The Art of Breaking Bottles

By Kim Dohrman, Creative Clay CEO

Artwork by Michael R. 2006

St. Petersburg, Florida. It was early July 2007 when I moved back to St. Petersburg from Grand Forks, North Dakota, where I had been living with my wife Barbara Voglewede for four years. During this time I’d been focusing on my art portfolio and teaching private art lessons. Grand Forks, a beautiful city along the Red River, was a perfect place to work. But I longed for home and Barbara, a North Dakota native, was ready to try living in a climate where there wasn’t a need for mittens or snow shovels. Soon after we began exploring our options, Barbara was offered a visiting faculty position at Stetson University College of Law, so we bought a cute little home in the Palmetto Park neighborhood and began to explore St. Petersburg. As we got to know St. Pete, we loved the cultural diversity and growing art scene. I’m originally from Tarpon Springs, but I also lived in downtown St. Petersburg in 1996-97 working as an elementary teacher at Community Montessori School (Tampa) and part-time stringer at a newspaper around the corner from where I lived called The Pinellas News. Although there wasn’t much going on in the city in the 90s, I loved St. Pete and hoped to return one day.

Creative Clay. Shortly after our move, I was driving along Central Ave in what seemed a blighted business area (now the EDGE District, but then the Dome District), I noticed a colorful, quirky-looking storefront called Creative Clay. I pulled over and walked in, immediately impressed with artwork that seemed to be breaking all of the rules. Yes! Folk art! The first piece I was drawn to was by an artist named Michael R. The painting was seemingly random words—names of people, WDUV (local radio station), Jackson Brown, Peter Frampton, Be Happy, and so many more words—written in silver paint marker in all caps on a delicious, textured, multi-colored background on wood. Captivated, I continued my journey around the gallery, noticing other intriguing works as well as whimsical greeting cards, t-shirts and other vibrant, art-centric merch. As I was looking, a diminutive, cheerful-faced woman with gorgeous white hair, bright eyes, and a warm smile approached me. She introduced herself as Mary Andrews, the office manager and mother of one of the member artists, Carolyn R.

Creative Clay in 2007—1124 Central Ave, St. Petersburg, FL.

“Wow—this artwork is great! What is this place?” I asked her.

“Do you want to meet our member artists?”

Her smile broadened and she led me down a short hall, past a couple of administrative offices to a long, narrow, industrial-looking studio space. I met Chris Coyle, who was working in his sketchbook drawing expressive cartoon characters. Looking around the room, I was impressed that all of the artists were working on their own work—it wasn’t a cookie-cutter, follow-the-teacher, step-by-step kind of studio experience. These were artists expressing themselves authentically. Then I noticed a woman glaring at me hardcore, like I’d stepped on her turf and needed to get going. First impressions aren’t always right! She stared for a second, and then got up and walked over to me and introduced herself excitedly. “I’m Gina Kenney.” She smiled and introduced me to some of her friends—Carolyn, Kim, Kevin, Chris F., Artie, John, Steve and Sarah. “We are artists,” she said proudly. And I remember turning to Mary and saying, “Do you need volunteers?”

The next day, I was volunteering in the studio. The day after that I was hired as a guest artist, so excited to work in this awesome community of artists. I loved that the teaching staff weren’t teaching in the traditional sense. Instead, they were more like mentors, circling the studio and giving tips and advice organically. These mentors left some of the artists to work completely independently, while with others, they offered more guidance. Coming from a Montessori teaching background, where the focus is on the individual’s interests and also respects and integrates children of all learning abilities, I fell for Creative Clay immediately. As an artist and teacher, it just felt like home. A year later, I was selected to participate in a unique program called Artlink, a one-to-one apprenticeship pairing a professional artist with one of the members artists who has a developmental and/or intellectual disability. I knew exactly who I wanted to work with. Michael R.

