Visions In Clay Artists

Photo by Kurt Fishback

Lisa Reinertson is nationally known both for
her life size figurative ceramic sculptures and
her large-scale public sculptures cast in bronze.
Reinertson’s artwork conveys an underlying
humanism and concern for the earth that can
be seen both in her poetic ceramic figures with
animals, to her historic bronze monumental
portraits of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Cesar
Chavez, in which she blends narrative bas relief
into her three dimensional sculptural forms. Her
work combines a realism rooted in figurative art
traditions, with a contemporary expression of
social, political and psychological content.

Reinertson completed her MFA at UC Davis in
1984, studying with Robert Arneson, and Manuel
Neri. She has taught at several Northern California
universities and colleges, including CSU Chico,
UC Berkeley and the San Francisco Art Institute.
Her ceramic work has been in exhibitions and
museums nationally and internationally including
the Crocker Art Museum, Cantor Arts Center,
Stanford University, the Mint Museum, and the
Museo Internationale Della Ceramica in Faenza,
Italy. Recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition,
"Edge of Extinction", at the Pence Gallery, Davis,
and a mid-career retrospective at the American
Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA). Reinertson
has completed over 20 public commissions in bronze.

http://lisareinertson.com/

Juror Statement

First off, I would like to honor Joe Mariscal for his many years of dedicated teaching in the Ceramics Department at Delta College. Joe, your ceramic comrades are looking forward to seeing your post-retirement creations.

I appreciate the honor of being asked to jury this exhibition. As an artist who has dedicated much of my life to this humble, malleable, and endlessly versatile and expressive medium, my hope is that I could bring some of my experienced eye to the process of selecting works for this exhibition.

Jurying a ceramics exhibition has some unique challenges. As a material, clay is a medium for both functional and sculptural objects, and everything in between. The challenge, (and fun) in this is that there is no one standard of measure to consistently use to determine one’s choice. But the one thing that I did respond to consistently was work in which the voice of the artist stood out.

Art is ultimately a form of expression. But it is in the how the artist understands and interacts with the material that can make the expression possible and powerful. Initially, I allowed myself to respond intuitively to the work that struck me with surprise; with an energy or spirit that the work embodied. As I spent more time looking at the images, different strengths and qualities of the ceramic artwork resonated to me. As the number of pieces in the exhibition was limited, I chose only one piece from each selected artist.

The artwork selected in this show has a wide and diverse range of strengths. In some of the pieces it is a sense of humor, in others a quite serious beauty. Many works contained a narrative expression of life experiences and internal struggles. Some spoke of issues of cultural identities, or contained social or political commentaries. Other works had more subtle qualities such as grace of form, elegance of gesture, while others exhibited a quirky playfulness. Some were powerfully sculpted with little or no surface enhancements while other ceramic works had quite elaborate glazed imagery. But ultimately, it was the successful marriage of the technical handling of the medium with the expression of the concept that made a work stand out. Ceramics has an amazing and ancient history to draw from, and yet still has wide range of possibilities for the contemporary artist to explore. This group of selected works is a great example of some of the diversity of techniques and concepts in contemporary ceramics.

My own immersion into the world of ceramic art spanned the realms of vessels to sculptural works. I took Ruth Rippon’s rigorous pottery classes at Sac State, while simultaneously visiting the Candy Store Gallery in the town of Folsom where “Funk” was in full blossom. David Gilhouly’s frogs, Clayton Baily’s gurgling cartoonish heads, Robert Arneson’s pop art with self-referential humor embodied a freedom and irreverence to the status quo that was truly a spirit of the 1960’s. Richard Shaw and Marilyn Levine were creating ceramic trompe l’oeil that took one joyfully by surprise. Viola Frey, (incidentally, a former Delta College student), filled her backyard with imposing large-scale and brightly glazed women. Pete Voulkos took abstract expressionism to its three-dimensional climax. The initial energy and explosion of ceramics as a contemporary expressive art form was cataclysmic and opened a floodgate of young artists inspired to delve into their own visions in clay. It is a great legacy to be part of.