BY KAREN BOSSICK
Archie Teater spent summers trekking with pack burros through the Sawtooth Mountains in search of gold enroute to becoming America’s most prolific painter.
And Frank Lloyd Wright designed thousands of structures enroute to becoming America’s most renowned architect.
Learn about the intersection between these two, which culminated in the only building in Idaho designed by Wright, when the Sun Valley Center for the Arts celebrates the opening of its newest exhibition Friday night.
The Center will host a free opening celebration of "Art into Architecture: Frank Lloyd Wright, Archie Teater and Teater’s Knoll,” from 5 to 7 p.m. Friday, Dec. 1 at its gallery at Fifth and Washington streets in Ketchum.
Refreshments will be served.
Free evening tours will also be offered at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 7, and on Thursday, Jan. 11.
Teater’s Knoll is located on the banks of the Snake River near Bliss. Designed in 1952, it was built between 1953 and 1960.
Teater Studio happens to be the only Wright-designed artist studio that was ever built.
The exhibition includes furniture from the studio and a selection of paintings by Archie Teater, who lived between 1901 and 1978.
Teater, born and raised in Hagerman, was a prolific painter of impressionistic landscapes documenting his experience of Idaho and the American West. He painted some of Frank Lloyd Wright’s landmark architectural achievements, including the Guggenheim Museum in New York and Taliesin in Spring Green, Wis. And he created fantasy scenes and history paintings.
During the early part of his life he lived briefly in a cave in Malad Canyon; he also lived briefly in a horse-drawn covered wagon. He and his brothers once built a corral in the Snake River to catch sturgeon to sell as food to mining crews.
His first canvas is said to have been cut from the covering of a sheepherder’s wagon.
In the years that followed, he painted more than 4,000 paintings of landscapes in Idaho, Wyoming and more than a hundred countries around the world. He painted gritty mining towns and the majestic grandeur of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. And he was once jailed for painting the rear end of a buffalo in New York’s Central Park Zoo.
Some consider his paintings of Jackson Hole to be unequaled—he was even nicknamed “Teton Teater” for his paintings of the Tetons.
“While Archie Teater’s heavily impressionistic paintings and Frank Lloyd Wright’s clean, modernist architecture may at first glance appear unrelated to each other, both men were driven in their work by a love of landscape,” said Dr. Courtney Gilbert, curator of Visual Arts at The Center.
Wright, who lived between 1867 and 1959, designed his structures with an organic philosophy, stressing that his buildings be in harmony with humanity and the environment. His Fallingwater, constructed over a 30-foot waterfall in Pennsylvania, is considered by many to be the best all-time work of American architecture.
Archie Teater and his wife Patricia appreciated the fact that the relationship between a structure and its place guided Wright’s approach to architecture, Gilbert said. And the studio Wright designed for the Teaters, with its astounding views of the Snake River Canyon, reflects the men’s shared appreciation for the land.
The exhibition will be on view through Jan. 17, 2018. It was made possible with the help of Henry Whiting and the Hagerman Valley Historical Society Museum.