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Californian Jim Hager points out homelessness by carving a cardboard house in marble. In a strange twist of fate gentrification becomes an issue all too close to home.
A podcast where artists tell their stories through the materials they choose.
Hi. This is Materially Speaking, where artists tell their stories through the materials they choose. In this series, we're talking about marble in a community in Northern Italy where artists have been carving marble since Michelangelo first came here 500 years ago to source marble for his Pieta. They come not only to benefit from the range of marble available here, but also to work with the exceptionally skilled artisans. With 30 miles north of Pisa and 15 miles south of the Marble Mountains of Carrara, sandwiched between sea and pine forests on one side and olive groves rising up the hillsides into the Apuan Alps on the other, near a town called Pietrasanta
Sarah Monk:Today, I'm talking to sculptor Jim Hager, who divides his time between Pietrasanta and his home in Oakland, California. Jim has a workspace in La Polviera, one of the last historic studios in the center of town. And because it is pretty noisy in a sculptor studio, we set off to find a quiet spot for our interview. He takes me to Il Cro di Porta A Luca, a historic worker's restaurant. On the wall, someone has painted empty picture frames ready for the artist to draw something inside if the fancy takes them.
Sarah Monk:The small table we meet in has an old fashioned gramophone, a couple of small tables and chairs, and bookshelves crammed with art books and catalogs of artist shows. There is a small window open to the street, and people often poke their head in to say hello. And what about this place, where we're sitting now? I'm gonna take a picture of you. So what are we in, where are we now?
Jim Hager:So this place is a library created in, a small workers restaurant called Il Cro. In the early days when I came here, it was filled with, artisans that worked in the studios around here, so it was all workers. Now there are very few left, but, it's still a wonderful environment and a and a place to get a a a great pasta for a good value.
Sarah Monk:So if you wouldn't mind, just say your name and introduce yourself in your own words. Let's go.
Jim Hager:Yeah. I'm, Jim Hager. I've, been sculpting for probably 30 years. Came to Pietrasanta in 1992. I came here for a wedding. A friend of mine from university got married and introduced me to a carving studio, and I've I've been modeling in clay for years at, in San Francisco and said, oh, it'd be interesting to try to do some marble carving. So I came and spent 4 months at Studio Sem in Pietrasanta.
Sarah Monk:And, tell me a little about, your background. So where were you born and what were your childhood?
Jim Hager:I was born in California. I went to university to become a doctor because you need to be either a doctor or a lawyer to be successful in the eyes of my family. So I took a lot of biology and anatomy and physiology kind of courses, and changed my major halfway when I realized that that wasn't for me. And so I ended up going into health policy work.
Sarah Monk:What does that mean?
Jim Hager:Well, that that means working sort of on the business side of health care in the United States. And my first job was in Washington DC, with the federal government in a program for a couple years, and my office was right across the street from the National Gallery. And I started going to the gallery to, look at, documentaries that were playing in the basement of the East Wing, during lunch times and was enamored by art and what I saw and decided I wanted to change and become an artist. So I moved to San Francisco a couple years later and took courses in a program, at Fort Mason and learned how to model and fell in love with it. And so when I had the opportunity to come here a couple years later to learn how to carve, I jumped on it.
Sarah Monk:So did you sort of mix working in the health care system with art, or did you do them separately?
Jim Hager:No. I tried to do them simultaneously, which was quite a challenge for me. So I would spend a month here, every summer. Both our children sort of grew up with their summers in Pietrasanta and did a project. I'd rough it out at the studio where I can make a lot of dust and noise, and then I ship it home and finish it in my studio at home.
Jim Hager:And sculpture seemed to be a much easier medium for me to tackle than painting because I I would do life drawing classes, and I love the figure, but I had no inclination for how to use colors. So doing something like modeling and carving seemed to be a natural, and and I I loved the routine of carving. So that became my new medium once I came here and learned.
Sarah Monk:What do you mean about the routine of carving? Can you explain that?
Jim Hager:I find, carving marble can be, very routine and boring, after a while, especially the way I do it. I would I typically did figurative work, so I would use pointing tools, and I do an exact copy of the plaster model that I brought into the studio. And a lot of that is very routine and, structured process of carving. So I would it would take a lot of time.
Jim Hager:And I put on my headset and put on some good music, and I spend the whole day and realize that 8 hours had passed.
Sarah Monk:So you like that way of working?
Jim Hager:I like that way of working. I'm sort of evolved to the point where I'm wanting to move away from figurative work and moved into more abstract where I could just carve, what I feel like carving without having to worry about reference points.
Sarah Monk:Does your corporate experience, or your work in health fair, does does that inform your work at all? It
Jim Hager:It does from more of a social purpose. So the piece I'm working on now is all around homelessness in in the Bay Area where I spent all my adult life. Homelessness has become more and more, chronic an issue in our community. And I, I see, I, I used to walk to work in downtown Oakland every day and I would see more and more people panhandling, and seeing that a lot of them were, you know, they're not their traditional drug addicts and, and, you know, mental health patients. A lot of them were older people that were just down on their luck.
