The early years of the Expo were the best, in my opinion.

In the first months of 1997, energized by the success of the recent 1996 Carolina Bonsai Exposition, I was busy making plans to do the show again. I continued to correspond with the participating clubs in periodic letters, making certain they all reserved the second weekend in October for the big event. I made return visits to the bonsai clubs I had gone to in 1995 and 1996, and added new clubs with whom I’d more recently made contact. I would go and visit with any club that would have me, providing educational programming while promoting bonsai at The North Carolina Arboretum at every stop along the way. If the club I was visiting wasn’t already participating in the Expo, I’d invite them, and that’s how we grew the show.

For the first Expo we had Dan Chiplis, assistant curator of the National Bonsai and Penjing Museum, as our guest artist. Dan was a friend and did the gig for the cost of his travel expenses and accommodations, knowing that we didn’t really have much of a budget. We had more money to work with for the second Expo because individuals and clubs were making financial donations to the bonsai program. I made contact with bonsai artist Peter Adams, who was originally from England but had only recently moved to the United States. I was familiar with Peter by name through his several bonsai books and a few magazine articles. I’d never met him, but I liked what he wrote and he was a figure of note in bonsai circles. I phoned him and asked if he’d be our guest artist for the 1997 Expo and he readily accepted.

This was the logo for the event that year:

The above photo shows the logo on the front of a tee-shirt we sold that year. I don’t have the image in any other form because it wasn’t used for much else. The logo idea started with the selection of the ‘Yoshimura Island’ tray landscape for the first show, rendered as a drawing that I intentionally wanted to look different from the bonsai images I’d seen used to advertise other shows. We had the logo printed on tee-shirts by a graphics shop in Asheville and found the souvenir sold well. Coming up with a new logo design for each Expo — always depicting a bonsai from the Arboretum’s collection — was an enjoyable creative side project for me every year. Eventually the Expo logos saw more use for advertising purposes, including banners displayed out front of the Arboretum, in addition to the tee-shirts and posters.

Guest artist Peter Adams was very good. He was an excellent presenter, entertaining and knowledgeable, and wickedly funny behind the scenes. Peter would return to host the notorious thirteenth Expo in 2008:

The Arboretum bonsai display for the first Expo was a simple lining out of trees on stands, presented on cloth-covered tables in front of a plain wall. The 1997 display was largely the same, except for the addition of a painted mural as a backdrop:

The backdrop painting depicted an imaginary Southern Appalachian mountain scene. It was a triptych consisting of two long horizontal panels and one smaller panel in a vertical format. This set of acrylic paintings was a last-minute idea, so they were done the Thursday before the weekend of the show, using the work tables in the Support Facility as my easel. My desire was to present bonsai in a way I hadn’t seen done before, and to reinforce the idea of our collection being a product of our part of the world. I really liked the effect of this presentation, and over the course of the next seven Expos I would further explore the idea of painted images as background for bonsai display.

The second Expo was another success, attracting a larger crowd than the year before, which earned us the right to do it again:

The guest artist in 1998 was Susumu Nakamura, from Japan. Mr. Nakamura had been my host and teacher when I traveled to Japan earlier that year to study bonsai, and having him come to Asheville to headline the Expo was a way of showing my gratitude. It didn’t hurt, either, having a guest artist of international stature. Here is Mr. Nakamura leading a critique of the club displays:

Mr. Nakamura conducting a workshop:

The Arboretum display for the third Expo took two different forms. One component was based on the theme of Under Construction, featuring trees that were still being developed. Each bonsai was presented alongside a photograph of how it looked when the Arboretum first received the tree as a donation. In another late-hour idea, I used a splattered old drop cloth for a background, along with a few random construction tools and some hardware as accessories. It was different, and different was what I was after:

The second Arboretum display featured a series of painted panels. They were abstracted images in muted tones, done by applying the paint with a sponge. Here is Yoshimura Island presented in front of one of these panels:

One recurring problem with the Expo was that I was always too busy to properly photo-document the event. No early Expo was more woefully neglected in this regard than the fourth in 1999. I do not have even a single photograph from that year:

The guest artist was David DeGroot, then the curator of the Weyerhaeuser Pacific Rim bonsai collection in Washington state. I met David the year before when he had come to Raleigh, North Carolina, as the guest of the Triangle Bonsai Society. He impressed me with his knowledge and teaching skills and I felt a camaraderie with him as a fellow curator of a public collection. David did such a good job as guest artist in 1999 that we had him back again for the twenty first Expo in 2016.