Artlink 2008. Michael and I shared two main things—a love of words and a compulsion to make art. We also shared an affinity for creating sounds. Me, admittedly more traditional music, but Michael specifically liked making all kinds of sounds—tapping various objects. But it seemed his favorite was the sound of a bottle breaking. I know, interesting, right? This was discovered by one of the guest artists who oriented me to my new role at Creative Clay. At the time, Beau Smith was not only one of the staff, but also a talented artist and art student at Eckerd College. He was bold and loved his job, and I adored working with him because you could see from his interactions with the member artists how he respected and cared about them. Beau began taking Michael out back to the dumpster to let him break Coke bottles. He’d let Michael break one bottle after lunch each day, and Michael would giggle listening to the sound of that smashing glass. He seemed to get so much joy from smashing a bottle. I also found out from Beau that Michael had his own bottle collection at home. So, when we teamed up to work together for Artlink, I thought, why not bottles?

Artlink 2008—Promo card for the exhibition of 10 teams at the Pier in St. Petersburg, FL. In the photo is Michael and I working on painting bottles with words.

Michael and I collected and painted glass bottles, painted 2D bottles on canvas, wrote words about bottles, wrote words on bottles, made a crude musical instrument using bottles with varying amounts of water in them, made merch donning bottles, and finally—our masterpiece—we made a bottle-breaker. Yes, a bottle-breaker. I thought it might bring Michael endless happiness to create a safe way for him to break bottles when he wanted to, and maybe even at home in his backyard.

His mother said, “You’re making WHAT?!”

Looking back, it was a potentially really bad idea, but somehow, I convinced his mother that this bottle art installation wouldn’t be complete without the bottle-breaker, and she finally conceded. We did it. With a lot of engineering help from Barbara, we made a large plexiglass cube with a long chute to drop the bottles, which would crash on a concrete slab. And you could watch the whole process, being that it was made of plexiglass. Yes. The first time he dropped the bottle and it crashed into pieces, I laughed right along with him. The joy!

Months later, we’d completed ten art pieces required for our apprenticeship to be installed at the old Pier on the third floor. The exhibit included a huge installation of a tree branch hung from the ceiling that dripped with blue, green and brown bottles. We had interactive musical bottles lined up with a striker for patrons to play, bottle paintings, our bottle-breaker, and a journal of our work together. Finally, it was time for the opening exhibition, which would take up the entire third floor with nine other teams. We were set up in the southeast corner. The bottle-breaker, our pride, sat ready for what I’d hoped would be a fun interactive experience for the beer-drinking patrons—after finishing their beer, they were invited to break their bottles. It was a hit!

Until it wasn’t. I’d forgotten an important consequence of breaking beer bottles. I should have requested the bottles be rinsed before dropping them down the chute. Oops. The exhibit was set to be up for another month, and because I’d forgotten to engineer a way to clean the bottle-breaker, there it sat--stinking and nasty with the over-whelming smell of stale beer—so obviously we had to remove it. I can laugh about it now, and realize even for the short time we had it, because of the glee it brought Michael, it was all worth it.

Michael and I worked for months on our artwork together—some work we collaborated on, some we worked on separately, but it was a wonderful experience I’ll never forget. The aim of Artlink is primarily to give artists with developmental disabilities the opportunity to work one on one with a professional artist to expand their skill set and to provide training on the business of being an artist. How do you prepare for an exhibit? How do you price your work? Talk to customers? Write an artist statement? We are to pass on all of the important things needed to move forward with a career as an artist. And although I reviewed these things with Michael, I soon realized that the one truly learning from our work together was not Michael. It was me. He had already embraced art-making fully and what it meant to him—his purpose—a means of expression and release. A way for someone who used very few words to communicate, to connect powerfully through his art. He didn’t feel the need to sell his art for it to matter or for it to be purposeful. What mattered was the opportunity to make it. The process, not the product.

84 Bottles by Michael R. and Kim Dohrman. 12x12 Acrylic on canvas. Artlink 2008. On exhibit now in the show Impact: The Teaching Artist at Creative Clay's Good Folk Gallery, 1846 1st Ave S., St. Petersburg, FL.

And now, after 17 years, it thrills me to still be a part of Creative Clay-- this beautiful community of professional artists, art-makers, art-lovers and those who support us. As we hire our next apprenticeship mentors for Artlink, I look forward to seeing all that unfolds.