Heritage
Albert Paley and the Senate chamber gates
The most ambitious forged ironwork in New York State hangs in a corridor most visitors walk straight past.
The New York State Senate meets behind gates designed by a man trained as a goldsmith. Albert Paley made the portal gates for the Senate chamber of the State Capitol in 1980, and the building they hang in took thirty-two years to finish.
A jeweler with no plan for college
Paley was born in Philadelphia in 1944, while his father fought in the Burma Campaign and Albert and his mother lived with her parents. At sixteen he left school, planning to work and support his mother after his father developed arthritis. A girlfriend later took him to the Tyler School of Art, part of Temple University, where a strong first semester led to the honors program and a second year in the metal shop made him a studio assistant under Stanley Lechtzin, a strong influence on him. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in sculpture with a minor in metalsmithing in 1966, then a Master of Fine Arts in goldsmithing. In 1969 he moved to Rochester to teach at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he holds an endowed chair.
How does a jeweler learn to forge iron?
The turn came in his last year in the Philadelphia area. Paley and Lechtzin assembled a small forging setup in the garage of Lechtzin’s home and spent the summer of 1969 reading about forging and learning the tools. He taught goldsmithing at the Rochester Institute of Technology until 1972, then turned to his own work. His jewelry was large and specific; he described it as suiting “a strong woman rather than someone who was repressed”. Since 1965 his jewelry and metal work had appeared in more than one hundred and fifty national and international exhibitions. He later stopped, bought the pieces back from galleries and sold his tools.
The commission that built the shop
In 1973 the Smithsonian awarded Paley the portal gates of the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C. To build them he rented a space, filled it with machinery and hired a former student, Richard Palmer, as full-time assistant; the two spent a year on the gates. What was left afterward mattered as much as the work: a larger workspace, an assistant, supplies and machines, and a career now pointed at functional design, tables, lamps and other usable sculpture. A second museum commission was already in hand, an 85-foot (26 m) wrought iron fence sculpture for the Hunter Museum of American Art in Tennessee. The full run, goldsmith to public sculptor, is laid out in the Wikipedia biography of Paley.
Why hang forged gates in the Senate chamber?
The Senate gates hang inside the most expensive government building of its time. The Capitol went up from 1867 to 1899 at a cost of $25 million, about $794 million in current money, under three successive teams of architects, and Henry Hobson Richardson’s Romanesque shapes the finished chambers. The dome was never built: the weight of the structure was opening stress fractures and pushing the building downhill toward State Street, so a 166-foot (51 m) eastern staircase was added to brace the facade.
Paley’s 1980 gates belong to a run of institutional commissions: the Victoria and Albert Gates in London in 1982, portal gates at the Naples Museum of Art in 2000, the Animals Always gateway at the St. Louis Zoo in 2006, recorded as the largest sculpture at any zoo in the United States. In 1995 the American Institute of Architects gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award, the first given to a metal sculptor. The style is his own; the moves underneath are the short list this journal keeps returning to: lengthen, thicken, bend, cut, pierce, join. Every curve in a Paley bar begins with drawing out and upsetting, at a forging heat, like any other bar.
The commission record, side by side
Dates hold up better than adjectives when a career runs this long.
| Year | Building | Work |
|---|---|---|
| 1974 | Renwick Gallery, Washington, D.C. | Portal Gates |
| 1980 | New York State Capitol, Albany | Senate chamber gates |
| 1982 | Victoria and Albert Museum, London | Gates |
| 1987 | Wortham Center, Houston | Eight stairway sculptures |
| 2000 | Naples Museum of Art, Florida | Portal Gates |
| 2006 | St. Louis Zoological Park, Missouri | Animals Always sculpture |
From museum fence to Park Avenue
Sculpture for the Strong Museum, in 1982, marked the move to monumental size. The large pieces of that decade shared a simplicity built from basic elements, and the work grew more complex and colorful with time. In the summer of 2013 Paley was the featured artist on Park Avenue, with thirteen sculptures installed between 52nd and 67th Streets in New York, one of his larger single exhibitions. Craft in America closed its fifth season on PBS with him as the final Forge artist. He lives and works in Rochester with his wife, Frances.
What the record leaves out
The Senate gates themselves are thinly documented. The page does not publish their dimensions, weight, alloy or crew, and it gives no shop account of their making, while the Renwick gates a year earlier get the rented room, the machinery and the assistant. The building is easy to reach on State Street in Albany, and it anchors the stretch of river covered in this journal’s guide to ironwork still standing around Albany. On a next visit, stand in front of the gates and read the scrollwork as a sequence of heats and hammer decisions, which is the honest way to read any forged iron.
en.wikipedia.org
The free encyclopedia in English. Its Albert Paley page carries the biography, the career sections by material and scale, the dated commission list, the awards with references, a bibliography and external links, among them a 1982 interview conducted for the Archives of American Art. The dates above come from that page.