Last month, Inverness resident Mariah Nielson was helping set up a show of her father’s work in Santa Fe when there was a knock on the door. She opened the gallery to an elderly man with long, shaggy hair and big, glowing brown eyes. Fuzzy memories registered in her brain, but she couldn’t quite place him.
The man, dressed in house slippers in the blazing New Mexico sun, introduced himself as Fred Church. He told her he had been good friends with her father, JB Blunk, in the 1970s and owned a large cache of his work: 70 ceramic pieces, two chairs and two stools handcrafted by the late Inverness artist. Mr. Church, a retired schoolteacher, is an avid art collector, and he regaled Ms. Nielson with stories about the rows he would get into with his wife over spending his paychecks on a Blunk cup or plate he had fallen in love with.
“Experiences like that are wonderful and surprising,” Ms. Nielson said. “[Fred’s collection] is a big piece of the puzzle.” In October, she will drive to Los Angeles to begin archiving the collection.
Ms. Nielson has been cataloging her father’s work since 2007, though her role has taken many forms since she began the project. She runs the artist’s estate and maintains the idiosyncratic home he built a half-century ago on the Inverness Ridge. She recently published the third edition of a book on Mr. Blunk, and in 2021 she opened the Blunk Space in Point Reyes Station.
The gallery and research center is dedicated to preserving and advancing her father’s legacy through exhibitions of his work and that of his circle. It also exhibits art from contemporary artists and designers who create work in conversation with Mr. Blunk’s diverse oeuvre. On June 12, the space celebrated its second birthday.
Ms. Nielson said the gallery has evolved into a piece of what she calls her life’s work and an art practice in and of itself.
“It seems very clear to me now after two years of doing what I’ve been doing—fundamentally, it’s about sustaining JB’s legacy,” she said. “Focusing on [his] work, artists from his circle and then contemporary artists and designers with links to his work and his contemporaries’ work, I’m instigating these conversations between past and present that all focus on themes of creative influence and legacy.”
Ms. Nielson, who is 44, described the relationship she had with Inverness as a young girl as magical and nourished by a strong community. In a photograph from the late ’80s, she poses in her backyard at the base of a massive redwood burl, her smile stretching from one ear to the other. But as she grew up, teenage angst took over and she longed for a life closer to civilization.
“As a teenager, I just wanted to get out,” she said. “To live in a normal place, like Terra Linda, would have been an ideal setting,” she said, rolling her eyes and laughing. “Easy access to Northgate Mall and all of that!”
As she went off to college, and especially after the death of her father in 2002, she gained a new appreciation for her childhood home, its setting and the lifestyle Mr. Blunk had dedicated himself to. She pursued a degree in architecture at California College of the Arts, where the social and educational environment was fluid and interdisciplinary. She worked alongside painters and graphic and industrial designers, and as she brought her artist friends back home to Inverness, she witnessed the power the house had on a creative mind.
“They would walk in and immediately point out specific details that I had overlooked my entire life, bringing my eyes back to those features,” she said. “It was an epiphany for me. I wasn’t able to appreciate this place the way they were.”
She and her college friends tackled deferred maintenance on the house after her mother, Christine Nielson, left West Marin for Montana in 2004. A slow reorganization of the home and Mr. Blunk’s studio would follow in the ensuing years.
After graduating, Ms. Nielson spent three years working for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, an architecture firm where she contributed to the design of the World Trade Center in Beijing and the Oakland Cathedral along Lake Merritt. She left the company in 2007 to focus on managing Mr. Blunk’s estate and home, archiving his work and collaborating with the Lucid Art Foundation—a nonprofit co-founded by artist Gordon Onslow Ford, a friend and collaborator of Mr. Blunk—to set up an artist residency at her childhood home.
Mr. Blunk suffered from Alzheimer’s and dementia in his later years. Before his illness, he had stored records of his work in one cabinet, and as he deteriorated, he attempted to reorganize it. After his death, Ms. Nielson was there to pick up the pieces.
“There was literally no system—it was chaos,” she said. “It was like someone had emptied the contents of this cabinet and thrown them back in a haphazard way.”