Jim Hager:And so the healthcare component of my life, I think, gave me more of a social conscience that I want to exhibit in my artwork.
Sarah Monk:So do you wanna talk about this piece? Tell tell us what it looks like.
Jim Hager:One aspect of marble carving that I am really in love with is that you could take a real hard substance like stone and turn it into something that looks very different than what it is. I early on in my career, when I first started carving, I would go to a lot of museums and I'd see works like Bernini and, and the Borghese Gallery where hands were pushed against flesh and it looked like flesh. It looked like a hand. And so when, I was thinking about doing something in homelessness, I thought, you know, I would love to do something that doesn't look like marble, but, uses marble. So I created a house of cards out of cardboard placards.
Jim Hager:I've been collecting, cardboard placards from homeless members around Oakland. And I thought, oh, I'd stack up these placards and make a house of cards and carve it in marble. So I wanted it to look very fragile. I wanted it to represent cardboard as accurately as I could. And I debated whether or not to inscribe the messages that people I found on the streets were using or not, and I decided that I wouldn't, that I would let people's imaginations put their own messages on there, but I'd have images around an exhibit, as an installation that would have some of those messages around it.
Jim Hager:The main purpose is to have, people realize that homeless neighbors are real people because we often just blow by people with signs and say, I'm not gonna give them. They're just gonna go out and buy a beer or do do whatever we might imagine they would do with the money we give them. And so I took a a colleague and we interviewed 20 homeless people in Oakland, did videotapes. So I want to, put in video format around an exhibition, people talking about who they are so the audience will realize that these are real people and that they deserve some of our attention. Especially seeing a a house of cards in in marble, which is a material used for creating some of the finest homes in our world, and being, cardboard, which is, you know, what a lot of people are living, sleeping on in the streets of Oakland and other cities around the world.
Sarah Monk:It's a sensational piece. Can you tell us roughly how high it is and describe it a little more fully?
Jim Hager:It is a block, probably a cubic meter. I use as a model, the placards that I collected and a lot of them had been folded as people, you know, finish their day, fold it up, put it in their back pocket and walk away. So each one is about a foot high and 2, 3 feet wide. And so I stacked them up and it's 3 layers of cardboard stack.
Jim Hager:And I tried to be very deliberate about, making the edges frayed, making it look rippled because, you know, as I saw these placards, it's not it's not a new piece of cardboard people are using on the streets to ask for help. It's, it's usually a wadded up discard that, they found on the street, so it's it's pretty banged up.
Sarah Monk:And how long did it take you to do?
Jim Hager:It took me about 4 months, and and it was a break in routine from doing figurative work, so I loved it.
Sarah Monk:And what sort of technology did you use, or did you use any technology?
Jim Hager:I found a beautiful block of statuario from a studio, Cervietti, which is used to be the studio that we're in now. They they used to have an artist's studio there for many years.
Sarah Monk:Franco Cervietti is highly respected, and his name comes up a lot in this series. He's the founder, son, and current owner of Cervietti Studios, which dates from 1962 and is well known for figurative and classical work.
Jim Hager:So Franco was able to find a beautiful block of statuario for me, which is very important because, I had started the piece in a different block, and it was soft, and cooked, they say in Italy as colto. It's it's been exposed to the sun, so it gets sort of sugary and the it doesn't hold an edge on the crystals. So the block that I got was gorgeous. So I used my model as a reference. I marked it up with crayon, and then I took a diamond saw and an angle grinder and started cutting away big chunks of the stone to sort of liberate the the dimensions that I wanted to to have.
Jim Hager:I initially made the cardboard about a half an inch thick, so I'd have plenty of material left to adjust and do details as I made it as thin as cardboard normally is. The piece is pretty fragile, but, you know, initially, it was saws, then it was chisels, then files. And I used, a Dremel tool to get a lot of the details because I have places where corrugation is exposed on the ripped edges of the cardboard. That got me into my old, quietly sit with music routine of picking away, cutting little grooves in the cardboard as I finished it.
Sarah Monk:That's amazing. See, I don't know how you get into the crevices, and it's just extraordinary. We wind back now to hear about the time that Jim first came to Pietrasanta.
Jim Hager:The guy I was working for at the time was, a dream. He said, yes, go. And I came here, with a wife and 2 year old son, rented a little place and it was October, so we rode my bicycle to work in, and learned how to carve stone at the studio. And it was a great experience because at the time, Pietrasanta probably had 30 carving studios in the middle of town. All the artigani that worked in the community that would do pieces mainly for churches and other religious works had their own little studios in the in the first floor of their homes down the middle of town, and it's completely changed now.
Jim Hager:So it's sort of sad to see, the city evolve. I guess this gentrification just like happens in San Francisco and any other community where there's a lot to offer and values, of homes and and workspaces climb and artists can't afford it anymore, the city changes complexion, which happened here.
