The Art of Andrea Haffner: at Eastern Market

The Arts and Crafts Festival at Eastern Market was founded by John Harrod, founder of Market 5 Gallery, in the 1970's. By 1995 there was a renaissance at Eastern Market.

There was the creative color fusion jazz impulse, with amorphous forms epitomized by the painters Alex Madison ( first artist at Eastern Market) Stevens Jay Carter, Michael Berman, Fatai Dosunmu and Chris Damola. There was the Codice Hammer (a la Leonardo DaVinci) work of painter Daniel Kessler. There were the humor-driven, Sesame-Street-inspired prints and paintings of Jonathan Blum, who at that time only painted from the nose up. There was art inside Eastern Market. There was the adventure/travel color photography of Jim Spillane, which folks flocked to see and buy, on the walls of the then Market 5 Gallery (now the North Hall of Eastern Market. )

There was the high classic oil portraiture of Simmie Knox and his watercolor flowers. Il y a quelqu'un que se souvient sa peinture en plein air en face de le stand des Fleurs de Angie.

There were art and artists everywhere one looked.

And in 1995, Andrea Haffner appeared on the plaza. Her work was modern, embodying the art and art form mastered in the 20th century: black and white photography. Think Alfred Stieglizts or Karl Blossfeldt, not Ansel Adams or Dorothea Lange. Her work, unlike any other at that time, had a decidedly womanist edge.

She re-de-constructed the image at Eastern Market .

(Andrea Haffner at Eastern Market)

Andrea Haffner was born in 1971 in New York City. Her formative years were spent in Gallup, New Mexico, until she was eleven: then she, her sister and parents moved to Montgomery County, Maryland. She has a bachelor of Arts degree in English from Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut, and is now pursuing a master's degree in marriage and family therapy at Pacifica Graduate Institute in California.

Images from childhood:

(Andrea Haffner points out elements in her photography at Eastern Market with her son Walker)

In New Mexico, Andrea's parents worked at the public health service on the Navajo Reservation. Thus, some of her first vistas on the world were wide open spaces, objects which bore the effects of exposure to dry heat, arid temperatures and wind, and "a scubby old landscape" This landscape formed her initial "observation of the natural world." In asking when she started making images, Ms. Haffner replied, "I was given a camera by my parents when I was five and was always comfortable taking pictures. I took lots of art classes, starting early, but never felt compelled or competent enough at other media..." Andrea Haffner's work has a voice, spirit, presence, style and meaning that transcends words. What is clear in her art now was present in her earliest contemplations of art-making. "I remember taking abstract images as a teenager and loving the way I could take the familiar and make a person think."

In college and afterwards:

Ms. Haffner did not formally study photography during her college days. However, she was deeply involved in photography in college. But she has always liked learning independently. She was running her college's darkroom by the time she finished school. She remembers one photo teacher in particular "...gave us an assignment to 'make the ordinary extraordinary' and that resonated with me." She fell in love with photography in college when she took a semester off and went back to New Mexico. In that arid place she came back to the idea that, "I always liked things that show their age, their history, things existing through time erosion, decay." In black and white photography, she says, "I found a language there that was like mine."

One of her first cameras belonged to her mother, a Nickkarmat thirty-five millimeter which is still one of her favorites. Her preference is medium format photography with a Mimiya. From the start she says there was " something about photography that made me feel very capable."

After college she came back to the Washington D.C. area and worked for a year at the Children's Studio School in a photo program with first graders.

The road to Eastern Market:

In 1994 or 1995, she knew that she needed her own work space, so she rented space in the well known O Street Studios in northwest D. C. Eastern Market (Renaissance painter Stevens Jay Carter also had a studio there at that time.) After that, she says, she had to figure out a way to pay the rent, the major motivator that propelled her to make money from her work. She started showing work and met Patty Mulligan at a Georgetown Art Fair. It was Ms. Mulligan (known for her Polaroid transfer imagery), an established photographer at Eastern Market, who told Andrea about the Market. Ms. Haffner says that in all the years "I lived in suburban D.C., I did not even know it existed."

(Back in the day-Andrea Haffner in her O Street Studio space)

Andrea started coming to the Market once a week in 1995, and added a second day in 1996. Like so many exhibitors who came to the Arts and Craft festival after it had been established and the Renaissance was afoot, she remembers packing her car to come to market at four a.m. on Saturday mornings.

