The founder and director of a UNM plastics engineering facility recently received recognition for something one wouldn't expect from a man who teaches students the business and science of materials engineering.
Several pieces of plastic artwork - rare specimens of a process that UNM Research Professor Armand Winfield invented more than 50 years ago - have been accepted as part of the permanent collection of American jewelry in the American Crafts Museum in New York City.
Fascinated by plastics since 1939, when he began working for a college museum while studying anthropology, Winfield invented the first mass-producible method of embedding objects in clear acrylics in 1945. With the help of his art student brother, Rodney, Winfield set up a shop in Greenwich Village in New York City, and assembled a cadre of 65 artists to submit tiny, original pieces, which would subsequently be cocooned in clear plastic. The resulting cigarette and compact cases, necklaces, earrings, broaches and other jewelry found instant popularity, retailing from between $5 to $100 each. Now, Winfield's tiny plastic time capsules - oil paintings on canvas, drawings, fishing lures, delicate plants and wire sculptures - surface at antique dealers for up to $5,000 each.
"This was the first time it had ever been done this way - some of these are landmark pieces," Winfield says, stirring through a desktop collection of oddities frozen forever in their original condition.
Among his collection of pieces, a photographic slide hasn't faded since it was taken - more than 50 years ago. A large fly-like insect peers from a clear plastic pin. A thread-thin wire fish, which would never have survived outside of its plastic shell, peers from a lapel pin. Tiny threads of colored fabric lace through an acrylic broach that has remained perfectly clear since the 1940s.
"On a lot of these, the idea was that it would pick up the color of what you were wearing around the edge," Winfield said.
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The Winfields' process involved making molds out of brass, in which the object to be embedded was surrounded by molten acrylic 'dough,' then cutting and polishing the finished product. It attracted instant attention from industries all over the country interested in preserving delicate items.
"We were immediately contacted by museums and doctors interested in protecting specimens and tissue samples," he said. "In 1946, the War Department called and had me embed the guts from all their walkie-talkies - it made them unbreakable."
Though his education and early career focused on ethnology and anthropology, Winfield's interest and invention in plastics would catapult him from the art world into a plastics engineering career that has spanned more than five decades. Winfeild told reporters writing an article about the jewelry for a March 1947 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine that he "viewed his fashion role as a purely accidental and capricious by-product of his research."
Regardless, the plastic jewelry pieces have become his legacy. Besides the recent acceptance of seven works by the American Museum, Winfield's pieces are included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian Institution and the Royal Science Museum in London, among others. The pieces have also been in temporary exhibits worldwide.
In 2000, Winfield became the 27th person to be archived in the Smithsonian Institution's National Design Museum - putting him in league with design luminaries like Frank Lloyd Wright.
Winfield himself went on to teach at eight colleges and universities, with stints as a plastics engineer and research and development consultant in between. In 1993, he helped found the UNM Training and Research Institute for Plastics - designed as a hands-on training program in plastics for undergraduate and graduate students - for which he is still the director. Administrated by the School of Engineering, the institute occupies a vast warehouse space in the Galles Building, behind the Parking and Transportion Department offices. Inside the cavernous space are hundreds of pieces of equipment, from injection molding to cutting, as well as projects in various stages of development. Visitors are greeted at the door by a 20-foot long plastic and fiberglass Viking ship - an abandoned project for a bathtub race.
Winfield received the UNM's prestigious Popejoy Medal for his contributions to the research institute.
"For a long time, we taught classes here," Winfield said. "But more recently, some of the people in the department don't see the value of plastics, even though it is the third largest industry in the world. Some departments don't support it at all. We're just trying to keep this place alive now - we used to have a waiting list."
Students still cross University Boulevard to work on individual projects, though Winfield's classes on plastics development and patenting are no longer offered by the University. In his office, surrounded by examples of the now-commonplace embedding process he invented, Winfield sits in front of a painting of a classic scene from the landmark 1967 movie "The Graduate," in which aimless Ben - young Dustin Hoffman - is offered career advice from a well meaning family friend: "plastics."
He takes this most recent recognition - inclusion in the American Museum's collection - in stride.
"Well, as long as they'll be kept - it means the work I've done over my lifetime, at least some of them, are worthwhile," he said.
