Long-time Valley artist weaves rich, diverse life

WASILLA -- The black and white photo in the faded Indianapolis Star clipping shows a young girl with an impish grin, her face framed by the jaws of a horse skull. It is not difficult to imagine that the hair is flaming red.

The 14-year-old Vickie Cole was already an educator, local celebrity and curator of her own Meadowbrook Museum of natural history and archaeology in the basement of her parents' Indiana home. The collection of artifacts that she started at the age of eight grew and matured with the precocious youngster, who sold memberships to her museum.

"Grade-school teachers would bring their classes there on field trips," Cole remembers.

Later she became friends with two archaeologists from Lawrence College who were conducting a dig on Lake Michigan near the summer home owned by Cole's family. The couple allowed the eager youngster to help, teaching and mentoring her and eventually naming their daughter Victoria after her.

She still has a copy of the report that her friends published as a result of the dig, pulling it from a bookcase in her workroom at Birch Grove Studio, the woodland complex near Wasilla that she shares with her husband, potter and photographer Dennis McKenzie, and their son David McKenzie-Cole.

The hair is not red anymore, but the delighted grin is the same. It is obvious that Vickie Cole has never been bored and likely never will be. The rich collection of artifacts and art that surrounds Cole in her studio reflects her lifelong fascination with natural and human history and the myriad forms, textures and colors of the world.

Building a life in Alaska

Armed with a bachelors' degree in anthropology and history from Indiana University, lacking all but a thesis for a masters' degree in the archaeology of the Great Lakes, Cole came to Alaska in 1968 with her husband at the time, a military man stationed in the Fairbanks area. She took her first weaving class almost as a lark while she was living in Fairbanks, and one of her rugs took a first place at the Tanana Valley Fair.

That was the beginning of a love affair. One of her photographs took a prize, as well, but that didn't resonate with Cole as weaving did. The rest is history.

Cole recounts that in 1971 she moved with her husband to the Matanuska-Susitna Valley, where they bought an old homestead on what was then the very end of Hollywood Road, and is now the location of Birch Grove Studio. They bought the property from the original homesteader, a veteran from California.

"There were four homesteads at the end of the road," Cole recalls, adding that the settlers were all ex-military men under a U.S. government program. A road was put in to reach their homesteads, with a connecting road to Knik-Goose Bay Road.

As Cole remembers the story, the veterans called their road "Hollywood" in honor of their home state, and jokingly suggested that the connecting road be called "Vine." The names stuck.

She began teaching at Mat-Su College in 1973. Remaining fascinated with weaving and with natural fibers, dyes and other materials, she was instrumental in the late '80s in founding a curriculum, still unique to Mat-Su College, that included surface design, woven forms and fiber structures.

Today's weaving room at Mat-Su could be called "the house that Vickie built," since the program began with Cole's own looms. Eventually she was able to take them home as the college replaced them with looms purchased or inherited from other campuses.

A life-changing disaster

A fire in 1994 destroyed the original log structure at Cole's homestead, a building that by that time housed her studio as well as living space for her elderly mother. Miraculously, her mother escaped into the freezing February night in her nightclothes, spraining an ankle in a fall as she fled the flames. Fortunately, a passerby spotted the blaze and discovered Cole's mother in time to take her to safety.

But the fire consumed most of Cole's looms, her weaving and decades of collections, journals, family memorabilia, and thousands of dollars in irreplaceable books. According to Cole, the disaster was a turning point in her life. Although she had won many prizes for her weaving art and continued to teach weaving and fiber arts, she did not replace her looms and no longer concentrated her own art on weaving.

Instead, having taken a metalsmithing class at the college a few years earlier, she began to design jewelry, developing her own line of unique accessories. She also undertook the creation of artistic structures in gut and other natural and manmade materials, airy and translucent structures that seem to glow with captured light.

These, along with McKenzie's pottery and photography, are displayed and sold often at fairs and art shows, and in the gallery that the family maintains at Birch Grove.

In addition to teaching anthropology and fiber arts at Mat-Su College, and assisting in the coordination of all art programs and activities at the school, Cole also teaches private pottery classes along with McKenzie at Birch Grove.

McKenzie designed and the couple built the imaginative multi-level building that houses their home as well as their individual studios and gallery. Even the exterior walls at Birch Grove are lined with shelves groaning with McKenzie's pottery and the bleached skulls and bones that testify to Cole's lifelong interest in natural history.

A family tradition

in art and science

Cole comes by her passions naturally. Her maternal grandfather was an artist, studying in France and eventually teaching at the Chicago Art Institute. His work hangs on her studio walls today. Her mother taught both art and weaving at a private school, and was an avid birdwatcher and hobby botanist. Her father, a printer by trade, taught Cole about his craft, but was also a musician, a hobby scientist, and a collector of stamps and coins.

Although he died when she was only a month old, her grandfather played a vital part in Cole's life. She spent her childhood summers on Lake Michigan, surrounded by his art and the tools he left behind. She especially loved his studio, still richly perfumed with linseed oil and turpentine, a treasure trove of drawers filled with wonderful brushes and tubes of paint, and the seats and easels on which his private students had worked.

Cole remembers a particular day during her twelfth summer when she decided that she, too, would become a painter. She took paints, brushes, a canvas and an old patio umbrella into a field by the road and spent the whole day working. At the end of the day she finished the picture and packed everything up and took it home. The picture, Cole recollects, was awful.

"The composition was probably not too bad," she said. "There was Lake Michigan, birch trees, a seagull."

"But I had never been taught that grass isn't always green and the sky isn't blue," she laughed. She recalls being in tears when she returned to the house.

"Let's look at Pop's paintings," her mother suggested, and she showed the youngster how her grandfather had used unexpected colors in his work. Shadows, for example, were not really black.

It was an eye-opening experience for Cole, her first real art lesson. She never painted anything after that.

The family traditions continue with Cole's own generation. Both of her brothers pursued careers in music as teachers and orchestra conductors, and a first cousin on her mother's side is the playwright and actor, Sam Shepard.

Although Cole's family lived in Indiana and Shepard's in California, the cousins often spent vacations together at the summer home on Lake Michigan. Cole, a year older than Shepard, recalls that after Shepard finished high school, he made up his mind to go to New York and become a playwright. Enroute from California, he arranged to meet Cole, then a college sophomore, at the Indianapolis bus station for a quick visit before going on to New York.

"I begged and pleaded with him to go to college first," Cole said of their conversation in the seedy bus station. But Shepard was adamant that he was going straight to New York to "make his fortune."

She laughed, "And that's exactly what he did."

Recycling as a life art

One of Cole's current fascinations is creating jewelry with found objects in all shapes, colors, origins and materials. Her gallery contains a stunning necklace created of spoons, and another hung with religious symbols gleaned from Salvation Army treasure hunts. In her studio she has a drawer of brass shell casings that she collected and plans to incorporate into jewelry. Why bullets?

"Because I can't stand to waste anything," Cole said.

Then, opening a small box of artifacts that she was able to sift from the ashes of the catastrophic studio fire, she gently extracted a family heirloom, a charred but still exquisitely glossy Chinese Mahjongg tile made of bamboo and ivory.

"I'm planning a necklace made of things that came through the fire," she explained. Then she added softly, "It will be just for me."