Six McKnight Artists 2018

Six c M Knight Artists

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Xilam Balam Ybarra

Kosmas Ballis

Forrest LeschMiddelton

2017 McKnight Artist Fellow

2016 McKnight Artist Resident

2016 McKnight Artist Resident

Ms Ek

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Mic Stowell

Eva Kwong

Anthony Stellaccio

2017 McKnight Artist Fellow

2016 McKnight Artist Resident

2016 McKnight Artist Resident

Six c M Knight Artists On view July 14 – August 26, 2018 Northern Clay Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota

2017 McKnight Artist Fellows: Xilam Balam Ybarra Mic Stowell 2016 McKnight Artist Residents: Kosmas Ballis Eva Kwong Forrest Lesch-Middelton Anthony Stellaccio

Essays by M.C. Baumstark Edited by Elizabeth Coleman and Franny Hyde

Foreword

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Sarah Millfelt, Executive Director

© 2018 Northern Clay Center.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

For information, write to Northern Clay Center, 2424 Franklin Avenue East, Minneapolis, MN 55406. www.northernclaycenter.org Manufactured in the United States First edition, 2018 International Standard Book Number 1-932706-49-6 Unless otherwise noted, all dimensions: height precedes width precedes depth.

The McKnight Artist Fellowships and Residencies for Ceramic Artists programs are designed to strengthen and enhance Minnesota’s artistic community, as well as significantly advance the work of Minnesota ceramic artists whose work is of exceptional artistic merit, who have already proven their abilities, and are at a career stage that is beyond emerging.

The programs provide two forms of direct financial support to ceramic artists: two fellowships are awarded annually to outstanding mid-career Minnesota ceramic artists; four residency awards are granted each year to artists from outside Minnesota for a three-month stay at Northern Clay Center.

Three individuals comprised the 2017 selection panel: Namita Gupta Wiggers, curator and Critical Craft Forum co-founder and director; Elaine Henry, artist and former editor of Ceramics: Art and Perception and Ceramics: Technical; and Josh DeWeese, potter and head of ceramics at Montana State University, Bozeman.

The 2018 exhibition features work by two 2017 McKnight Artist Fellows, and four 2016 McKnight Artist Residents. The fellowship artists used the grants to defray studio and living expenses, experiment with new materials and techniques, and build upon ideas within their current and past work.

The McKnight Artist Fellowships and Residencies for Ceramic Artists program and this exhibition are made possible by generous financial support from the McKnight Foundation, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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Xilam Balam Ybarra

2017 McKnight Artist Fellow

Tone and Temporality Clarity. Tone. Energy.

These are not words typically used within studio ceramics, but they exist at the core of Xilam Balam Ybarra’s interdisciplinary practice. Xilam produces ceramic flutes and ocarinas in the pre-Columbian tradition, integrating the finished works into multimedia musical performances.

Each piece integrates Mexican (Aztec) and Mayan motifs, intentionally referring back to the glyphs, statuary, and architecture of Mesoamerica. Far from producing archaeological replicas, Xilam locates this work within a contemporary Chicano Latinx movement and incorporates each piece into performances with the Indigenous electronic music group Curandero, seamlessly melding pre-Columbian Indigenous instrumentation and electronic music for expressive and ceremonial effect.

Each of Ybarra’s instruments is meticulously crafted, with ornate relief surfaces and precisely designed interiors made to produce specific sounds. Flutes vary in size, number of notes, and tone. Function and form come to the fore, as Xilam’s ancestors used these flutes for ceremonial purposes, each one specific and intentional. Xilam’s making and use of the flutes reclaims pre-Columbian Indigenous music, situating historically informed flutes as contemporary, relevant instruments, imagining new melodies, new vibrations each time the flute is played.

In both the practice of making, and performing, with these objects, Xilam and his collaborators decolonize the anthropological gaze inherent in Western archaeology.

Rather than render Mayan and Mexican (Aztec) music as a thing of the past, Ybarra’s work insists that Indigenous craft, music, and performance are necessary tools of the contemporary moment, and of the future. These

instruments are not merely reproductions, but also contemporary interpretations, existing in a continuum of tradition and novelty, resistance and reclamation.

Xilam and his partner, Rebekah Crisanta de Ybarra (who, along with others, co-founded Electric Machete Studios, a Twin Cities art and music collective and gallery), will tell you that each flute has its own tone and its own vibration, dictated by its construction and its surface imagery. Each piece has its own energy to be respected, explored, and cultivated.

