-
mental electric kilns.
“Due to energy issues, we want our stu-
dents to know lots of firing techniques
when they go out in the world,” she says,
“so they can afford to fire their work when
they are just starting out.”
Alleghany Meadows of Carbondale,
Colorado, an Alfred M.F.A., says he cut
continued
Potter Stan Baker’s propane bill
doubled, to $2,400–$3,200 a year.
Sculptor Bill Secunda’s diesel pickup gets just thirteen miles per gallon when
laden with 5,000 pounds of life-sized bison, bears, moose, and gorillas.
photosgriffinlindsay
his high-fire kiln fuel costs from $150 a
load to almost zero by switching to renew-
able energy. He now burns wood to pre-
heat the kiln to about 500 degrees and then
turns on a forced-air blower to ignite a
mist of his new primary fuel—recycled
restaurant cooking oil.
“Restaurants pay people to get rid of
the oil because it is a liability to have
around,” Meadows says. “I have a friend
who is a chef and was complaining about
it. I told him that I’d take the oil. He even
gives me a couple of meals a month, too,
as a bonus.
“It’s an excellent fuel source. It is more
labor intensive than natural gas, similar to
the labor of a wood firing, but time is
something that artists have. You can’t use
it to bisque pots, though, because it gener-
ates a particulate that you would have to
spend a lot of time washing off.”
Meadows got the idea from a fellow
Pitzer College alumnus, Sam Clarkson,
now of Santa Cruz; while Clarkson was a
graduate student at Penn State, he heard a
lecture about a car that ran on vegetable
oil. Clarkson built an experimental restau-
rant oil kiln while working on his M.F.A.
When the two taught a workshop together
at Penland School of Crafts in 2001, they
built a kiln and did successful large-scale
firings with restaurant oil.
“Chinese restaurant oil is the best, be-
cause it tends to be better-quality oil, and
the chefs don’t overcook the food or over-
use the same oil,” Meadows says. “Fast-
food oil is the worst. It is so overused,
there are hardly any BTUs left in it.”
Firing clay is pricey, but the medium
that wins the fuel guzzler title is
glass. Glass artists burn fossil fuels
24-7, 365 days a year for kilns and glory
hole ovens.
Mark Sudduth of Cleveland Heights,
Ohio, has maintained a private glass studio
since 1983. “When natural gas was dereg-
ulated four to five years ago, I signed up
for a three-year plan, which was the best
rate where I live,” he recalls. “My bill
tripled overnight. When that plan ended,
my bill doubled again.” His current
monthly bill is more than $1,600.
“Natural gas alone has put many glass
studios out of business,” says Sudduth,
who will exhibit on North University in
the Street Art Fair.
Eshelman, Baker, and Sudduth point
out three different catch-22s related to ris-
ing fuel costs.
“I’m having to do more shows,” says
Eshelman. “They aren’t as good [economi-
cally] as they used to be. My profit has
dropped by a third. When your profit is
less, then you have to do more shows,
which means you drive more and your
profit margin drops.”
Baker feels another impetus to hit the
road. “Because the economy in Michigan
is bad, you have to leave Michigan to make
money at fairs,” he says. “That means you
are driving farther and spending more on
fuel.” He used to travel to big Florida
shows. “They were great shows for me
down there, but not anymore. My profits
went down and my expenses went up.”
Sudduth says he wishes he could opti-
mize his gasoline bills, the number of
shows he does per year, and the distance
he travels to each one in order to predict
his best show schedule. “But it is an im-
possible formula. The economy is bounc-
ing all over the place. You never know
which show will be your best. In 2005,
Winter Park was my best Florida show
and Coconut Grove was my worst. But in
2006, my best Florida show was Coconut
Grove. And you never know about the
weather or if Tiger Woods is playing in a
tournament nearby.” The climate or a
competing attraction can hurt fair atten-
dance and sales.
Ann Arbor’s coffeehouses have tip jars
by the cash registers. Maybe the Art Fairs
need a new tradition—tip jars at each
booth for energy bills.
ArtFair
Reunion
Kemper’s traveling
family.
An Art Fair old-timer told me that
among the 1,500-some artists at
the four official street fairs and
the unofficial art fairs on every scrap of
vacant land downtown, Kemper stands out
as a great salesman.
Turns out we had stumbled sight-
unseen on a six-foot, two-inch, stylish
hunk selling some great art.
