FAQ: An Insight into Church Art,The Stained Gass Industry, the Working Poor, How Artists Get Famous

FAQ: An Insight into Church Art,The Stained Gass Industry, the Working Poor, How Artists Get Famous

Will A Heart Go Out to These

Artists and craftsmen in the U.S. get paid fairly right??

Why would they languish upon falling ill in their 50s?

They lived it up too much?

L.-Mary , angel on 11 pieces of glass

R.-Mary , angel on one piece of glass, both by Dan Myers

The Myers studio was the last bastion

of the cowboy way of making a living as

an artist.

Because of his local reputation as an

artist, Joe Myers was able to secure

stained glass art commissions when

he opened his studio in his backyard

in 1946. One of his early commissions

was Christ the King Catholic Church

in Tampa, for whom he made the window

over the choir and the round windows

lining each side of the sanctuary

around 1953. One of his son's last

windows was placed over the altar

of this same church in 1995.

Joseph D. Myers Associates was honored with an

award from the Florida AIA for their stained glass

in Palma Ceia Baptist Church, Tampa, in 1962.

The stained glass industry exploded in the 1970s, but has

never been regulated or controlled like electricians,

plumbers, or contractors.. Rather, a group of studios

devised the Stained Glass Association of America,

which hoped to be mistaken for a licensing board,

the stamp of official approval, but they had an art

agenda members had to adhere to:

to promote abstract art in the medium, rediculing the

Rennaisance style of church window as the European,

or old, style of stained glass. A mantra was, "If you want to

paint, get a canvas." This author has old issues of their

magazine instructing members how to talk

congregations and pastors out of representational,

pictoral windows.. They knew fame-seeking

architects understood.

Dotting the country through the Smokies, Blue Ridge,

down through Florida , the old-schooled painters on

glass, in their middle years or older, eked out a living

giving "naive" southern churches splendid religious

scenes of stained glass. Such art talked down to the

congregant, the SGAA said, as if ignorant and naive

when in reality Americans were sophisticated , more

abstract thinkers than the illiterate peasants of the

Middle Ages.

As funds for the art became a dedicated part of the

American scene, public art projects required certain

materials--slides of at least 3 public installations, a list

of at least three museums or gallerys you've shown in-

-and a fee--to be listed in the database public artists

had to be selected from.

Because Joe and Dan worked 40 or more hours a week

, without summer vacations, to feed their families, and

not much more, they had no idle time to experiment

with creations of their own to sell on the open market,

let alone assemble a gallery-sized collection of them.

One peice of Dan's--the Our Lady of Guaudelupe

pictured on the right here--was sold, ever, uninstalled;

and one, a small panel of a happy Franciscan friar,

given to a Fransican friar. Everything else is installed

in a church, home, or business. A representative of

the Mullen Religoius Supply Company saw the Guadelupe

as it sold and asked Dan to produce another peice for

an art museum in Chicago. But he couldn't find the time.

Throughout history God has gifted select men with the ability

to glorify Him on glass. Historically they have painted and

passed on, anonymous. To dedicate yourself to church

stained glass is to realize this and be willing to work in

the background, leaving your identity behind, just as God

calls us to do on our path to Holiness as we become one.

This is one artistic medium where "expressing yourself " is

the antithesis of the purpose of the art. The artist should not

be thought about at all, other than in reverance that God

gives man such talent. As Joe Myers wrote, "From the

stained glass windows,like the refeshing waters, the

beautiful symphony of light and color flows over the

congregation instructing the mind and renewing the spirit.

To spend my life making stained glass

works to the greater glory of God. Thus have I been indulged

and for this give joyous thanks."

, Christ the King Catholic Church, Tampa

by Joseph. D. Myers Associates

This just illustrates what is wrong with going at something in your backyard, as a little mom-and-pop or sole proprietorship, and giving it 110%: you have to make enough to afford good health insurance, and save enough to keep you out of poverty when you're past your prime. If you aren't doing that, you've got to do something else that allows for that.

Being an artist is a luxury you can't afford.

Few or no stained glass studios in America offer painterly skills on stained glass anymore. The major studios in New England import German and English glass painters when restoring national treasures like windows in cathedrals, at Harvard, etc.

Because of their hardheadedness, the Myers family gave America a few more beautiful church windows , of original one-of-a-kind art, than we would have had. Stained glass has been known to last 1000 years.One day perhaps, when there is money to play with, some scholar will research Florida's stained glass and find the Myers' names in little corners of some of the most awesome.

Then they will be dutifully catalogued, explored, recorded for history. Right now, nobody knows. They get all the respect of welfare bums .

While some on Medicaid might not be, and surely none of the Africans getting money for AIDS are, former or current U.S. taxpayers, Dan Myers and deanne Young were and are. Dan paid Social Security taxes from 1961 to 1997 on from 20 to 40 hour workweeks. He and Deanne paid them together the ten years they were married, once selling a fly-rod her grandfather, Paul H. Young, had made for her grandmother, for $3000 to cover them.

Yearly they paid property taxes on their home and on his studio .In 2001 Deanne didn't know she had to refile as a homesteader and so recieved a full property tax debt while other Floridans enjoyed a $25,000 exemption on their personal homes.(her home was worth $25,000 and there would have been no tax; instead, because she didn't know to file, she owed $1000 for 2 years back taxes last week.) So these people are actually paying more than their share of taxes. They also pay the very discriminatory sales tax whenever they buy anything, just like we all do.

