Napa artist Gordon Huether: Heart, soul, entrepreneurship
On this morning, Gordon Huether, 63, is wearing a leather vest and his signature turned-around black cap.
The ground-level conference room in his 15,000-square-foot Napa studio is flooded with autumn sunlight. Two walls are covered with poster-sized color photographs of a sampling of his art installations. High shelves hold small-scale models of many others, some of which are proposed projects that were never funded and executed.
Since he founded his studio in 1987 and was awarded his first public art commission in 1989, Huether has focused not only on making public art objects of wonder and delight, but also on ideas and storytelling.
“We are an S corporation, and I am the sole shareholder,” the artist said. “If I had to do everything myself, though, I’d get one or two projects done a year, and I’m more into 20 or 30. In order to do that, I have to surround myself with people who are smarter than I am in different areas.”
Huether’s operation includes two project managers, an accounting department, marketing and business development staff, fabrication people, structural engineers, lighting consultants, digital designers, and his wife, Darcy, who uses the title “director.”
“I’ve been through three recessions in 25 or 30 years,” Huether said. “In one of those I went from having 45 employees to eight overnight. What I learned then was that I got more done with fewer people. I would say that for each person under roof now, there are two contracted out. Before the pandemic, we were tracking that way, and COVID accelerated it for us. It was another case of a catastrophe that turned out to be a good thing.”
In fact, Huether said his business did not decline during the pandemic. He created art installations for the $4.8 billion terminal redevelopment of Salt Lake City International Airport and, more recently, won a bid in Oklahoma to produce “Pathway to Hope,” a memorial tribute to the May 1921 Tulsa Massacre in which a mob of white residents attacked black residents and destroyed their homes and businesses.
Huether was born of German immigrant parents who eventually moved to northern California from Rochester, New York. He remembers being in a restaurant with his mother and grandmother when he was about 6 years old making little drawings and selling them off the table for five cents.
“I guess I always had that entrepreneurial side,” he said. “I believed I had the heart and soul of an artist, but I never really thought about galleries, that didn’t appeal to me.”
His public art interest may have been kindled by his father, who at one point worked as a window display designer for prominent department stores in Napa, Petaluma and Santa Rosa.
“To keep me off the streets — I was about 17 — he asked me to help him. I would pull staples out of frames or undress and dress mannequins,” Huether said. “He’d give me eight or nine prune crates and task me to arrange them in the window and take Polaroids. The scene had to make sense no matter what the camera angle. From him I learned about composition and how to tell a story.”
Huether said that in the first half of his career, he lacked confidence. But he believed he could make it up with hard work.
“All the projects we do are competitively won,” he said. “To use a baseball analogy, the more you swing, the more you hit, also the more times you strike out. So the reason we have such a measure of success is that we are so good at losing.”
In the pre-internet years, Huether hustled business with hand-made catalogs and post card mailers, while lecturing at lunch-and-learns, and speaking to meetings of young architects.
“Then I discovered this thing called public art, where a university or some other place would post that they had X amount of dollars for an artist to create something. At first, I didn’t even have slides to send, so I’d do a drawing with a little scale man take a picture of it and submit,” he said.
Huether said it’s easier to find public opportunities but they are harder to win.
“A $200,000 project 20 years ago would have 50 artists competing for it, and today there will be 300. If you become a finalist, you then need thousands of dollars to continue — with all the renderings, models, pages of words, and sometimes travel to the site. In a competition we are currently involved with, six of the seven finalists will have spent all that money and lose,” he said.
Art projects commissioned in the private sector are more elusive, but Heuther prefers its more collaborative process. He points to the six project photos on the wall and said he had to compete for five of them.
