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Carnegie also displays collections of 8 'Alumi-Nuts'
Sunday, November 26, 2000 By Bob Batz Jr., Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Dr. Thomas Armour owns a piece of the past that he can walk into and even make something out of.
"That's one of the memories engraved in my mind, that sound," the Grove City physician says, listening to his own footsteps -- echoes of when he was a boy -- on the timeworn wooden stairs to the second floor of the workshop of his late father, Arthur Armour.
It was in this little concrete-block shop, starting in 1932, after about six months of working for the Wendell August Forge, that Arthur Armour started his own hand-hammered aluminum business. His had become one of the most highly regarded names in the field by the time he closed the shop in 1976.
His son, who bought it around the time of his father's death in 1998, has kept the place just as it was on the last day, from the scraps on the floor to the calendar on the wall. Occasionally, he goes in and hammers a piece himself. But what he'd really like to make out of this is a museum to his dad and his craft.
That's why he's been trying to collect examples of every piece his father ever designed.
Other collectors have different motivations, and that's what is explored, with the hand-made and mass-produced aluminum objects, in a companion exhibit to the Carnegie Museum of Art's "Aluminum by Design" exhibition.
This show-within-a-show's name, "Alumi-Nuts: Collectors' Confessions," is inspired by something the elder Armour said when he attended his first aluminum collectors' show: He thought they were nuts.
But thousands of people happily collect aluminum items. Alumi-Nuts is "about what we all can participate in," says Elisabeth Agro, the assistant curator of decorative arts who organized it.
The exhibit, in the museum's Treasure Room, gives Armour and seven other Pennsylvania collectors display cases for parts of their collections. Armour's sort of tells a story of how his dad worked, from drawing the design to cutting a die to the finished World Map tray.
The other collectors also have interesting stories that help flesh out the story of aluminum in Western Pennsylvania.
For instance, Marilyn Sullivan Bonatti, now of Vero Beach, Fla., is known as "The Kensington Lady" for having collected, over 37 years, every piece of Kensington Ware ever made by Alcoa. She's donated her 3,000-piece collection, and a 440-page manuscript, to the New Kensington Chamber Foundation, with an agreement that it be preserved for the public, perhaps in a museum, now in the early planning stages, that will cover this region's aluminum industrial heritage.
The other collectors include Sherry Kudranski of Plum, who takes a shine to colored anodized housewares, and Mattress Factory curator Michael Olijnyk, who pursues everything aluminum, for "the obsession of the find."
All eight collectors will try to participate in a collecting forum -- free and open to the public -- at 1 p.m. Dec. 9 in the Carnegie Museum of Art Theater, Oakland. The moderator will be John Sample, an expert on the modern collecting phenomenon. Call 412-622-3131.
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