The first time she tried to purchase a $1.19 food item with 2 one-dollar food stamps, in 1994, the clerk at the convenience store said,"Oh, no, you're not getting away with that here! You have to buy something worth at least 51 cents with that other food stamp. I know what you're trying to do."
"I was about to say, put the change on gas,"Deanne began, confused, abut the cashier cut her off, the issue too close to her to let her boss get 80 cents either way.

"We give you that aid for food only, and I can't let you have 80 cents in cash. It's the policy."
"Whose policy--the store's or the government's?" Deanne asked incredulously.

"The taxpayers," said the clerk levelly. She was 20 years younger than Deanne, and had to have paid taxes OF ANY KIND only about 4 years to Deanne's 22 years and her husband's 32 years. Weeks before, Deanne and Dan had paid the $1000 property tax for the studio that year .The next April, they paid income and social security tax on the income they had in 1994. But because Deanne held a foodstamp, the clerk had made a million assumptions about her worth.And who were taxpayers.And how much the others counted.

Half of the poor are children. One-third of all American babies, one-fourth of all children, and three-fourths of all nursing home residents are on Medicaid.

$3 billion a year for 5 years to Africa for study of AIDS: Who voted for this ? Roll call: http://www.vote-smart.org/issue_keyvote_member.php?vote_id=3255

Billions for African AIDS? Because we are the Good Samaritan, and we are not going to leave our neighbor on the side of the street?What about those of us on the side of the street?
__A billion seconds ago it was 1959.

--A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.

And then I read an article in the February 2004 Natural History by Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and Special Advisor to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millenium Development Goals and I realized how excited I would be that our President seems to get it about world health, if he only got it about American health and I had an income of $30,000 a year to raise my two children on instead of $9,000.

The article is called "Why Must the Poor be Sick?" It's a review of a book by Paul Farmer called Pathologies of Power:Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor.

It says Farmer has saved countless destitute patients lives in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, and has shown that effective health services, even complex medical regimens, can be put in place in impoverished communiities."His accomplishments have forcefully undercut the flimsy excuses that the rich countries have routinely offered for their inaction, as millions of people die unnecessarily each year in poor countries...farmer has 3 themes..that the poor are not the victims of their sins but of their circumstances,; instead of sitting in judgement on the sick and dying, rich countries should be helping to save them. 2. The poor can be successfully treated and cured of disease, even in the most unlikely and impoverished circumstances. 3, the human rights community should be defending the rights of the poor to health, for without the right to health, all other human rights are likely to proove empty. Nothing, farmer argues, b except practical, physical resources--in ample supply throughout the rich world--is keeping the poor world from undergoing a revolution in health.

"Farmer's moral stance is grounded in what the liberation theology movement calls a " preferential option for the poor", a principle of Roman catholic social teaching that enjoins the rich to offer dignity and material support to the poor...

But he goes on to suggest..structural violence is the key barrier to escape from poverty. In essence, he occassionally comes close to espousing a neo-Marxist theory, according to which extremem poverty persists mainly because of exploitation by the rich and powerful. (That the rich become steadily richer and the poor steadily poorer) is not true--"Haiti aside--the Haitian experience does not shed much light on the massive reduction of poverty in Asia in the past quarter century, particularly in China and India. ..or even the Dominican Republic....

contrary to the steroetypes prevalent within the bureaucraceis of rich countries and international development agencies, the destitute adn vulnerable patients that farmer comes into contact with are smart, resourceful, and absolutely intent on staying alive. They adhere even to complicated drug regimens,...Farmer's genius was to treat his HIV/AIDS and MDR-TB patients without asking permission from the official aid agencies. They would surely have said no. (using donated drugs and pilfered supplies) Farmer and his colleague Jim Kim of the Harvard medical School demonstrated clinical efficacy in treating those 2 diseases and that drug prices could be sharply reduced through aggressive negotiations.

As their successes have become apparant, Farmer, Kim, and their colleagues have increasingly focused on persuading policy makers to make a bold commitment to improved health among the world's poor. Hence, the third theme--that human rights are indivisible--that so-called social and economic rights must accompany civil and political rights. Making such a shift of emphasis would be a sea of change for a community that has traditionally been organized around the defense of civil and political rights alone.

'''"Again and again he shows that when poor people are abandoned to their economic fate, merely defending their civil rights will not keep them alive--muc less give them a chance for a dignified and prosperous life....the rich have an obligation to the poor, to help the poor stay alive in the face of structural impediments of lethal dimensions..."

And here I am, all for this , all against it an hour ago. Not understanding. I still think America should give dignity and health care to its own and then to others too but not to others while people like me go around without dental and our ears so swollen from dental caries they are llike donkey ears....

And so it is with other situations in our lives. Those who want to be successful must help their neighbors, friends, relatives be successful. Those who choose to live well must help others live well, for the value of a life is measured by the lives it touches. And those who choose to be happy must help others find happiness, for the welfare of each is bound up with the welfare of all.Incidently, the only U.S. Presidential candidate I heard talking like this is Dennis Kucinich.