The Arboretum bonsai display in 1999 featured a new set of painted backdrops, but there is no photo to show what it looked like. In searching through my files from that year I did find a preparatory sketch I made of ideas for the painted panels. It was a series of ten squares, each one measuring twenty four inches by twenty four inches, done in tones of beige and orange:

The invitational message sent to participating clubs in 1999:

The following year’s Expo was the fifth. The logo that year had what I thought to be a sort of retro vibe, which was ironic given all the hubbub at the time about “Y2K” ushering in a bold new future:

We had dual guest artists that year, the husband and wife team of Chase and Solita Rosade from Pennsylvania. Even at that time, Chase was an old pro, one of the first generation of American bonsai artists. He had previously visited the Arboretum to conduct educational programs and I had made a visit to his studio in Bucks County. Solita was a lively and charming woman, a bonsai artist in her own right who was also a presence in the world of international bonsai politics:

The Arboretum once again featured two different displays. For one of them I asked a fellow staff member named Clara Curtis to design the background. Clara wore many hats at the Arboretum, but she was particularly known for her design skills, and she came up with with a novel treatment featuring colorful drapery. Clara had no preconceived ideas about how bonsai are supposed to be displayed, so her effort was guided purely by her creative eye and sense of style:

The trees in this display were the five bonsai used as logo subjects for the first five Expos. Each was shown with a folded tee-shirt featuring the logo image from that particular year, along with a sign stating the name of the guest artist and the number of attendees for the show. I played up the numbers because they were good; each year we attracted a slightly larger crowd:

The second Arboretum display featured painted panels, this time depicting a blue sky with white clouds:

The 2000, 2001, and 2002 Expos were much more thoroughly documented because other people took pictures and shared them with me. Credits below these images acknowledge the photographers:

By the time of the 2001 Expo, the event was beginning to find its stride. Two more clubs joined that year — the Hinoki Bonsai Society from Roanoke, Virginia, and the Atlanta Bonsai Society from Atlanta, Georgia — bringing to four the number of states represented in the show. The format for the event, its features and the way they unfolded, had begun to take familiar shape. The audience continued to grow, not by leaps and bounds but slowly and surely:

Once again the Expo featured a duo of guest artists. Jim Doyle of Nature’s Way Nursery in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, was someone I had met on a couple of occasions and thought well of. I called to ask if he would be interested in being guest artist for the Expo and he made a counter offer too good to decline. It happened that he was putting together a tour with a German bonsai artist of his acquaintance named Walter Pall, as a way of introducing Walter to an American audience. We could have the two of them for a rate not much greater than it would have cost for Jim by himself. I didn’t know anything about Walter at the time, but Jim vouched for him and I agreed to do it. Jim Doyle would go on to become a fixture at the Carolina Bonsai Expo, returning for the next eighteen years as an exhibitor, vendor, teacher and auctioneer. Walter Pall would return as a solo Expo guest artist on two other occasions, making him the only artist to headline the event three times.

The Arboretum display in 2001 returned to a more abstract background, featuring painted black panels with fields of brown and splatters of bright yellow. These were the exact same panels as were used the year before and hung the same way, but the cloud motif had been painted over with the new design. These same panels would be repainted and reused for the next two years:

2002 marked the ten year anniversary of the donation by the Staples family that started the Arboretum’s involvement with bonsai. The Expo that year celebrated the occasion:

The Expo guest artist in 2002 was Harry Tomlinson from England. Harry had authored a book that I spent a lot of time with when first starting out in bonsai, so I reached out to him and offered him the job. I didn’t know much about Harry beyond his book. It turned out he was quite a character, full of stories, not all of which were suitable for sharing while onstage:

The Arboretum once again had two displays, the first focused on the ten year anniversary of our bonsai collection.

The following was produced as signage, displayed on the wall behind the bonsai in the first display, explaining what was being shown:

The other component of the Arboretum display featured the painted panels, this time depicting a more realistic motif of mountains and evening sky with a crescent moon:

A new feature at the 2002 Expo was the introduction of an ikebana display. I had some hesitation when the Asheville chapter of Ikebana International approached me about being included in the show. Many people think of ikebana as being a sort of sister art to bonsai, but that connection is rooted in the idea of both practices being Asian art forms. The identification of bonsai as an Asian practice was an idea from which I wanted very much to disassociate, but the ikebana people were nice and their work was beautiful. I knew having them in the show would make the Expo better and that was the deciding factor. I did ask the folks in the ikebana club to avoid overt references to Asian influence and they graciously agreed to do that. Ikebana remained a colorful part of the Carolina Bonsai Expo for the next seventeen years.