While visually appealing, with dense imagery and meticulous carvings, these flutes are meant to be used.

Each one invites both tradition and ceremony on the part of the user. No two are alike, just as their context is never the same twice. Xilam described one of his favorite works, a Jaguar flute, and the way it “came alive” in the hands of another performer.

Watching Curandero perform, viewers focus on the flutes, their sharp and clear tone soaring above handdrumming, keyboard beats, and electronic music. In this context, beneath the spotlight of a theater and surrounded by contemporary musicians, the flute seems to be anything but historical. Rather than rely on the lost melodies of the past, Curandero imagines new ones, giving voice to pre-Columbian Indigenous culture one note at a time.

Ybarra’s multidisciplinary practice combines research and experimentation, exploring ceremony and guiding energy through music and form. In combining the tradition of flute-making and historical imagery with hip hop, electronic music, and contemporary technology, Xilam resituates the flute as a tool of the present, a clear tone of decolonization rising above the din.

Jaguar Lily 2015 Buff stoneware with ochre 18” x 12” x 6”

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Mic Stowell

2017 McKnight Artist Fellow

Disciplined Interrogation Diligently balancing ambiguity and specificity, Mic Stowell’s sculptures simultaneously invite and reject interrogation.

Initially, the works seem familiar, like a vessel or landscape, and soon emerge as alien, with complex surfaces and unexpected forms. Razor-thin edges crack and fracture around sumptuous, cavernous interiors, barely accessible at each end of twisting, posturing forms.

These sculptures most closely resemble tubes bent at odd angles. Their undulating width and knobby exteriors suggest everything from fingers to tentacles to branches and bones. In zlpg18, the wide, bubbly surface reminds us of gourds or sea cucumbers, but rapidly switches to a log or mushroom with the protrusion on the left-hand side, defying simple or quick interpretation, and demanding further contemplation.

As an educator and artist, Stowell draws inspiration from a variety of art traditions, from landscape paintings to ceramic history. Simultaneously vessel and figure, each of these gestural pieces are meticulously coilbuilt. Stowell pinches the coils precariously thin, allowing sections to stiffen and dry at odd angles as he works from one open end to the other, slowly constructing a vessel with no bottom, a limb with no body.

The forms are both unresolved and perfectly finished, intentionally ambiguous and oddly specific. The continued use of oppositional pairs—inside and outside, front and back, top and bottom, coarse and smooth, shiny and mottled—offers points of contrast from every angle. Where viewers anticipate closure, Stowell opens. Sleek, burnished beginnings become bubbling, wrinkled ends. Drooping, heavy masses defy gravity with odd angles and precarious perches.

Rather than take sculpture’s parameters like mass, surface, form, and volume for granted, Stowell investigates each intentionally, reflecting on the parameters themselves and delicately toeing the line between process and product.

Rather than tackle an idea using ceramics, Mic confronts the discipline directly as the building process informs the structure; his experiments manifest in lush surfaces. Early in this series, Mic covered the majority of the work in opaque, black plastic, only responding to the last few inches left exposed. The process of making became a meander, rather than a clear path, and the twists and turns offer new ways of making and seeing sculpture. Mic says, “For me, [the process] is the challenge of rediscovering or uncovering something. If I’m challenged, perhaps others will be too.”

His works refer to the horizon of landscapes, the volume of vessels, the mass of sculptures. Rather than rely too heavily on these influences, Stowell offers new solutions for art making. In xzbg18, landscape horizons become wobbly, sharp divisions in surface, vessels open at both ends, and sculptures open themselves to reveal thin, precarious interiors.

Stowell breathes new life into timeless issues within our ceramic discipline. His work embodies process and contemplation, meditating on each turn, each moment of surface. This continued investigation is refreshing in an age of rapid production and turnover, as viewer and artist alike wade through tradition to imagine new endings, different futures.

sxz18 2018 Earthenware, glaze, mother of pearl 16” x 10” x 9”

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Kosmas Ballis

2016 McKnight Artist Resident

Experimental Materiality Some artists might be troubled about the fact that their fired ceramic work will exist in the world much longer than they will, about 500,000 years longer, actually, but not Kosmas Ballis.

No, Kos has already considered that, having made multiple “encapsulations” during his time at Northern Clay Center. These pockets of concept are both literal and figurative, as Ballis tightly contains objects and space within glass barriers fused to ceramic armatures. Perhaps two of the most stable materials, glass and fired clay ensure Ballis’ brush with eternity. Barring a crushing weight of thousands of pounds, these pieces stand to exist long into the foreseeable future, the Xianrendong pot shards (carbon dated to 18,000 BCE) of the next millennia.

