Gallery of Modern Masters

Ken and Dore Wilhoite made their first kaleidoscope in 1990 as a home metal shop project. They were so pleased with the result that they made scopes as gifts for friends and family. While crude by today's standards, some of these scopes still exist. After spending a year or two asking questions and looking at kaleidoscopes in galleries and art exhibits, Ken & Dore made their first scope for sale in 1992, and attended their first Brewster Society convention in 1994.

During the early years, they continued to work at their day jobs; Dore as a legal department secretary, and Ken as a corporate assistant controller, both at the same aerospace company. During those years they worked at learning the craft of kaleidoscope construction and developing the art of design. In 1999, they retired from the corporate world to start a second career in kaleidoscope art.

For a decade, Ken and Dore made their kaleidoscopes exclusively from brass and aluminum, contrasting the bright yellow and silver hues of the metals and refining the precision of their metalwork and the accuracy of their mirror work and selection of object colors and textures. Then, in 2005, they took an interest in a new medium and added ceramic scopes to their product line. In order to create unique shapes that were sufficiently repeatable in dimension to fit the metal turning mechanism, we had to learn to make plaster models and molds to cast our clay. We are still using commercial glazes, but a next generation of our scopes will use home-made glazes to achieve different artistic effects.