JANUARY 10 – FEBRUARY 23, 2020
Main Gallery & Emily Galusha Gallery
Jerome Ceramic Artist Project Grant
The Jerome Ceramic Artist Project Grant program supports the work of Minnesota ceramic artists at relatively early stages in their careers, as they accomplish short-term, specific objectives.
The 2019 Jerome Ceramic Artist Project Grant recipients in the exhibition are: Erin Paradis, Zoë Powell, and Lynn Wadsworth. Each artist spent the past 8+ months pursuing a unique project, the results of which will be featured in the exhibition.
This exhibition is supported in part by the Jerome Foundation.
Emerging Artist Residencies
The Emerging Artist Residency programs—the Fogelberg Studio Fellowship and the Anonymous Artist Studio Fellowship —are designed to provide emerging ceramic artists with an opportunity to be in residence for one year at Northern Clay Center, where they can develop their own work, as well as exchange ideas and knowledge with other ceramic artists.
The 2018 recipients of the Fogelberg Studio Fellowship in the exhibition are Maia Homstad and Keather Lindman. The 2018 recipients of the Anonymous Artist Studio Fellowship in the exhibition are Soojin Choi and Peter Ronan.
Red Wing Collectors Society Foundation Award
The Red Wing Collectors Society Foundation Award is granted annually to one person at an early stage of his or her career, who demonstrates talent and skill as a potter or as an art historian studying the history of ceramics, and commitment to the field of pottery as a maker or a historian.
The 2019 Red Wing Collectors Society Foundation Award recipient in the exhibition is Nick Earl.
About the artists:
Soojin Choi (Changwon, South Korea) earned her MFA at New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in May of 2018 after completing a double major in painting/printmaking and craft material studies at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. Choi combines representational imagery with abstracted geometric forms to blind a viewer’s perception. During her residency, she enjoyed the challenge of conveying large concepts in a more intimate scale.
Nick Earl (Stillwater, Minnesota) received his BA in art from the University of Vermont, Burlington, in 2011, and apprenticed with potter Dick Cooter in Two Harbors, Minnesota, from 2012 – 2014. He currently maintains his studio at Abnet Farm just north of Stillwater. Earl’s wheel-thrown pots are influenced by medieval Korean, Japanese, and English pottery, as well as by nature, food, and imperfection.
Maia Homstad (Minneapolis, Minnesota) has been the sales gallery manager of Dock 6 Pottery Gallery since 2013, and has been an active member of the Minneapolis ceramic community for over 20 years. She is inspired by the parameters of function, stating, “To create a form that ‘works for a living’ is immensely satisfying.” Homstad focused her residency on further developing a line of wares informed by a combination of historical Shaker furniture, early American spongeware, and Scandinavian design.
Keather Lindman (Plymouth, Minnesota) is a committed art teacher, as passionate about her students as she is about her own practice. She holds a BFA in art education and studio art, with a minor in special education from Minnesota State University, Moorhead. Lindman creates collages of imagery upon the surface of her functional wares, inspired by the tradition of still-life painting, or memento mori, contrasting the abundance of service with the finality of death.
Erin Paradis has been diligently earning opportunities and accolades in the state of Minnesota, pushing her work in scale and reach. The Jerome Ceramic Artist Project Grant provided an opportunity for her to focus even more pointedly on advancing her career. She received a Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant prior, which allowed her to equip a home studio with a kiln, and made it possible for her to increase her scale for her first solo show in Minneapolis in 2017. In 2018, she received an Open Studio Fellowship through Franconia Sculpture Park and installed her largest work to date. The Jerome award has allowed Paradis to upgrade her glaze area, acquire a HEPA filter for her studio, invest in computer hardware upgrades for the business side of her practice, and attend a workshop with Linda Lopez at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. Her work is a recollection of spatial encounters, mimicking line, texture, and color. She abstractly materializes particular instances through installation of sculptural forms and their relationships to one another.
“In my studio practice, these encounters are translated into abstract drawings, sculptural ceramic objects, and reinterpretations of drawn imagery,” she explains.
Zoë Powell was finding joy in the struggle to reach compromise with native materials, but she also found that sometimes the compromise required by the nature of these materials was too great; her forms yielded to material demands too often. Wanting to showcase the inherent grace of her forms, she proposed a body of work in unglazed porcelain, which she thought would sit in complement to her native-clay work, “highlighting my ideals of fragility and elegance in a new way.” Powell found that the funding for this research has empowered her to create harmony among her surfaces, forms, and ideas. The sculptural work Powell delivers serves as a formal exploration of human emotions. It is an attempt to visualize the intangible. Powell is a former wood-fire resident of both the Cub Creek Foundation, in Appomattox, Virginia, and Cobb Mountain Art and Ecology Project, in Northern California. She is a past Virginia Museum of Fine Arts fellowship recipient and has been awarded numerous grants for her work with native clays and wood firing. Her work has been exhibited in various galleries around the country and in 2019, she was named an emerging artist by Ceramics Monthly.
Peter Ronan (Boise, Idaho) has more recently been an education assistant at The Clay Studio of Philadelphia. His BFA in ceramics is from Boise State University, where he had the opportunity to complete a summer session in Nagoya, Japan. Ronan uses function to create a tangible representation of queer culture beyond the sterilized and commodified versions created for mass consumption through pop culture.
Lynn Wadsworth was chosen to receive the Jerome Ceramic Artist Project Grant by our jurors because of the humor, intelligence, and “an element of surprise” in her work. Wadsworth confounds the idea of “women’s work,” creating incongruous connections between materials and processes. She undermines the concept of fine craft materials with handicraft materials and, in doing so, puts viewers in a position to question their assumptions of existing hierarchies on multiple levels. She has used her grant year to engage regional and national craft artists in conversations about the boundaries defining their practice in order to better understand her own studio compulsions. Her work has been exhibited nationally at museums and galleries including The Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Northern Clay Center, Carleton College (all MN), and Rutgers University (NJ), Hyde Park Art Center (IL), Art in General (NY), Queens College (NY), A.I.R. Gallery (NY), and Momenta Fine Arts (PA).