But Kemper, who is notable among the
hordes of artists for exhibiting some
anatomically correct male nudes among
his other G and PG paintings, is more than
a daring, handsome artist. He has formed
an extended, multigenerational family of
customers and artists that gives his booth
the mood of a neighborhood.
On Saturday morning of the 2005 fair,
Kemper’s designated interview time had
come, but he was not to be found in his
enviably shady spot under the trees on
Glassmaker Mark Sudduth’s natural
gas bill runs $1,600 a month.
continued

3. July 2006 ANN ARBOR OBSERVER 3
North University in the State Street Area
Art Fair, where he returns for 2006. The
volunteer booth watcher grumbled about
the artist’s grande-long coffee break.
How did Kemper make up for keeping
the reporter waiting? I’ve written about
Art Fair artists who kiss customers on the
cheek, but Kemper hugged me, a first.
(This PR trick works only if your looks
can compete with George Clooney’s.)
But there was no time to talk, because
Kemper, with his stylish, thick black
glasses that matched his black and red
shirt and shorts, soon held court with long-
time fan Patrice Lang of Hudson, Ohio.
She stopped by with her son Isaac, who
had made Kemper a caricature at one of
the children’s art booths. The drawing was
a special gift, since many of Kemper’s
paintings have drawn figures, only some
of which are nudes.
Patrice, who had brought him home-
made chocolate chip cookies, met Kemper
and his mother, Gillian, now a painter-
printmaker of landscapes in Ann Arbor’s
South University Art Fair, at Gillian and
Kemper’s first Ann Arbor fair in the mid-
1990s.
The festive mood increased when birth-
day girl Gillian rode up on a borrowed bi-
cycle. She wore a black and white ensem-
ble, a straw cowboy hat, red flip-flops,
matching toenail polish, and—the pièce de
résistance—red Dame Edna Everage sun-
glasses.
Gillian, who was born in the village of
Ruislip near London and moved to Okla-
homa as a teenager, said that a married En-
glish photographer near her South Univer-
sity booth (Mark Bennett) had asked if he
could wear the glasses. She said she’d told
him, “If we had something going, then and
only then would I let you wear them.” He
demurred.
Gillian would not say what birthday this
was: “The closest I get is thirty-seven and
holding.” Kemper did tell his birth date af-
ter she left but asked me not to print it:
“My mom will be furious. Everyone will
do the math. No one can have a kid as big
and gray haired as me and be thirty-seven.”
At first mother and son, who live in
Oklahoma City, squabbled over who got to
keep Isaac’s drawing. Gillian chided Kem-
per about not sharing the cookies with her.
Both admitted they were “so tired of smil-
ing.”
Soon they moved on to every artist’s
Saturday topic du jour—sales. When
Kemper complained, “There are fifteen
hundred artists to compete with here,
which sucks,” Gillian chided him, “The
problem is your attitude—‘If you can find
me, you can buy something.’ ” Her solu-
tion? Gillian, who began doing art fairs in
Oklahoma in the early 1980s, wears her
good-luck dice bracelet.
On the fourth day of the fairs, Kemper
and Gillian were cheerful and chatty, but
tired. Fifteen touring artists had had a
postmidnight Friday escapade repainting
the Rock at Hill and Washtenaw. “Today
I’ve had so much caffeine,” said Gillian, “I
could talk for three days.”
Customers and friends drifted through
to buy or to visit. Two local families have
adopted the Kempers and host one or both
during Fair Week. One of them is the fam-
ily of Patrice Lang’s sister, Laurie Solon;
Solon’s son Nate has Ping-Pong tourna-
ments with Kemper. Kemper gave Nate a
painting that still hangs in the boy’s room.
Kemper, who is single, has four cats
and a collection of more than 400 antique
squeak toys, some of which appear in his
paintings. He said he “gets flak” for draw-
ing male nudes, “but there is an element of
self-portraiture to them—‘everyman ex-
posed and vulnerable.’ I have a European
attitude toward nudity. My house is full of
them. But even today people are uncom-
fortable with the ‘wiener thing.’ ”
As I left, someone in his group said,
“Don’t believe a word he tells you.”
Kemper turned and . . . smiled.
Who’s
onState?
A guide to the fairs’
geography (with
apologies to Abbott and
Costello).
by Billy Keener and Peggy Page
Peggy: Well, Billy, we can go to the pool
just as soon as I finish writing my Art Fair
stories. My editor said we could have this
beat as long as we want it.
Billy: Look, Mom, if you’re the reporter,
you must know everything there is to
know.