Take Fossil #8, a sculptural assemblage of semitransparent glass that flows between hard and geometric ceramic structures that tightly enclose a variety of white “fossils.” While some of Ballis’s Fossil series offer recognizable, slipcast objects encased in glass, #8 prompts us to consider archaic bones and pottery shards, its bubbly encasement too dense for discernment. Informed by Ballis’ multiple iterations in this series, we might suppose them to be moths, dragonflies, or birds; organic ephemera that, when translated into ceramic and glass, wax eternal.

While his most striking technical achievement is the glass and ceramic fusing, each piece of Ballis’s contains something novel. Recent travels to Japan, Korea, and China allowed Kos to experiment with integrating new materials such as polyresin and architectural, stacking techniques into his ceramic practice; experiments that eventually led to this fossil series.

Drawing from earlier experiments and knowing that Minnesota was too cold in the winters for polyresin, Kos utilized his time at Northern Clay Center to collaborate with area glass artists, Martha Wittstruck and Chad Holliday, attempting to encapsulate objects using clay, glaze, and plate glass. In combining the rigid multiplicity of the protruding structure with the continuous flow of glass and glaze, Ballis interrogates some of the material’s most inherent qualities. While the pieces ask questions about memory, history, and preservation, as an object it delights ceramic layperson and expert alike.

While Ballis’s sculptural work at NCC might appear to be about encapsulation’s most basic definition, encasement, I would encourage viewers to consider his encapsulation of concept, making explicit the potential impact of pursuing “encapsulation” from a material perspective. Having traveled to and experienced vastly different locales on the ceramic landscape, Ballis’s material approach is both novel and traditional, geographically specific and universal.

During his time at NCC, in collaboration with glass artists, Ballis developed new firing schedules, material possibilities, and artifacts within the North American ceramic legacy.

It is this idea of legacy that I find most interesting when faced with the novelty of Ballis’s work. Fossil #8 co-locates ceramics in both the past and future, in clarity and obfuscation. Kosmas Ballis’s work offers viewers a chance to situate themselves within the material continuum of this rapidly changing landscape, to glimpse a fossil in the making, our present encapsulated for an unknown future.

Butterfly and Dog 2017 Ceramic and glass 8” x 11” x 6”

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Eva Kwong

2016 McKnight Artist Resident

Things We Cannot Shake There’s a vitality to Eva Kwong’s work.

Not only does it wriggle, and blossom, and shake in its forms: amoebas, flowers, and splitting cells; each work contains a rich, individual complexity. Take, for example, Kwong’s continued, career-long insistence on spots.

She says, “I was called the ‘Spotted Girl’ when I was little, from bug bites, insects, cuts, bruises, and sticks… I had to wear opaque tights!...The spots are a part of my identity.”

Rather than just a pattern, working with spots is about the spots themselves. “Each spot is different. No spot is ever the same. It twists a little different, just based on how you move the brush.” Kwong’s surfaces invite us to consider not only the amassed pattern, but also the particularities of the spot itself, the individual within the collective surface.

Working as an assistant in Rhode Island School of Design’s Nature Lab with Edna Lawrence during her time as an undergraduate, Kwong was able to handle natural specimens of all sorts, and noticed that in nature, spots are never regular; the front is never the same as the back; the inside differs from the outside. There is always diversity, multiplicity, and complexity in the simplest of forms.

Kwong says, “In hindsight, I realize how influential that was.... I got to study all of those specimens, and that became my vocabulary. My work is a hybrid of all those things. Bits of a beetle, stuffed bird, seashell, rocks, leaves, pods, all mixed together. All the things I saw, studied, and drew. [My work is] based on multiples, rather than one thing. It’s not just a seashell.”

Her experiences in the Nature Lab, as well as her countryside childhood, memories of her grandmother, and even Buddhism influence Kwong’s commitment to visually complicating and analyzing the natural world. We can find flower buds, coral, animal ears, crystals, and (of course) spots, even in her simpler works, such as Turquoise Sprouts.

In Portal, Kwong’s monumental sculpture, viewers are struck by the stoic solitude of this mounded object. And yet, we cannot avoid being enamored with its small portal, with the immense multiplicity of spots, or maybe one spot

in particular. Even in the most mammoth of objects, Kwong returns us to pinpricks of light, the movement between space, and the individual within collectives.

