interest—I am interested in death in general. I mean, aren’t w e all
on som e level?.
.. C iv il W ar letters are am azingly beautiful and
a tonic to all that is cynical and ironic in our w orld today.”
Sch aechter grew up in N ew to n , M assachusetts, her m other
an accom plished pianist, her father chairm an o f the m icrobiology
departm ent at T u fts, and for many years the man that the poison
control people called on w hen they w ere concerned som eone had
sw allow ed a deadly m ushroom. Even in her youth, she loved pat-
terns. “ I rem em ber I ’d sit on the toilet and stare at the tiles on the
floor and see paintings that w ere w ay better than T u rn er,” she
remembers. “ You know , ships in storms and stuff, beautiful things,
and this w as just all around my environm ent.” A t the M useum o f
Fine A rts , B oston, she liked the scary paintings. “ T h ere’s one o f
som eone being draw n and quartered,” she says. “ I w ould beg to
see those things, as I recall, and then not be able to really look but
be fascinated. I think children have an intuitive sense that the
true function o f an im age is as a m agic spell.” On the lighter side,
she also played w ith L ite-B rite, learned classical guitar and per-
petu ally built fu rnitu re for her dollhouse. “ T o this day, I often
think I’m just going to drop this art crap,” she says. “ I know how
to m ake the most killer dollhouses.”
She was supposed to have been a painter, like her grandm other,
w ho learned to paint in her 70s, but Schaechter found an em pty
canvas te rrifyin g. O r fru stratin g, or som e com bination. W h ile
studying painting at the R hode Island School o f D esign, she took
a class in stained glass. T h a t w as it. It w as love/hate at first sight.
L ove because w ith stained glass she w as m aking a thing that con-
tained a picture. H ate because it takes forever; stained glass is
hard, though she loves the part she hates, than kfully. “ R ecently,
I said to a student, ‘You can be m y assistant, but you have to come
up w ith all the ideas and I sit there and grind.’” T h e grind is a solu-
tion for her, a cure for her attention deficit disorder. “ T h e prob-
lem w ith a lot o f these media w as that it w as sort o f a ve ry d irect
confrontation w ith me and cre ativity,” she says, “ and th at is
som ething I can w alk aw ay from w ith very little excuse to w alk
away. But w ith glass you have to do this.” She points to her tools,
to the painstakingly etched glass. “ You have to put the contact
papers on. You have to grind this. Y ou have to sandblast there.
A n d there’s all thisift/^ that has to be done to it before
anything
has happened. B y the tim e you are done you love it like a baby
because you have gestated it.”
In 1983, after graduating from
r i s d ,
she moved to Philadelphia.
“ Since no one knew me here I decided to reinvent m yself as som e-
one cool, ’cause I ’d alw ays been such a big d ork,” she says. “ T h at
w as ve ry d ifficu lt. T h a t w as quite a project, and totally w o rth -
less.” She laughs her big, crazy, infectious laugh. “ It turns out,
I couldn’t erase my inner dork! ” She did hook up w ith the hard-core
punk scene, playing in a band called Ice B ox and another called
K en , an all-girl band w ith a gu y singer. “ Som e people think my
glass is nervous and edgy. W e ll, m y songs w ere like the m ost
morose morbid things in the w orld,” she says. “ M y glass is a happy
picnic in the sunshine com pared to that son gw ritin g stu ff.” In
lieu o f G ram m y aw ards, she has, as a stained glass artist, w on
a Guggenheim Fellow ship, a P ew Fellow ship, the L ouis C om fort
T iffa n y Foundation A w ard , as w ell as n .e .a . grants and, m ost
recently, w as nam ed a U nited States A rtists Fellow .
Lately, it’s been difficult to open or renovate a n ew museum >
Right:
S till L ife w ith
B a n k Robber,
1996
{h. 18
in,w.
28 in),
shows the accoutre-
ments of a robbery-
mask, gloves, note,
etc.-forming a halo
above the man on
the tile floor.
066 american craft feb/m aro9
