Art Loft | The Wiener Museum of Decorative Arts WMODA | Season 13

Arthur Wiener, he actually started by collecting Royal Doulton wares.

He started in the 1960s when he was just a new law graduate and he was visiting London.

And he came across a Royal Doulton character jug of Merlin the Magician.

So we like to say that Merlin cast a spell on Arthur because he went on to collect Royal Doulton character jugs and Toby jugs.

Then he moved to Royal Doulton figures.

Then he moved to the art pottery.

He amassed the biggest collection of art pottery of Royal Doulton probably in the world before he then moved on to all the other treasures that you see here at WMODA.

Hi, I’m Louise Irvine.

I’m the executive director and curator of the Wiener Museum of Decorative Arts.

We just recently reopened a museum in Hollywood, Florida.

And it came about because our founder and benefactor, Arthur Wiener, became passionate about glass for his private collection, and then decided that he wanted to share with the public and invite them in to see all aspects of his collection, which is very diverse.

People are going to learn all about the fired arts, which we like to use that name to talk about the beautiful ceramics and glass that we have here at the museum.

The museum really celebrates British ceramic art, South African ceramic art, and also American studio glass, particularly the work of Dale Chihuly, who’s one of the great stars of our exhibition here and, of course, I’m surrounded by here in our hot glass gallery.

Something about glass, particularly in Florida, it really does resonate with the public here.

And I’d say it’s one of the biggest draws that we have for WMODA, is the glass collection.

And Chihuly, he really has revolutionized the way we think about glass.

We’re not really thinking anymore about even a glass of wine or a glass of water.

We’re thinking about how glass can be art.

And he pushed out all the boundaries to make these monumental pieces, and he brought a new organic field to the glass art, creating all these amazing forms inspired by nature, flowers, gardens, the sea up in the Pacific Northwest.

And he also worked on a scale that was unprecedented at the time.

And he’s taught so many other people to work with him, collaborate with him, but also to follow in his footsteps.

So really, through his teaching, through his practice, there’s a whole really successful American studio glass movement.

Because of the interest in the different design movements, we’re sort of focused in the gallery.

Once you leave the hot glass gallery, it’s into the Art Nouveau movement and the Art Deco movement.

He comes really from the 1800s right up to the present day in his interest.

Very eager to support artists working in the media that he enjoys today, as well as the historical artists.

And to that end, he became fascinated with studio pottery in South Africa called Ardmore, which was started 40 years ago, making amazing safari animals out of clay.

And Arthur became really enthusiastic.

And when he becomes enthusiastic, the collection grows pretty quickly.

And we have an amazing collection from Ardmore in South Africa, with all these unique pieces that have turned up, uplifting a whole community in a remote part of South Africa because of their involvement in ceramic art.

And now that’s even grown because now they’re involved in textile design and wallpaper design and silk scarfs with Hermes.

So it’s really been an extraordinary journey that we’ve all participated thanks to Arthur’s enthusiasm for all of these different areas.

Now they’re making furniture and poofs and pillows.

So because of that, we created a design shop, an Ardmore design shop here at the museum.

We brought everything from our previous museum, but it all looked quite differently there than it does here.

We’ve only just reopened here in Hollywood.

And it’s been very exciting, very gratifying, because we’ve had a long closure.

As we got the place ready, we had to pack up many, many thousands of objects in order to make the move.

And so we’ve been essentially at the cull phase.

Very close to it all, chipping away to get open.

And really, to have the public come in and enjoy it now has been phenomenal.

It’s been just really encouraging and inspiring to see their reaction to it all.

It’s made all of our hard work worthwhile.

It was a whole team operation.

I mean, we’re very fortunate to have an amazing small team, but very, very talented group of people here at the museum, who all pulled their resources in terms of cataloging the pieces for inventory purposes, for packing them.

We trained people how to pack.

We got specialist people in to help us learn how to pack the pieces.

And then for some of the monumental pieces, including the Chihuly, we had a specialist packing team came.

But then came the time to move, and we had an 18wheeler moving backwards and forwards between our home in Dania Beach to our home here.

And that took the whole month of April in order to accommodate that move with pallets of our collection.

So it was an extraordinary operation and one that was thankfully acknowledged by the Museums Association.

Gave us an award for this move.

And moving all the objects was recognized as being quite a feat.

Enormous feat.

Because we’re in this design district, I looked at interpreting the collection in a different way.

And it’s really reflecting the main design eras of the 1800s and 1900s So we have a Regency gallery, where we’re featuring our Wedgewood collection.

We’ve got Victorian, where we’re featuring all the beautiful ceramics made by Royal Doulton and Minton and the great Victorian manufacturers in Britain.

Then we have Art Nouveau, which is predominantly featuring European makers.

Beautiful maidens in flowing gowns that were such a feature of the Art Nouveau movement.

But the big star right now is our Art Deco gallery, where we’ve got all the flappers, vamps, and divas of the Roaring ’20s.

And we’ve done that because 1925 was when the Paris exhibition, the big world’s fair, launched the whole new Art Deco movement.

And now we’re coming into 2025.

You’re going to hear a lot about Art Deco through the following year.

And so we brought out all of our dancers and movie stars from the ’20s and ’30s, who were portrayed in porcelain by European makers.

We really followed the design trends from the sort of 1800s to the present day and displayed the collection along those lines.

We’ve tried from day one to create a platform for emerging artists in our community and also the more experienced as well.

We sell their work through the museum shop, but we’ve also had solo exhibitions featuring their work.

One of the people we’ve worked with who was a star of the “Blown Away” Netflix program is Rob Stern.

And Arthur, again, met Rob and became very interested in his work.

We have lots of his amazing stars and leaves and even his stiletto shoes, which was one of his recent excursions in glass art.

We work also with Chelsea Russo, who’s a fused glass artist.

And she does classes here at the museum, and she teaches people how to work with glass.

We started to work more with programs that would appeal to families with children.

We started our scavenger hunts.

So we have had lots of scavenger hunts around the museum.

Currently, in our new space we’re featuring dragons.

You can come and spot all the ceramic dragons hiding in their layers.

People are sometimes scared at the idea of children in a museum of ceramics and glass with all the breakables, but we found that they can be very respectful once they’re shown what the ropes are and just how to be careful surrounded by all these precious pieces.

And we love exposing the kids to that.

They respond to the color.

From a very young age, kids are fascinated by the color.

And they love the little people in the Deco galleries and so on.

They love seeing all the little figures, the sort of Barbie dolls of the ’20s or whatever.

We will build up to integrating much more into the schools programs.

We’ve also had some of our potters in the community teaching them how to throw on the potter’s wheel.

We’re not your granny’s china closet.

We’re really trying to be something that shows how important these were.

They were either part of your home in the interior decoration of the time.

We’re looking and exploring all different aspects of the history.

Fortunately, we have that liberty to do that and to tell the stories, which we hope people are going to enjoy.

Arthur, I don’t think he’ll ever stop as long as he takes breath.

It’s his passion.

He’s a voracious, passionate collector, and he loves it all.

He loves the beauty of it, but now with the museum, he has the ability to think of it as a legacy that he can now share with all other people that maybe wouldn’t necessarily be exposed to what he’s been fortunate enough to enjoy.

So that’s really become the motivating factor now about having the museum and keeping that going and keeping it alive.

And he has plans for an even bigger museum down the road and the cultural arts complex as well It’s going to be quite something.

Watch this space as WMODA develops.