University Times

Mooney and Allen stand amid examples of their artistry.

His house is crammed with handmade wooden art: picture frames, tables, bookcases, mirrors, shelving and a large chair and ottoman, all lovingly crafted in various styles from nearly a century ago and inset with his own stained-glass pieces.

Many of the pieces that weren’t constructed by him were crafted by his wife -— pottery, tiles and other ceramic art displaying the designs and earth tones of prehistory and nature. Their basement and garage are full of the tools of their artistic lives.

Mark Mooney’s Morris chair and ottoman sit next to the Japanese print, framed in the Greene & Greene style, that earned him commissions via the artist’s website.

Maybe an anthropology department lecturer, such as Kathleen M. Allen, might be expected to take up the creation of ancient forms from clay. But it is perhaps surprising that the chair of oral biology in the School of Dental Medicine — Mark P. Mooney, a specialist in the growth and development of the face, as well as its birth defects — would spend his time creating such Frank Lloyd Wright-era pieces.

Mooney, for one, sees a connection between his career and his art. “It’s really scientific, if you think about it,” he says of woodworking. “There are a number of steps and they have to be in the right order. It’s pretty challenging and pretty rewarding when it all comes together.”

Inside Mooney and Allen’s New Kensington house, the art is wall to wall. Sometimes the couple even merges their art forms, inlaying Allen’s tiles in Mooney’s frames and mirrors.

Kathleen Allen’s pots are displayed on Mooney’s shelving and Mooney’s table. The frame features Stickley-style exposed joinery.

From their home, the pair of academics runs Gingko Studios, selling their work at A Fair in the Park, the annual Mellon Park arts festival, and through their web site (http://theginkgostudios.com/). After sending a Japanese artist a photo of her print displayed in one of his hand-built frames, Mooney says, the artist was so pleased that she placed it on her own web site — and got Mooney commissions in the process.

Ginkgo’s motto, “Art from the earth,” reflects Mooney and Allen’s common esthetic. “One of the things I enjoy about art is making things that come out of nature, that are organic,” Allen says. “It’s working with the earth but in a different way than I do as an archaeologist.”

The couple often collaborates on projects, such as Mooney’s mirror in the Stickley style, with curved supports under a shelf-like top, which bears inlaid tiles by Allen.

“I treat it as therapy,” says Mooney of his woodworking, which began with classes in high school and college and continued with summer jobs as a carpenter’s helper, framing houses under construction while pursuing his undergraduate degree in psychology and zoology from Western Illinois University. He received an MS in biological psychology from the same institution, then earned a PhD from Pitt in physical anthropology in 1986.

Mooney began his career at Pitt that year as a research scientist in the School of Dental Medicine’s Cleft Palate Center and today is a full professor. He has had secondary appointments in several departments in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, the Department of Anthropology in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Medicine’s Department of Surgery. Today he is president of the American Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Association.

“I always wanted to learn how to make stained glass,” he says, “and by chance a fellow student in grad school at Pitt in the early ’80s knew how to do it and then taught me. What drew me toward it was that I liked to work with my hands and be creative, and it was a relaxing activity to do after work. At the time it was relatively cheap to buy the equipment and it didn’t take up too much space. I had more time than money then.”

Seven years ago, he took up serious woodworking, starting with basic frames and progressing to long, slim, high serving or sofa tables; small, round tabouret side tables; a Morris chair and ottoman;  even a bed frame for the couple’s vacation home in New Mexico.

“I was also always interested in Arts and Crafts furniture, which combined stained glass and wood …” Mooney explains. His daughter encouraged him to take courses in furniture-making and woodworking.

Allen’s pinch pots expose her coil method along their rims.

Mooney has studied with master craftsmen across the country, taking weekend or weeklong classes at woodworking schools, craft centers and woodshops during his vacations. He has worked under Seattle-based artisan Thomas Stangeland at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking, craftsman Jeffery Lohr in Pottstown, and at the Roycroft campus in East Aurora, N.Y. He also credits the training of local craftsmen Max Peterson and Dante DiIanni for his own expertise.

Under these master teachers, Mooney has become highly proficient in several styles of the Arts and Crafts movement. The Stickley style, for instance, uses oak and features natural finishes and exposed mortise and tenon joinery, with horizontal pieces passing fully through vertical pieces to emphasize their construction. Another favorite Wright-era style for Mooney is Greene & Greene, named for architects whose furniture was made from mahogany with inlaid ebony accents. Characteristic curves in the wood, called cloud lifts, are a signature of this style. Now Mooney himself is teaching, holding classes on frame- and furniture-making at DiLegno Woodshop Supply in McKees Rocks, where he maintains studio space.

While the upstairs of the couple’s home is filled with their handiwork, it is in the basement that most of their work is done. Mooney’s woodworking shop, located in an unheated part of the basement, mostly is abandoned during the winter. A frame sits half-finished in a vise, while stacks of quarter-sawn oak await his hand above the saws, planers, chisels and other machines. These boards have been cut at a tilt to expose a different grain pattern than the plain-sawn wood sold at lumberyards.

In a heated room next door sits Mooney’s  stained-glass  worktable, a small piece with beaded, decorative solder in progress. Nearby is a framed set of sample stains, as well as several cavity molds for Allen’s tiles. In yet another room is the slab roller Allen uses to shape the clay for the hand-built coil and pinch pots she prefers to the wheel-thrown pottery more commonly available. Like Mooney’s woodworking shop, her electric kiln largely is unused over the winter months, sitting next to her car in the unheated garage.

Allen’s style is directly traceable to her academic pursuits. She did her dissertation on Iroquois pottery at the University of Buffalo and has been inspired by prehistoric and Native American ceramics. Every other year, Allen runs Pitt’s central New York state archaeology field school, providing excavation opportunities for students from Pitt and other schools. Her undergraduate classes include Pots and People, which allows students to reproduce pots from anywhere in the world. They are bisque fired — the common first firing before glazing — in the Mooney-Allen household and exhibited in the anthropology department.

Allen’s work favors earth tones and other echoes of the natural world. Some of her pots display the mottled, dark marks of ash and smoke from wood fires, others the intense glazes from raku. Once she spent more than three days with a group of potters tending a wood-fired noborigama kiln, a process in which the wood ash acts like a glaze. She enjoys the community this kind of process creates, she says: “You really know how you’re contributing and building something.”

She also has chewed a curved strip of yucca leaf into a narrow-pointed brush to produce Native American animals and patterns on pottery in the traditional manner. Some of her pots bear fern-leaf impressions; her tiles feature seashells and the ginkgo leaf that gave their studio its name.

What is now a sideline for both educators soon may become a major focus in their lives. Mooney plans to retire in five or six years, Allen sooner. “Maybe we’ll even go on the road,” selling their art at various fairs, Mooney says.

At the very least, the couple expects to become more involved in the artists’ coop in the small New Mexican town where their other home is located. And they expect to sell more items through their web site.

“When we retire, we’ll have the infrastructure to expand,” Mooney says. “We’ll already have a presence for people in the area and I can start taking on bigger commissions.”

—Marty Levine

Examples of framed tiles sold by the couple at A Fair in the Park.