Old First Night honors Chautauqua Institution’s uniquely consequential past, marks its present season, and provides a heart-warming glimpse into its future.
In the Amphitheater, as Boys’ and Girls’ Club groupers belt out the Club song and perform their winning Airband sketches, and Group One and Children’s School kids sing “Happy Birthday” to Chautauqua, multigenerational Chautauqua families are reminded that OFN is a particularly special evening.
The Chautauqua Speaks series, sponsored by the Chautauqua Women’s Club, will be celebrating OFN’s sesquicentennial the morning after with a presentation by a member of one such family.
At 9:15 a.m. Wednesday at the CWC House, Gretchen Gaede — owner of Gretchen’s Gallery on the first floor of the Colonnade — will present “The Patterns of Life: Art and Artists in One Chautauqua Family.”
“Being a graphic artist, (my talk is) going to be very visual,” Gaede said. “It starts with family — my great-grandfather, Henry Turner Bailey, coming here. He was well known for designing the Arts Quad … and he was the first director of the Chautauqua School of Arts and Crafts. He left in 1917 to become the first dean of the Cleveland School of Art.”
A “charismatic and popular speaker on the arts and arts education for kids, … (Bailey) gave an enormous number of lectures at the Amphitheater,” Gaede continued. “He talked about education for children and how to find beauty in every aspect of your life. … His grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren are excessively focused around the arts.”
Gaede will focus less on HTB (as he’s referred to within the family) than she may have otherwise because her first cousin — sculptor, writer and former Chautauquan Daily reporter Mary Bailey — will be giving a talk Aug. 13 that focuses entirely on him as part of Chautauqua’s Heritage Lecture Series.
That lecture next week will be titled “Henry Turner Bailey: Ambassador of Beauty and Director of the Chautauqua School of Arts and Crafts, 1906-1917.”
Four generations of the Bailey-Gaede family have left, and continue to leave, their mark on Chautauqua’s art and architecture.
Following HTB was his son Ted, who Gaede said met her grandmother, Helen, at Chautauqua.
“She was working in the Colonnade for a lady at a handicraft gift shop and gallery,” Gaede said. “At lunch, she served tables at the St. Elmo. At age 24, she took over the shop, in the spot (where my shop is now).”
Helen Bailey also opened H.M. Bailey Jewelers in Shaker Heights, Ohio.
Ted and Helen’s daughter Jean married Bob Gaede, Gaede’s father. A restoration architect, he served as the architect for the renovation of the Athenaeum Hotel in 1989.
Gaede grew up in Shaker Heights and has come to Chautauqua every summer of her life. She said that after graduating from Shaker Heights High School, she attended Miami University of Ohio because it was one of just three schools in the United States to offer courses in surface design — the design of wallpaper and fabric. She double-majored in graphic design and surface design.
“I was immediately hired by Imperial Wall Coverings in Beachwood, Ohio … and worked there for a couple of years,” Gaede said. “I moved to Miami (Florida) to design floor coverings — tile and carpeting — at Biscayne Decorative Products. But Miami wasn’t for me.”
Deciding to “see a little of the world,” she co-founded her first business in 1981 in Malaysia with a colleague whose given name was Kavita. They called it G-&-K Atelier; in French, “atelier” means “studio.”
“I studied the process of batik making in an extremely remote village in the jungle on the equator,” Gaede said. “I’d never been out of the U.S. before then. There, fabric designers used original woodcut blocks and hand blocks. I studied designs and colors. I returned to Chautauqua; Kavita stayed in Malaysia.”
With her new-found knowledge and skill, she went back to Imperial Wall Coverings, and later worked for a series of other wallpaper companies.
“In 1989, I purchased an entire collection of wallpaper documents from the Victorian era, 1890-1910,” Gaede said. “Some were arts and crafts-related. Other collections were designed from them. My father … was approached by someone who’d had it. It was like a museum collection.”
She sold her wallpaper documents to perfume, sheet and stationery companies, as well as many other clients.
“I had so many I could have sold (documents) every day for three years,” Gaede said. “I had the Cleveland Museum of Art restore any that had even the most minor flaw, because they were museum-worthy.”
In 1993, Gaede decided to start her own surface and graphic design business, giving it a name signifying the highest quality: Sable Studios.
“I did everything by hand, all of the colorations,” she said. “(For example,) I painted the same design six times. Now it’s all colorized and digitized. I designed in Cleveland, and every six weeks I went to New York City. I met all of the designers; Bill Blass and everyone.”
Then Gaede decided she wanted to create juvenile designs, “not just for wallpaper manufacturers, but for everyone you can imagine.”
So, she went to work for Save the Children in Wilton, Connecticut.
“A child would design a tie, and I’d make it into a sheet for beds, working with a very tiny design,” Gaede said. “I’d have to get into the kid’s mindset, and do (the same design) on all of the sheets.”
In addition to working full-time, she created wallpaper books for children and cheerful designs for several pediatric wards.
“There’s not a part of this that I didn’t like doing,” she said.
After spending some time in Sweden, Gaede said she got the idea to design dinner plates, with a theme of the twelve days of Christmas, for Domestications catalog in Weehawken, New Jersey.
“Nobody knew who I was in that industry, but they came out with the line,” she said. “I did a second line, ‘Santas of the World.’ I (chose) 12 countries and 12 different stories. My name is on the back of each plate, under a legend about what that country believed (about Santa).”
These two Christmas lines “launched me into the dinnerware industry for major companies,” Gaede added.
During the 1990s, as the wallpaper industry was being phased out due to a glut, magazine ads were featuring second-hand designs, and the “paint industry was showing up,” Imperial Wall Coverings was issuing a book of designs each week.
“So, I had to do a Madonna again and reinvent myself,” Gaede said.
She did so via photography.
“My grandfather had said, ‘develop your eye,’ ” she said.
He had also said that if a photo doesn’t elicit any feeling, the fact that it’s taken with the most expensive photographic equipment, and that it’s good technically, won’t draw people to it.
“You can learn to see things,” Gaede added. “… People can train their eyes to see. There’s beauty in any part of nature. Chase the light, and always be open to the art around you in the natural world. … The things I look for for pattern and design in photos are the same as for wallpaper and plates.”
America Online Digital City, known now as AOL, immediately hired Gaede.
“I had an offer to go to Italy for a month to photograph tango dancers in Tuscany,” she said. “I started doing all of Italy.”
In 2009, Gaede began selling her photos in the back of the antique shop at the southeast corner of the Colonnade.
While actively looking for an assistant, she met her current business partner, Ruth Ann Raines, who had purchased a piece of hers and was seeking another. There’s more to this story, and Gaede may well share it if asked.
When the shop next door became available — the very same space where her grandmother Helen’s shop had been 100 years earlier — they took it over and launched Gretchen’s Gallery.
Currently, the Gallery offers items made by 50 other artists, and is becoming known for home decor and vintage pieces.
Rubbing the “karma case” — which Gaede’s grandmother used for displaying items, just as Gaede does now — is thought to bring good luck.
“When my grandmother passed at 105, I was a wallpaper designer,” she said. “I would never have thought of having Gretchen’s Gallery here. … When a door opens, follow it.”
Just as there is pattern and design in Gaede’s photographs, there is pattern and design within her multigenerational Chautauqua family, which she will demonstrate visually on Wednesday morning.