Sarah Monk:Has that impacted the the homeless project, do you think?
Jim Hager:I see so many parallels between the two. I was always drawn to Pietrasanta because of the art community that existed here. We would go to the bars and the piazza at lunch and they would be filled with dust covered people talking about what they're doing with their art. And it would be great because we could share stories, talk about our projects, see other people's works, and it was a very fulfilling environment to work in and we would grow from the experience of being together. Now it's much different.
Jim Hager:I'm blessed to be in a wonderful studio that is in the middle of town. A studio somewhere I worked has migrated out into the country, like a lot of the carving studios here because of noise and dust, leaving the sort of touristy restaurant filled Pietrasanta downtown area. I see in Oakland, where I've lived the last 30 years of my life, there was a big art community as was San Francisco, and a lot of the artists migrated to big less desirable warehouse spaces in more industrial parts of the town. And it's a shame you go to galleries and you see the price of art and people are shocked, by how much it costs. And then we look at artists and you realize how little they make.
Jim Hager:Unless you're very famous or successful, artists live on the edge financially and need to be in a work environment that they can afford. In San Francisco, a lot of that has migrated out of the core part of the town into fringe areas. Oakland, there's a big issue about artists being displaced by just the gentrification of the city and the cost of housing. In Pietrasanta, I see the same parallel. So as the studios move further away from a core center, it's harder to collaborate.
Jim Hager:In the US, there is a research study done every year in urban communities to count the homeless. They just finished one in January in the Bay Area in Oakland where I'm from, and the homeless population increased almost double in the 2 years prior. So there are now estimated to be around 8,000 homeless in Oakland. In Los Angeles, the count was 60,000 and there was a reported almost a 1000 people in the homeless community died on the streets and they die with a life expectancy that's a good 20 years less than the normal population. So there's there's a lot of issues around the need to better support this kind of community.
Sarah Monk:Why so many homeless? Why the growth?
Jim Hager:I think it's the cost of living. In San Francisco, you know, I'm we're blessed to be in picturesque, we're blessed to be in a very prosperous community where there in San Francisco, Uber went public, there's several large corporations went public, and when that happens and the workforce, you know, benefits from all of their hard work and education and become mini millionaires. And so there's a lot of people that move into those communities, wanna buy houses. They're expanding the the housing into areas that once were low income, low rent communities and they're being gentrified and people are losing their homes, they can't afford the rent anymore. I think it's important that people realize that homeless people are real people.
Jim Hager:And, when I interviewed members of the homeless community in Oakland, there there were a lot that had alcohol and substance abuse and there were a lot of veterans that have PTSD and, you know, it's hard for them to survive in a job in a normal work environment that you and I would have. And there are a lot of seniors that become homeless, at an older age and it's tragic.
Jim Hager:I left my corporate job a few years ago, and I left early because I was so excited to do this full time. And my goal was to come back to Studio 7, and they had just moved out of the city prior to my arrival here, so I found La Polveriera, which was a wonderful studio right next door that I'd walked by, all the years that I'd worked at Studio Sem, the old Cervietti studio. And it is, still there.
Jim Hager:It's probably, well, it's one of the last carving studios in Pietrasanta, which is a shame, in the city area. And it's, filled with a dozen artists that are there pretty much, full time or or close to it, with others that come in periodically. It's a beautiful old building with a second floor filled with plaster models from the old days when the studio used to carve a lot of religious figures for churches, which is a treasure to see. It's got a great diverse group of people managed by 2 women from Argentina of Italian descent. Then it's in an area where there are trees and outdoor carving spaces, and the trees shed their leaves in the winter when you need more light, and they have leaves in the summer when you need it to be cool.
Jim Hager:It's just a beautiful carving environment.
Sarah Monk:And what's happening to it now?
Jim Hager:The owner apparently passed away, and it's gone to the heirs, and they wanna sell the property. Pietrasanta, as I said earlier, had probably 30 carving studios within the town center, which is only 4 blocks by 4 blocks. And now there are none in the town center, this is the closest thing to it, and they've all disappeared. There are a lot of galleries and a lot of restaurants and a lot of tourists from the beach. It's a shame to have, they call it the city of art that has few artists living in it anymore.
Jim Hager:There's a museum of art and there's a lot of galleries that display art, but the actual creators of art are needing to migrate further from the center, which is which is sad, for me, as somebody who grew up in this space. Yeah. You know, one thing that's costed is change. I still have a, a wonderful, community of artists. Some of them that I've known for 30 years that have been coming here are working in studios outside of the center, some that are in La Polveriera.
Jim Hager:So, hopefully, as we migrate to a new location, we'll create another community to work in.
Sarah Monk:So thanks to Jim Hager. You can see his work on his website at haegersculpture.com, and follow him on Instagram, @jimhagersculpture For photographs of all the work discussed in this series, follow us on Instagram, or visit our website, materiallyspeaking.com, and join our mailing list to hear about upcoming episodes. Production thanks go to Michael Hall.