Peggy: I don’t know if I know everything,
but I’ve been going to the Art Fairs since
1982. One year I went into all the booths,
but that was back when there were only a
thousand of them.
Billy: Well, you’ll have to tell me their
names and where they are, so I can keep
them straight.
Peggy: Oh, I’ll tell you their names, but
you won’t keep them straight.
Billy: Are they funny names?
Peggy: Constantly changing names and
places.
Billy: Is that why you had the yellow
sticky note on the computer—the one the
cat ate?
Peggy: Yes—my absolutely necessary
sticky note. When I started, there were
three small fairs. Two of the three have
changed names. One has changed its
place. A fourth was added—then a fifth,
but it’s unofficial. And there are all the
temporary vacant-lot ones and scraps of
lawn ones. And each one seems to get big-
ger each year.
Billy: I thought there was just one.
Peggy: Lots of people think that, because
it looks like one when you walk around.
Billy: So where are they?
Peggy: Well, let’s see who we have on the
streets. Ann Arbor’s South University Art
Fair is on South U, East U, and Church.
The State Street Area Art Fair is on Liberty,
William, North U, Maynard, and Thomp-
son, but the art isn’t on State—just the ice
cream, food, and sidewalk sales. The Ann
Arbor Street Art Fair, the Original, which
used to be called that but without “the
Original” and used to be on South Univer-
sity, was on North University, Washington,
and Thayer streets, but changed again this
year to North University and Ingalls Mall.
The Ann Arbor Summer Art Fair, which
used to be the Summer Arts Festival (not
to be confused with the Ann Arbor Sum-
mer Festival, of course), is on Liberty,
Main, and State streets.
Billy: Are you sure you’re the reporter?
Peggy: Yes.
Billy: Can’t you make this simple?
Peggy: No.
Billy: And you don’t know the fairs’
names by heart?
Peggy: Well, I should.
Billy: Well, then, who’s on State?
Peggy: It depends.
Billy: Depends on what?
Peggy: If you mean the art or the food.
Billy: The art on State.
Peggy: The Ann Arbor Summer Art Fair.
Billy: Not the State Street Fair?
Peggy: No, that’s on Liberty.
Billy: With the Ann Arbor Summer Art
Fair.
Peggy: Which is on State.
Billy: I’m asking you, who’s on State?
Peggy: Not the State Street Fair.
Billy: Then who’s on North U?
Peggy: The State Street Fair and the Ann
Arbor Street Art Fair, the Original, which
was originally on South U.
Billy: Well, go ahead and tell me who’s on
South U.
Peggy: Ann Arbor’s South University Art
Fair, which is where the Ann Arbor Street
Art Fair was before it became the Ann Ar-
bor Street Art Fair, the Original, and
moved to North U.
Billy: I am so confused.
Peggy: You can’t say that. It’s a line from
the film Moonstruck.
Billy: Look, what is the fair on Liberty?
Peggy: King’s Chosen.
Billy: You haven’t mentioned that one yet.
Peggy: I didn’t want to confuse you.
Billy: All I’m trying to find out is the
name of the fair on State Street.
Peggy: I already told you.
Billy: But . . . who gets the money?
Peggy: The parking meters.
Billy: Where’s the ice cream?
Peggy: We usually go to the State Street
Fair or the South U Fair.
Billy: But not on State Street.
Peggy: Yes, on State Street.
Billy: But you told me the State Street Fair
isn’t on State Street.
Peggy: The art isn’t but its ice cream is.
Billy: All I’m trying to find out is what’s
on State Street.
Peggy: Ice cream and the Summer Art
Fair.
Billy: I’m not asking who’s on Liberty.
Peggy: Oh, that’s easy. The State Street
Fair and the Summer Art Fair.
Billy: One street at a time!
Peggy: Well, don’t keep changing the
streets.
Billy: I’m not changing anything!
Peggy: It’s easy once you have your map
and sticky note.
Billy: Just give me a GPS! I’m only ask-
ing you, who’s on State?
Peggy: The curly fries and elephant ears.
Billy: Look, you got a parking spot?
Peggy: Sure. My secret place that’s al-
ways empty.
Billy: Do I know where it is?
Peggy: You probably don’t remember.
You’ve been there only once.
Billy: I just thought I’d ask you.
Peggy: Well, I won’t tell you. You’d auc-
tion the location on eBay.
Billy: Then tell me, is it on State?
Peggy: Who’s on State? I
Kemper (he uses only one name)
makes his booth a social center.
griffinlindsay