Art and the Art of making a living as an artist:

I remember spotting Andrea's work on the plaza in the midst of all the (mostly male) painters. It was in 1996 and I had just come back from studying landscape photography at Penland School of Craft in North Carolina. I remember loving her images; at that time she had developed her own language of imagery using double exposures in the dark room, overlaying women's bodies and branch formations or roots or... This takes a serious levels of technical fluency to achieve. Ms. Haffner said "At the time I needed to have my own personal stamp on my work" (Andrea's work song!) I also remember thinking she knows the zones system cold. I also remember her early jewelry, tiny boxes of stained glass with a small seed, leaf or other natural element trapped between the glass and set with solder. I loved her photographs, but I did not envision how her jewelry would evolve and change her methods and media as an artist.

(untitled: double exposure image: Andrea Haffner)

(Back: image: Andrea Haffner double exposure)

She was introduced to and became knowledgeable about stained glass in high school. She loved the effect of light through color and texture.

So for a time Ms. Haffner made stained glass windows to sell; in 1995 she started making the smaller pieces of stained glass to pay for her studio. She did not think her photographic work was mainstream enough, so to make money, and for a safety net, she made stained glass pendants. She told me in conversation that she sold them for twenty dollars, adding, "I loved that it was something that anyone could afford." A couple of years later she met silversmith Stacey Krantz at Eastern Market. Andrea started going to Stacey's studio to learn basic silversmithing. Andrea wanted her work to look less "crafty"; she says, "I needed to move into the small world, I started caring about the small composition." She developed her signature work: small sterling silver squares, rectangles and circular compositions of seeds, buds, leaves and other small objects encased in multicolored polymer resin. She also studied silversmithing at the Torpedo Factory and welding at the Corcoran School of Art.

(pendant/image by: Andrea Haffner)

(pendants by Andrea Haffner: silver polymer resin, elements and seeds)

Through this process, her work evolved through the framework of the ground glass in photographic composition. Ms. Haffner knew what to keep in the frame and what to leave out. "I make jewelry," she says, "but I would not call myself a jewelry-maker. I make wearable art. I got the idea, then I had to figure out how to do it. I am drawn towards doing something that I had never seen before. Photography had been very private. This work I could take on the road."

In 1999 Ms. Haffner self-published her first book, a limited edition book of her images called ISOGRAMS.

(book cover: Isograms, image by Andrea Haffner)

The book is beautifully printed in warm, almost sepia tones; I think of it as an image essay. I asked Andrea to talk about the book, and she writes, "I found a great printer in Forestville, MD, called Anaconda Press, and they worked with me to get exactly the right warm-tone through a double printing process. The book does have grouped themes ...with certain series grouped together... and also juxtaposes some images that would not immediately seem to relate in order to create new relationships or language. The term 'isograms' I borrowed from the dictionary and is a mapping term for lines that connect points of equal value on a map, chart, or graph. It sounds like a photographic term, which I liked, and I was speaking to connections that I was working through in the various subjects I was shooting and combining, and that the line of connection could be as important as the individual things being connected."

I purchased edition # 198/1000. For her, "photography is the capturing of the familiar or to completely abstract the familiar."

Andrea Haffner on intellectual and artistic aesthetics:

She says-

"I like thinking about process"

She questions, "What does the art itself say about Art?"

" (I) work out visual language through jewelry and photography."

(Work table for laying out designs for jewelry-California)

"I am a big believer in rigor--working it out through your process."

Transition: Sculpture

After 1999, her work epanouir--opened, flowered and expanded. Ms. Haffner introduced sculptural form to Eastern Market. In conversation with Andrea I asked if she still thinks about composition when creating her larger pieces like a photographer; I asked her how she moved from the silver frame to the iron one, what motivated and caused her to want to work bigger? I asked her for language on process.

She replied, " I definitely think my photography background and compositional style influences my other work. I often make similar compositions (divided squares, for example) in both. I started making the big wall pieces mainly because I loved the direction the new jewelry was taking me and wanted to still be making wall art. I also liked the way I was able to create glowing objects with this work, ...It was also an opportunity for me to work on a larger scale with some of my larger found materials.

"I don't know how to describe my process of designing, other than it involves a lot of quiet observation (in the collecting and composing) and then I just move and change until something feels right. Photo is the same for me, especially when I was doing darkroom work."

