Desert Dwellers

The Palm Desert, California, home of Sharon and Steve Huling features contemporary two- and three-dimensional art.

- John O'hern

Sharon and Steve Huling built a home in Seattle that initially had a lot of empty walls. They share an interest in American history and Sharon had an interest in 19th century art. They soon began to collect late-19th-century American paintings.

After getting married in Seattle in 1980, they found themselves in the midst of the rise of the studio glass movement. Dale Chihuly founded the Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood in 1971. “We both liked glass,” Sharon says, and so they slowly began to collect studio glass by artists who have become the greats of contemporary glass. She now serves on the board of trustees of Pilchuck.

She notes that “their interest in glass together with remodeling a contemporary home in Palm Desert, California, in 2014, exposed us to more contemporary art. Today, one of the things we enjoy most is meeting and supporting young artists by collecting their work.”

Steve comments on the small world of glass art: “Sharon had purchased a triptych by April Surgent in Portland, an artist she liked. April works in cameo engraving on glass. We were invited to a show of hers and saw her pieces on Antarctica. We had been to Antarctica and she had been there in 2013 with the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists & Writers Program. We commissioned her to do a piece on a bay we had visited. One evening she was at a dinner at our home with other artists and art supporters and she saw Erich Woll’s glass matchstick piece in the dining room. She told us her husband had made the small stanchions that mount the matchsticks to the wall. Later, she mentioned our name to her husband, Zak Hinderyckx, who is a metal fabricator and bicycle builder. He told her he had had worked with Gerard Tsutakawa on a bronze sculpture we have at our home in Seattle.”