Much of Kwong’s work indirectly refers to her bodily anxieties, joys, and struggles. When Kwong was pregnant with her first child, her work began to deal with genetics, with splitting cells, with the diversity of genes, wondering what color eyes her firstborn would have, what color hair?

These anxieties with life’s building blocks are meditatively reflected in works like Dividing Cells and Coco. In her adult life, she explored relationships, marriage, and friendship through the bodily experience of each. Her “sculpturevases,” or “living sculptures” as she sometimes calls them, invite the natural into the domestic, through an examination of relation, of being together.

Kwong explains, “When you first look at it as an object, you have an enclosed shape. When you put the flowers in, the enclosed part seems empty. There’s a shift in relationships. Relationships were side by side in the early work, like friendship or marriage, it’s peer to peer. These new ones have a top and bottom, or a horizontal plane— referring to the landscape plane, or maybe another world.”

Azure Sprouts encourages examination of another sculptural plane, while rendering it inaccessible; just a peek, maybe a portal. Looking at a volume both full and empty, we’re forced to consider loss, juxtaposed against the vibrancy of a flower or branch. The shift from side-byside to above-and-beneath in her work is heart-rending, but universal. It speaks to that first syllable uttered toward someone who’s recently passed, who is right there, but entirely unreachable.

I asked Kwong if this type of work, sculptures that deal with partnership, relationships, children, genetics, and the mechanics and movements of bodies, is particularly vulnerable. She didn’t pause. She said, “Whatever we are, whatever’s at the core of ourselves, comes out regardless.

There are things that we carry with us, that we cannot shake.”

Bronze Sprouts 2017 Stoneware, bronze glaze 9.5” x 8.5” x 8.5”

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Forrest LeschMiddelton

2016 McKnight Artist Resident

The Patterns Among Us Pattern fascinates Forrest Lesch-Middelton.

Whether it’s the looped script of Iranian poetry, tessellated tiles, or the physics of sound, Forrest investigates patterns—natural, visual, social, economic, and environmental—within his diverse ceramic practice. It may seem a stretch, but Forrest calls ceramics as natural a medium as any; the “tofu” of the making world.

Lesch-Middelton expanded the technical limits of clay during his time at Northern Clay Center as a part of the McKnight Residency: stretching it paper thin and gently placing these bisqued porcelain “plates” onto a sound generator, capable of producing tones from a wide frequency of 0 – 10,000 hertz. He was intent on investigating this technology within functional ceramics, a new arena for sound.

Late at night, so as not to bother his studio mates, Forrest sprinkled a fine layer of particulate onto the porcelain plates (usually iron or titanium, but he’s still testing), tuned the sound generator to a specific tone, and watched the particles leap into a pattern generated by the vibrations.

The resulting particulate patterns range from “typical mathematical patterns to organic patterns, sometimes a sophisticated grid, a grid with dots in the middle, sometimes almost a floral pattern, depending on the scale and hardness of the plates.” Suddenly, sound and vibration (previously invisible phenomena) are made visible, emerging in precise patterns to be permanently fused to the plate once fired.

“It’s like a Rorschach test,” Forrest says, referring to the inkblot-level of abstraction. “I can never predict what someone will see, but I always ask.”

Lesch-Middelton sees his work as conversational, the aesthetics of the pot acting as a catalyst for dialogue. For him, the fact that a viewer might be attracted to his plates means the conversation is already happening, using pattern instead of words, abstraction over articulation.

It might seem a bit grandiose to lay the weight of human conversation on the shoulders of a pot, but LeschMiddelton can think of no better vessel. Pots, he says, are the way that he engages with the difficulties and complexities of humanity, using their form and surface as a platform for dialogue.

While we may not recognize the pattern of a specific tone as such, we can still appreciate and approach the pattern. This appreciation becomes the conversation between maker and user, object and human.

Lesch-Middelton’s work moves beyond the “studio” bit of a “studio potter.” True, he needed a studio to himself to conduct ear-shattering tests never performed on ceramic plates, and, true, the studio remains a site of continued investigation. Beyond the studio, however, an artist must part with their work at some point. Rather than consign his pots to unknown futures, Forrest considers the next user of the pot to be in dialogue with him; a conversation about the values, aesthetics, and taste that come with selling pottery.

He asks users of his pots to contemplate humanity with him, reveling in our shared aesthetics, the patterns among us, noticed and unnoticed, translatable and irreducible.

Once you’ve picked one up, you’ve already decided to answer his question.

“What do you see?”