Prior experience working as an archivist and a librarian equipped her with the skills she needed. She worked on the archive part-time while also working as a curator at the Museum of Craft & Design in San Francisco. In 2011, she moved to London to pursue a master’s degree in the history of design and material culture from the Royal College of Art and the Victoria & Albert Museum.
That same year, Ms. Nielson met her husband, Max Frommeld, an accomplished furniture designer from Germany. The two moved to the East London borough of Forest Gate and converted an alleged one-time counterfeit money printing facility into a flat and had a son, Tilo.
In 2016, Ms. Nielson hired Jessica Thornton Murphy, a young Mill Valley native, to help her digitize Mr. Blunk’s work and ephemera and find locals who might have pieces to sell.
Ms. Murphy spent five years alongside Ms. Nielson, helping develop a succinct narrative in the artist’s sometimes dizzying array of work. They found Blunk pieces in several Inverness homes, thanks in part to an ad in the Light with a photograph of the artist and a caption: “Do you have original artwork by JB Blunk? If so, call this phone number!”
“It was so fun, and I felt like such a detective looking back through all of these scraps of leftover puzzle pieces,” Ms. Murphy said. “There’d be a white plate that was made by JB but it had no information. We’d have to comb through photographs, and I could tell there was a series of white plates from a certain era. Maybe if we can find the owners out in the world, they’ll tell us the provenance of their plate.”
In 2020, she and Ms. Murphy had enough digital work to create the first edition of “JB Blunk,” a monograph showcasing Mr. Blunk’s life and work that is peppered with essays by designers and artists, vintage photographs of Inverness and interviews with Mr. Blunk. The next year, Ms. Nielson acquired a small office space in Point Reyes Station where she and Ms. Murphy could work on the expanding estate. She said the space, which had served as a studio and gallery for artist Mary Mountcastle Eubank, begged to exhibit artwork.
The gallery opened with a collection of JB’s work in three primary media: painting, ceramics and wood sculpture. Since then, it’s shown work that influenced her father, including Mingei ceramics from Japan, where Mr. Blunk spent time in the early ’50s. The movement drew from folkcraft and emphasized functionality and local materials. Works by Gordon Onslow Ford, Jack Wright and Mr. Blunk’s longtime assistant Rick Yoshimoto have all been shown in the space.
Just months after opening the gallery, Ms. Nielson published the third and best-selling edition of the book. She said the edition has had an immense impact on disseminating her father’s work and bringing people to the Blunk Space.
“As soon as I got that book, it was an endless inspiration,” said Everett Noel, a young Nevada City knifesmith whose work is currently on display at the gallery. “I was in love with every page.”
Mr. Noel grew up visiting West Marin with his parents, but he only discovered Mr. Blunk’s work through Ms. Nielson’s book. His 26 knives and tools on display are packed with references to Mr. Blunk’s sculptures, ceramics, jewelry and the idiosyncrasies that tie them together. Mr. Noel stayed a few weekends at the Blunk house, taking in the artist’s work and using wood from a collection at the property.
A hatchet he made from manzanita wood is modeled after the arches that lead to the Blunk house. An ulu—an Inuit, all-purpose knife whose blade is parallel to the handle—mimics the shape of Mr. Blunk’s sculpture “Man in Stone,” which is displayed alongside the knife in the exhibit.
“There’s balance here,” Mr. Noel said of the pieces. “I was looking directly at how I could make the knife function while still making it sculptural. The ulu is sort of perfect.”
With hardly a moment to rest, Ms. Nielson is preparing for the gallery’s next exhibition, which will close out July: a collection of bespoke folk baskets from Japan and pottery by Japanese ceramicist Shigeo Tanaka, a contemporary of Mr. Blunk.
Ms. Nielson’s journey as caretaker for her father’s estate is guided by intuition, she said. As she explores its avenues through history, her work grows.
“Everything that I’ve done with the estate has been driven by instinct,” she said. “It’s been my version of an art practice: there was no strategy, there was no business plan or long-term goals, but everything that we show here goes back to JB.”
The Blunk Space is open Fridays through Sundays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. To learn more, visit www.BlunkSpace.com.