She describes an upcoming show with photographer John Chiara, a visit from friend Kiff Slemmons, a new yellow patina that the artist Frank Connet brought by for her to try. “Before plating, the mesh is visually physical, but hardly there – on the edge of nothingness.”Īt an age when many would be looking back, Schwarcz is determined to move forward – though her health is fragile and she receives home hospice care.

The material is “inherently fragile before June transforms it into an extremely solid, enduring sculpture,” he says. Timothy Anglin Burgard, a curator at San Francisco’s de Young museum, which owns 16 of Schwarcz’s pieces, is intrigued by what the artist can do with copper wire cloth. I can make it look light and delicate, or tough and gritty.” “It’s so cool – it has the best properties of textile and metal. “Most of my new stuff is made from this,” she says, fingering a piece of the diaphanous, mesh-like fabric still on the bolt. Then, a few years ago, she discovered an even more ephemeral material: copper wire cloth. After hand-hammering sheet metal for many years, Schwarcz embraced copper foil, which can be pleated, shaped, and stitched like fabric. Since 1955, when a skeptical museum curator took a look at Schwarcz’s hand-hammered basse-taille pieces and proclaimed that she had restored his faith in enameling, her definition of beauty has been as fluid as molten glass, and her base material has become ever more pliable. “I’ve been chasing after beauty all my life.” “All those things are starting points – like kicking off from a swimming pool,” says Schwarcz, running her finger over a recent work, a sparsely enameled cubist construction of voids and angles.

In the nearly 60 years that June Schwarcz has been applying enamel to metal, she has found inspiration in tribal art, olive oil cans, medieval monks’ robes, fog, the Stanford linear accelerator, worm-eaten wood, Fortuny fabrics, Moorish ceilings, sidewalks, Paul Klee, Mark Rothko, illuminated manuscripts – and her grandson’s low-slung baggy pants.

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