The following image shows Bob Wymer, president of the Bonsai Society of the Carolinas, presenting me with a check in support of bonsai at the Arboretum:

The photo of Bob handing me a check was staged for use in a club newsletter, but such acts of generosity were common during the Expo weekend. The participating bonsai clubs and various individuals who belonged to them had come to value the Arboretum for providing a context in which they could come together as a genuine community. All of them supported and sustained the Expo and the bonsai program.

The 2003 Expo featured Rodney Clemons of Atlanta, Georgia, as guest artist. Rodney was a student of Felton Jones and a favorite son of the Atlanta Bonsai Society. I had seen him do a demonstration at the second World Bonsai Convention and taken note of his tendency toward naturalistic styling. He would return to the Expo as guest artist for the seventeenth Expo in 2012. The photo shows Rodney with the large rock planting he created in his demonstration program:

The Arboretum display that year was one of my all time favorites. The motif was blue trees, or more exactly, blue tree trunks. In one section of the display the walls were covered in black fabric and actual blue tree trunks were set up in various places, with the bonsai displayed among them. Spotlights overhead dramatically illuminated the little trees and blue trunks. I have been forever regretful for failing to get good photographs of this display. The one image I have gives just a hint of the effect:

I did, however, get a photo of volunteer Duane Clayburn painting the tree trunks blue. Duane was more of a traditionalist and didn’t think much of my display idea, but he went along with it more or less good-naturedly. The photo also shows how the tree trunks were anchored in pots filled with concrete. The pots were hidden from view in the display:

In another section of the display the blue tree motif was continued on painted panels:

In a demonstration program, I teamed up with my friends John and Ken from the Bonsai Club of South Carolina. Together we created a new tray landscape representing Roan Mountain, while being filmed by a camera crew from UNC-TV.

A big event attached to the 2003 Expo was a ground-breaking ceremony for the Bonsai Exhibition Garden. It wasn’t by accident that this ceremony took place during the Expo, because the bonsai community that the Expo brought together was a key constituency for the garden we intended to build. I was asked to provide some suitable comments for the occasion, which was also filmed by the UNC-TV crew:

In a nice touch, the Arboretum invited two surviving members of the Staples family to attend the groundbreaking ceremony. The Arboretum’s bonsai collection began with the donation of trees from the collection of the late Cora Staples of Butner, North Carolina, in 1992 and this was the first time anyone from the family had seen what grew out of that act of generosity. The picture below shows Arboretum Executive Director George Briggs with Mrs. Staples’ daughters:

By the time of the 2004 event, the Carolina Bonsai Expo had come into its own. The number of participating bonsai clubs now numbered twelve, representing six different states, joined by two ikebana chapters. The event once again featured an international guest artist - Qingquan “Brook” Zhao from China. Brook had previously visited the Arboretum to present educational programs, and I wanted him back because of his skill at creating excellent naturalistic landscape plantings:

The Arboretum display once again had two different presentations. The first featured signage with a simple message expressing the philosophy guiding my curation of the Arboretum bonsai collection. The quote reads, Question: What is BONSAI? Answer: At its best bonsai is living art, expressing in miniature an experience of nature.

The other part of our display featured, for one final time, the painted panels. Gone were the blue trees, replaced with an abstract assemblage consisting of spray painted newspaper and painted sticks. I was pleased with the quality of these pieces, feeling that they were legitimate as artistic work, and I thought the trees looked great presented in front of them:

Here is an informational flyer from the 2004 show, giving a good account of how the event had grown in complexity over its first nine years:

The early years of the Carolina Bonsai Expo were an exhilarating experience. The show grew bigger and better with each passing year, with more people coming to see it and more clubs wanting to join. The goal of creating a comprehensive bonsai community in the Southeastern United States with The North Carolina Arboretum at its center was accomplished beyond what could have been reasonably expected. The undeniable success and popularity of the Expo became a prime driver of bonsai’s ascension up the Arboretum’s institutional ladder. No greater physical manifestation of that fact could be found than at the 2005 Expo, when the brand-new Bonsai Exhibition Garden was first opened to the public. That event, and all the other Expos that followed, are another story. The early years of the Expo stand apart as a singular success, forever framed in my mind as a golden memory.

To be continued…

The Carolina Bonsai Expo - Part 2, Early Years