February 6 – March 3, 2024
Sales Gallery & Online
Christina Margarita Erives, Maia Leppo, Ernest Miller, Lisa Orr, S.C. Rolf
Christina Margarita Erives, Maia Leppo, Ernest Miller, Lisa Orr, S.C. Rolf
Our February Featured Artists showcase diverse approaches to clay. Christina Margarita Erives utilizes color and highly-stylized subject matter to share her heritage and views on contemporary womanhood. Ernest Miller brings focus, through his utilitarian forms and muted glaze palette, to the architecture and machinery found in Midwestern landscapes. Lisa Orr creates a riot of energy in her functional wares through slip trailing and color, resulting in finished work that is both cohesive and confident. S.C. Rolf offers recognizable forms in soft surfaces that uplift the ideas of generosity and intimacy he strives for in his work. Jewelry artist, Maia Leppo unites contemporary design and powerful colors to her work that both delight and empower the wearer.
About the Artists
Christina Margarita Erives
Los Angeles, CA
Christina Margarita Erives is a Mexican-American artist from Los Angeles, California. Erives received her MFA from Pennsylvania State University and has worked as an instructor and resident artist at various studios and universities across the United States. Her ceramic work is highly stylized, sometimes sculptural, sometimes functional, and always colorful. Informed by her heritage and using a diverse range of imagery, Erives investigates the stories we create and tell about food and contemporary womanhood. She cherishes the beautiful power of ceramic artifacts as keepers of ancient knowledge and cultures. Through her clay objects, Erives immortalizes her own experiences, aspiring that they’ll one day offer the future a tangible glimpse of our present.
Ernest Miller
Minneapolis, MN
Ernest Miller has exhibited his ceramics in various regional and national art fairs including the Uptown Art Fair in Minneapolis and the Plaza Art Fair in Kansas City, Missouri. Miller teaches at Fired Up Studios in Minneapolis and at the Minnetonka Center for the Arts in Wayzata, Minnesota. In 2011, he received a Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative grant. Miller studied at Olney Central College in Olney, Illinois, and received his BFA from Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Illinois. Miller’s work is inspired by architecture and machinery found in the rural Midwestern landscape. He is interested in the aesthetic of weathered paint and surface deterioration that reflects time and use. He applies these influences to his pots to create a hybrid between functional and sculptural work, utilizing wheel-throwing and off-wheel alteration.
Lisa Orr
Northborough, MA
Lisa Orr completed an MFA at The New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 1992. She has been awarded a Fulbright and National Endowment for the Arts fellowship through Mid-America Arts Alliance. Orr taught high school ceramics in Austin, Texas, and travels extensively for lectures and workshops. She creates low-fire pottery intended for use in everyday life. Though rooted in the deep history of ceramics, her forms are fluid and often gently asymmetrical—a combination of the clay’s natural expression and her own inspiration in the moment. Her slip work and relief decorations along with her rich colors suggest images of sky, coral reef, or flowers in bloom. The work is a riot of color, energy, memories, and emotion, all of which come together to create finished work that is cohesive and confident.
S.C. Rolf
River Falls, WI
S.C. Rolf lives and works as a studio potter in River Falls, WI, creating one-of-a-kind functional pots. His work reflects an ongoing search to unite his ideas with the generosity and the intimacy that the functional pot offers. Rolf holds multiple degrees in art and exhibits his work nationally and internationally. Rolf has received a number of national and international awards. He lectures and teaches workshops throughout the country. His work has been included in numerous publications, museum collections, and best of all, many kitchen cupboards.
Jewelry Spotlight: Maia Leppo
Pittsburgh, PA
Maia Leppo graduated from Tufts University (Medford, MA) in 2008 with a degree in biology and community health. She received training in jewelry and metals from various craft schools, including Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts (Gatlinburg, TN), Pocosin Arts School of Fine Craft (Columbia, NC), Penland School of Craft (Bakersville, NC), and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (Deer Isle, ME) and her MFA from State University of New York at New Paltz.
She has participated in artist residencies at Arrowmont and Fallingwater (Fall Run, PA) and has taught around the country including Penland, Arrowmont, Pocosin, and Touchstone Center for Crafts (Farmington, PA). She currently works out of her studio in the Brewhouse Association on the south side of Pittsburgh.