Gallery Talk for Spoons to Stir the Soul with Norm Sartorius

Gallery Talk for Spoons to Stir the Soul with Norm Sartorius | Sat. May 7, 2022 | 1:00 pm EDT | Hybrid Event

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Guests may join us in person or via ZOOM

Join us for a Gallery Tour of Spoons to Stir the Soul with artist Norm Sartorius who will lead you through the first career retrospective exhibition celebrating 40 years of his life and work. The exhibition includes many of Sartorius’s finest works, selected from some of the premier private and public collections in the United States. In addition to Sartorius’s spoons, Spoons to Stir the Soul will include outstanding examples demonstrating the breadth of his artistic repertoire, including larger sculptures.

Norm Sartorius (b. 1947) has built a unique career sculpting wooden spoons that, as he says, “stir the soul, not the soup.” Leaving a job in psychiatric social work, he embarked as a young man on a quest to find something tangible to make with his hands. With no background, he apprenticed with versatile crafters Phil and Sandye Jurus in Baltimore. He learned about tools and techniques in wood and metal. Leaving the city, he became a hippie homesteader in the mountains of West Virginia living on 25 acres on a remote mountaintop for five years. He sold functional woodenware of various kinds at local craft fairs, but it was his spoons that caught people’s attention. They had an artistic flair that hinted at ta deep artistic well of ideas and forms expressed as spoonish sculptures. Norm, too has said that spoons held a special attraction for him from the start.

Now 30 years on, Norm has “stayed in his seat,” exploring the common wooded spoon as a context for sculpture. Using woods of exceptional beauty, he shapes each spoon to stand as a unique artistic statement of color, form, and texture. Advancing the art of the spoon to a very high level, each work is inspired by the wood itself, and draws on his deep repository of creative ideas and ancient spoon making traditions worldwide.