Anabel Martinez
Arts Editor
Personal narratives. Contemporary issues. Psychological explorations. Popular culture.
These are just some of the things reflected in the “Mind + Matter” exhibition at Pomona’s American Museum of Ceramic Art, which features works from five sculptors from the Bay area, all artists with completely different creative processes nodding to prominent ceramic artists and educators they learned from.
“We thought that it would be a good idea to concentrate on the artists that had an affiliation as being a student of (artists like Peter Voulkos and Robert Arneson) because they were acclaimed masters who worked in the Bay Area teaching,” said Jo Lauria, adjunct curator at AMOCA.
Lauria said the Bay area is known for its distinguished education in ceramic art at universities in Oakland, San Francisco, Berkeley and Davis to name a few.
She said abstract expressionism, the Bay Area figurative style and the funk movement influenced artists to expand on the possibilities with ceramic art.
Nancy Selvin, a featured artist, studied with Voulkos at UC Berkeley and Arthur Gonzalez was taught by Arneson at UC Davis. Robert Brady and Richard Shaw got their masters degrees under the study of Arneson. Beverly Mayeri studied at UC Berkeley and earned her master of art in sculpture at San Francisco State University, where she learned from Oakland sculptor Karen Breschi.
The gallery space integrated all five artists’ work to compliment one another rather than dividing them in their own section, with some ceramic sculptures mounted on the walls and some displayed in a separate case.
“We felt that there were some common themes among them that it was going to be more powerful to have them integrated,” said Beth Ann Gerstein, executive director at AMOCA. “If those were lined up on the wall, I don’t think you would have had the same feeling as you view them as we did where there were only a couple at a time, because the work’s pretty intense.”
Mayeri’s art featured different variations of the human face, most of them given a pale, blue and yellow cool tone using acrylic paint.
“I’ve always loved the human face and the expressions you can get with it, and how the clay responds to your hands,” Mayeri said. “I remember once doing a face and it fell down. And I thought ‘Oh no,’ but I picked it up, and it had this amazing expression on it that I had never thought of before and I kept it.”
“I’m always so intrigued by the human face,” she added.
One of her pieces, “Vanishing Series: Western Face,” references 44 endangered animal species in the western United States, engraved onto a human face with hues of blue and yellow. Outlines of birds, otters, turtles and more were integrated into the facial features.
Selvin’s “Trophy Vase” series acknowledges female artists in the Abstract Expressionist movement and displays seven sculptures similar to trophies. Each vessel, as Selvin described it, is designed uniquely and has the first name of each referenced artist painted on.
“They’re really made in the way that I work in clay, which is very rough and tactile,” Selvin said. “In terms of color and form, they totally reflect how I work. That way, they don’t have anything to do with the artist. It’s like my making work in honor of their existence and their contribution to the art world, but not in any way reflecting what they did or do.”
Each sculpture stood on its own unique base, some made to look like brick and others like concrete blocks. Selvin said this was done to set her pieces apart and give them their own space from the architecture in the museum.
One of Shaw’s pieces, “Painters Table with Figure,” looks like a wooden table with cans, paint brushes, tubes of paint, and other supplies scattered around to create the illusion of a human-like figure made up of the supplies with a ball of yarn as its head and legs of pencils and wooden sticks.
A frame lies to the side on the floor, as if the art is the creative process itself.
Shaw said he likes the idea of assemblage and creating the illusion that these objects are the real thing when they are actually made with clay.
Gonzalez’s “Question of Balance Series: Doubting Thomas” explores a variety of personal symbols he has created for himself. The wall-mounted sculpture is of a young woman sitting on an abstract version of the human inner-ear, a symbol for balance, with one hand balancing herself onto it and the other hand in a white ball of fire, symbolizing patience.
The figure of the young woman has her eyes closed, exuding a calm demeanor, and has an open book painted on her lap.
“In general, a lot of people don’t know what my personal symbols mean, but the way their mind goes, trying to understand all the multi layers of the piece is just wonderful,” Gonzalez said. “And they will understand it the way that they understand it because of their own personal histories.”
Brady said the sculptures in his “Language Series” were inspired by, but not meant to imitate the composition of characters used in the Japanese language.
One sculpture was white with shades of grey and hints of orange blending up to the top, while the second one was fully white. The third had a dark, rustic look to it like stone and copper.
“There’s beautiful configurations of lines, intersecting lines, in creating a visual structure that represents a word-to-word meaning,” Brady said. “I think that when abstraction is at its best, it has to do with starting with a model, something identifiable, something that somebody has experienced, and beginning to withdraw from that and pull away from the reality of the model.”
Sketches and drawings by the artists were displayed throughout the museum space because although they are ceramic artists, they have a broad history in other art forms.
“We thought it would really enhance the exhibition to be able to peek into their thought process as they were building the works. And we opened each sketchbook to a page that we felt somehow spoke to something that was in the show,” Gerstein said.
“Mind + Matter” is on view until Jan. 23, 2022.
Admission $5 for students, veterans and seniors, $10 for general admission.
For reservations and information, visit amoca.org.
Anabel Martinez can be reached at anabel.martinez2@laverne.edu.
Anabel Martinez is a senior digital media major with a concentration in film and television, and a journalism minor. She serves as the managing editor overseeing all of the Campus Times sections and was previously editor-in-chief in Spring 2022.