Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.
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50 | APRIL 2015 nshoremag.com form was moving away from that notion. "The wood art movement is where glass was 10 years ago," says Bob, who notes wood artists today are getting between $40,000 and $50,000 for pieces that would have fetched $5,000 just a decade ago. Seeing the artists succeed is their greatest pleasure. "The journey is twofold: the hunt for new artists, new pieces, and then watching their development," says Lillian. "Getting a piece into a museum makes their work more valuable." "It takes a long time," says Bob of the art world's change of attitude toward wood art. "It takes a lot of work and a lot of endorsements, and it comes very slowly. Shows like tKis are a KuJe Eenefit to tKe public and the artist both, and the museum world as well." The Detroit Institute of Art, Museum and De - sign, the Mobile Museum, and the University of Michigan Art Museum are among the institutes who have supported the art form. For the Bohlens, deciding to ac- quire a piece begins with its visual appeal. The pair also considers whether the artist has produced many good works or has had a singular success. They have a rule that a new piece must place in the top 50 of their current collection. Additionally, they look at a piece three times before making a buying decision. "We have serious inter- est in a lot of artists," says Bob. CONTACT Peabody Essex Museum 161 Essex St. Salem 978-745-9500 pem.org They receive daily emails from artists looking to be considered for tKeir collection, or Ior Kelp findinJ galleries that will represent them. "We're pretty open-minded," says Bob. "We are always looking." For those who plan to see the Audacious exhibit, Lillian suggests taking special note of the quilt titled The Theory of Everything by Fraser Smith. "Even when people are standing two to three inches away from it, they think it is fabric, and it is a block of wood." When the Bohlens started collect- ing, there were only two museums in the country housing wood art collec- tions. Today, there are 42—thanks, in part, to their prolonged patron- age of the form. Their shared hope is to push the envelope in terms of what constitutes high art. Clockwise from top left, A Tree Runs Through It by Ron Gerton; The Bohlens; and Squid Series #2 by Stuart Mortimer FACES photograph by Sarah Jordan McCaffery (right) by Walter Silver (top left), by Dirk Bakker (bottom left)