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DORIS CHASE Twining Humber Award Recipient Doris Chase
This year’s Twining Humber Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement goes to our beloved Doris Chase. Born in 1923 in Seattle, she graduated from Roosevelt High School and studied architecture at the University of Washington for two years. She married a naval lieutenant, Elmo Chase, and after the war they moved to an apartment on Queen Anne. After the birth of their first son, Gary, she suffered an emotional collapse but found encouragement from a counselor that supported her urge to paint. This led Chase to create her first studio: she painted inside her young son’s playpen with him on the outside to keep him from getting into what she was doing. During her second pregnancy, her husband contracted polio, was paralyzed and spent six months at Harborview Hospital. In the midst of the difficulties present in her home life she nevertheless continued to paint and by 1948 Chase was exhibiting in SAM’s Northwest Annual with Kenneth Callahan and Mark Tobey. Her work continued to develop and in the early 60’s she was represented by galleries in New York and Beverly Hills and had shows slated in Florence, Rome and Tokyo. In the mid 60’s, Chase shifted to sculpture when one of her students asked if she had any interest in scraps of laminated oak from a shipyard. Soon after, she began creating nesting modules from wood that invited viewer participation. She referred to this work as “Kinetic Sculpture” and as the work grew in scale she started working in steel. By the end of the decade,she had received commissions to create monumental sculpture pieces for Kerry Park (on Queen Anne hill) and for the 1970 World’s fair in Osaka, Japan.
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