(Sculpture, steel, polymer resin, elements)

(Circular forms steel, natural elements and resin) Asthetics, the renassance and Andrea Haffner's influences on my work:

For all the years I have been at the market, it is Ms. Haffner's work from which I have drawn my biggest influence as an artist. At times she has captured a natural form in photography or has illuminated a natural object in her metal and resin work that I have abstracted through forging or constructed in metal. At times we have both drawn on the abstract in nature as a mode of expression. I have always check out what the artists at the market are working on new. Ms. Haffner's stand has always been one of my first stops. I loved when, I had impromptu art critiques from Andrea or Eastern Market Renassaince painter Sheila Crider when they came by my stand to see what I had made new. I am also influenced by Ms. Crider's study of line in her abstract expressionist paintings. It should be noted that my present signature piece (the broken circle necklace); I had done for years off and on always adding to it, making it more complex, but it was Andrea who suggested that I stop adding to the composition and that I... Her observations and thoughtful suggestions caused me to take a second, and then a third look at that piece and question whether I liked the process of making it enough. I did and I do. Outside Recognition of artistic Merit:

This belief in "rigor and working through the process", her careful, almost metaphysical composition, her larger pieces that can be seen as Mandala's, have led to critical acclaim in the contemporary art world. Ms. Haffner's work has been juried into the finest craft exhibitions in the United States, including SOFA Chicago, the Smithsonian craft show, the Philadelphia Museum craft show, and Cherry Creek Festival of the Arts. Her work is currently in various galleries, most notably the Wexler Gallery in Philadelphia. She has also received grants from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities and has participated in the Art in Embassies program. Her work is also in the permanent collection of the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities City Hall art collection.

Transition and Change:

But change is constant. Almost a year ago, Andrea, her son Walker and husband Rob left D.C. for California. After much thought, Andrea and her family were leaving D.C. but not Eastern Market.

As a product of a liberal arts education, I have two undergraduate degrees and a Master's degree, as well as being by profession a gold- and silversmith. So, when I heard talk around the market that Andrea was leaving to pursue a Master's degree in marriage and family therapy, I was less surprised than some. I asked her about the motivating factors for this desicion. She said- She had been wondering how long she could sustain what she was doing. She had gotten older. She had become a parent.

These factors have moved many artists of the Eastern Market Renaissance to transition from Eastern Market to the next stage in their lives. Andrea says, "after my child was born, I started thinking more about psychology. Watching this little being develop, I started having to be more of a giving person." She started doing a great deal of reading. On the transition, she states, "I am very excited about it." She went further, indicating that in a sense this transition is part of "her process". "If you are doing honest work you are digging inside yourself... this is just adding digging inside of other people. I get to be a part of that process." Thus, in this sense, and in reality, she has not stopped being an artist, making or showing her work; she has added to her expression, and to her life.

(Andrea in her studio in California with her son Walker)

On Eastern Market:

Andrea says, "What kept me in D.C. was my ability to make a living as an artist and the Market was a big part of that. The Market will always be home." She is still very attached to her O Street Studio, so much so that while she sold her house, she has sublet the studio. As for Eastern Market, she says, "I love the people, I love the place. I feel so fortunate to have had that experience. It is a really unique place. The old and new people together. It is really unique."

At the end of this month, Andrea starts classes in Ojai, California, at the Pacifica Graduate Institute. She will focus on in-depth psychology. But on Saturdays and Sundays you will find her work still at Eastern Market. Like Jonathan Blum who left Eastern Market more than six years ago, Andrea found someone who also loves the market and has made a place for herself there-- introducing Andrea Haffner's Eastern Market assistant, Maeve Sheridan! On Meave, Andrea says, "I am so grateful that I found such a good person. I do think it's a rare person who can appreciate the place. It's one thing standing in the freezing cold with your own work. She has been wonderful." In my observations of Ms. Sheridan, I told Andrea that she is tough: Maeve is out there at the Market in what I call "entertaining weather." I often see her being helped on Sundays by exhibitors like Christian Rathbone, Enid Romainek, and Adiante Franzoon; they help to set up her tent or watch the art while Maeve is on a "get food break."

In this sense Andrea Haffner's art is that line that connects, her, her work and her audiences here at Eastern Market and beyond: that is to say: Isograms-"a line on a map or chart along which there is a constant value"

(Andrea's assitant at Eastern Market: Maeve Sheridan)

(Andrea Haffner, with her son Walker, her assistant Maeve and a client, November 2009: Eastern Market: Washington, DC)

Witnessing,

Sonda Tamarr Allen

Turtle's Webb