The Beggar's Bowl
A lesson from a phone call with woodturner Mike Snegg
I don't usually answer the JAS helpline — we have people far better with callers than I am. But every so often I pick up, because I like hearing directly from artists: what they're working on, what they actually need.
One day I answered and got a wood artist named Mike Snegg. He was engaging, easy to talk to, and the conversation turned into a real one. He asked the question almost every serious artist eventually asks: how does he get his work to stand out to a jury?
I told him — speaking as someone who ran a gallery for 35 years and worked with artists from emerging to museum-level — that this is the question.
I looked at his bowls. They were nearly perfect. You could see the skill, the devotion, the years of craftsmanship in the wood. His artist statement said all the right things about revealing the inner beauty of the material.
And that was the problem. Tens of thousands of people can turn a beautiful bowl, the same way tens of thousands of people can paint a competent landscape. Technical mastery isn't what makes a juror stop. The real question is: what makes this unmistakably yours — not interchangeable with someone else's beautiful bowl?
I suggested he think about context. History. A larger narrative the work could belong to.
A couple of weeks later, Mike called back. He'd had a breakthrough.
He began exhibiting the bowls floating on invisible shelves, mounted on the wall — and beside each one, a life-size silhouette or photograph of a beggar.
Because in every society, on every continent, there are people who own almost nothing except a begging bowl. They eat from it. Drink from it. Sit on it. Collect what little comes their way in it. For some people, it may be the most important object in their life.
Suddenly the bowls weren't just objects of skill. They were part of the story of humanity itself.
That's the difference between a beautiful object and a body of work that stops a juror cold.
P.S. Mike has gone on to exhibit at the Smithsonian and the Carter Center among other prestigious venues.