Treasure Chest Thanks To Artist Kathryn Glowen, The 101-Year Life Of Mamie Rand Is On Display In ‘Petland’

As the reporter says in “Citizen Kane,” Orson Welles’ study of a life, no one word or thing can solve the puzzle of a person.

But as artist Kathryn Glowen discovered, it can be done with thousands upon thousands of things, particularly when your subject is someone like Mamie Rand.

The Spokane pet store owner, accountant, amateur musician and Bohemian pack rat saved just about every memento of her 101-year life, from her christening dress to her common school diploma to decades of dress scraps.

Glowen, a collage artist, spent three years carting box after box to her Arlington studio to create “Petland,” a remarkable 5,000-square-foot installation that opened this week at Washington State University’s Museum of Art.

“I didn’t think I’d make it,” Glowen, 56, said this week while fighting off a flu that kept her from Monday’s opening. “I’ll tell you, I didn’t get through the last boxes until three weeks before the show.”

The result, as museum Director Patricia Watkinson noted Monday, is a work that is history and biography, antique store and art gallery, poetry and prose, truth and fiction.

It is the closet emptied after the last guest has left the wake, an attic scrapbook, a life reflected in the room of a departed child, just as she left it, only more so.

“This show is about somebody that passes away in your family or your neighborhood or your extended family,” said Glowen, “and how interesting that person would be if you looked at their whole life.”

In the beginning, it actually was one thing that set Glowen to working on “Petland.” In 1994, while visiting the home of Esther Klein, her husband’s aunt and Rand’s neighbor, Glowen spied an embroidered pin cushion adorned with hair clips, a leather shoehorn, pins and the keys to locks long lost.

Glowen, a former WSU art student and collage artist, saw in it the work of a kindred spirit. After touring Rand’s cluttered and ramshackle house on East Decatur, she visited Rand, by then in a nursing home, to discuss using her belongings for an installation.

Frail as a chick but sharp enough to read Agatha Christie, Rand peeled back a lap blanket and pulled from several small bags her most cherished belongings: photos of her sister, her mother, her father and Lady Rebekah, the first-prize pullet at the 1914 Spokane Poultry Show and Spokane Interstate Fair. Glowen then knew Rand was committed to the project.

“She thought it was a great idea,” Glowen recalled.

A unique set of circumstances conspired to make Rand’s collection so special. She had been an accountant and had an accountant’s sense of organization. She never married and, upon reaching adulthood, didn’t move, precluding the need to throw things out. She lived through the Depression, fostering a frugality that had her making her own dresses, turning them into aprons when they wore out, then making quilt scraps with the remnants.

“I found a box of apron strings - just the strings,” Glowen said.

Rand also lived before the dawn of consumerism, in which people define themselves by what they buy, not what they make.

As it was, Rand cooked on a wood stove, didn’t own a refrigerator until the ‘60s and wore clothes from the ‘30s.

“She didn’t buy anything, really,” Glowen said.

She just saved - 240 handkerchiefs, 80 aprons, 100 dresses, scores of milk bottle caps that said, “Pure fresh milk - nature’s best food.”

That made for a lot of work, one box at a time.

“It was overwhelming,” Glowen said.

She read all of Rand’s extensive collection of family letters and sorted through the correspondence of Petland, the store Rand ran for 27 years on Riverside Avenue, then Sprague. She transformed her creative process. Before, she would build a collage piece by piece as she gathered items over the years. This time, with thousands of pieces already in hand, she edited the material into a number of collages and displays.

Then there was the challenge of filling so much space.

In the end, Glowen resolved to treat the collection like one large collage, a big box to be filled.

“Once I got that in my mind, it was no big deal,” said Glowen, who works in the tradition of collage artist Joseph Cornell. “That’s just what I do.”

The exhibition features three dozen works, beginning with an assemblage of Rand’s christening dress adorned with 101 buttons - one for each year between 1894 and 1995 - covered with butterflies from a dictionary page Rand had bookmarked.

On hangers cut from wood in the worried pup logo of Petland, dangle a lifetime of shirtwaist and wraparound dresses made by Rand and her sister Florence.

Hundreds of other objects conspire to offer myriad glimpses of Rand: her humor, her artistry, her love for her family, her faith, her devotion to her animals.

Among the more touching displays is a series of boxes of small clothes and pictures of Francis, a relative’s child whom Rand cared for briefly in the ‘40s, then lost when the relative took her back. At the display’s center, on an old fence gate, is a baby shirt embroidered with the words, “Life is a frail moth/Caught in the web of the years that pass.”

Then there’s a brass bed straddling a pile of corn feed and surrounded by feed sacks and photos taken by Rand’s father, an eccentric postcard maker and inventor.

The corn, said Glowen, speaks of renewal and the everlasting. The bed, made from a frame Glowen found in Montana and Rand’s boxsprings, is meant to represent a union of the artist and her subject.

Moreover, she said, it is “the minutes, the seconds, the days, the hours, all the years” of Rand’s life.

Like the collection itself.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Color Photos

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: “Petland” is on display at WSU’s Museum of Art through Nov. 16. Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday except Tuesday, when the museum is open until 10 p.m. Saturday and Sunday hours are between 1 and 5 p.m. For further information, call (509)335-6607. Artist Kathryn Glowen and her husband, art critic and historian Ron Glowen, will discuss the installation and its relationship to Spokane history at the Cheney Cowles Museum at 7 p.m. Tuesday Oct. 14.