Soundwave Tile 2017 Ceramic 18” x 18” x 2”

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Anthony Stellaccio 2016 McKnight Artist Resident

Memory as Material Anthony Stellaccio calls himself a “slave to memory.”

His sculptures are embroiled in the complexities of sentiment and coping with the loss that often spurs strong emotion. Each series of objects can contain multitudes: soil, ashes, metal, seeds. Once finished, and displayed, he says the work is as “good as buried.”

For Stellaccio, the process of making enlivens the objects he collects and assembles. Exhibition marks the end of their conversation and lives together.

Take Root, a pair finished during Stellaccio’s McKnight Residency at NCC. Each exists as both a container and an uncontained object. The two glass cylinders contain pieces of fired dirt; earth that was harvested at the artist’s mother’s current house, and from his birthplace in Muncie, Indiana.

Contained in sterile, transparent housings, this earth is both artifact and origin: the rich bloom of vitality and the dark of a final resting place.

In the process of “containing” this earth, or pressing it (as in Drifter (Bust)), Stellaccio complicates the use of land and natural resources, and the sentiments we ascribe to the earth, as life giving, decomposing, or middle ground.

Two reddish-orange sculptures emerge in the forms of a simplified tree, and a boli — a “power object” in Bamana spirituality. Stellaccio pulls from two different sculptural traditions, as the simplified tree can be traced to early, Mediterranean, funerary statuary, and the amorphous boli seen in Mali in the 19th and 20th centuries.

This kind of “cultural combination” rings true with Stellaccio, whose process revolves around collection and assemblage, often taking years. In combining, and reworking

objects and imagery that exist elsewhere, Stellaccio constructs a “living” archive of his own emotional state.

Given due reverence, Root constitutes a mobile altar; statuary resting on the soil of the past. Once exhibited, the meaning and implications of the work constantly shift, as one’s relationship with “home” often does. If this work is dead, its corpse tells stories.

Stellaccio’s work considers not only his life, the finality of death or the sentimentality of memory, but also the life cycle of objects, transforming, transplanting, and altering everyday materials like dirt, glass, cement, molded into an unexpected final form.

Stellaccio laces each piece with a delicate awareness of consumption, mortality, memory, and loss, each weighty, philosophical question resting alongside myriad materials.

For Stellaccio, objects and ideas are collected along the way. He says, “Accumulation can be the burden of memory or object; all the little things that build throughout a life….

Accumulation is a literal process, an emotional process. It doesn’t end until the work is ‘done.’”

Both Root and Drifter (Bust) embody the products of accumulation: the process left to our imagination and Stellaccio’s memory. For the artist, these works embody a rich, emotional center. For viewers, that center is obscured, yet imaginable.

Blind to the accumulation process, our empathy is the vehicle through which we navigate this work, considering our own ideas, our own objects alongside Stellaccio’s.

Where will we end up? When will we be done?

Root 2017 Clay, lead glaze, cement, glass, earth from the home of the artist's mother (fired), earth from the town of the artist’s birth (fired) 72” x 48” x 16”

Northern Clay Center

Six McKnight Artists

Xilam Balam Ybarra

Mic Stowell

St. Paul, Minnesota Born: 1973, San Antonio, Texas

Minneapolis, Minnesota Born: 1953, Mankato, Minnesota

EDUCATION 1995 – 1996: Audio Production and Engineering, Institute of Production & Recording—College of Creative Arts, Minneapolis, MN • 1993 – 1994: University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN

MUSICAL PROJECTS Recording Artist and Producer, 20 years with Rhymesayers Entertainment, Minneapolis, MN; Musical groups include: Los Nativos, Auddio Draggon, Curandero, Lady Xok, and Xilam Balam – Solo Projects

SELECTED SOLO & GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2018: 6 McKnight Artists, Northern Clay Center, Minneapolis, MN • Ordway Lobby Pre -Show: Paintings, Ceramics, & Music, Ordway Center for Performing Arts, St. Paul, MN • 2017: CSA Community Supported Art & Agriculture, Electric Machete Studios, St. Paul, MN • For Directions, All My Relations Arts, Minneapolis, MN • 2016: Nepantla, Electric Machete Studios, St. Paul, MN • 2015: Xilam Balam: 20 Years of Lines, Electric Machete Studios, St. Paul, MN • Mother Mary Come to Me, United Theological Seminary, New Brighton, MN • 2007 – 2016: Dimensions of Indigenous & Cultural Identity Politics, Intermedia Arts, Minneapolis MN

SELECTED PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE 2015 – present: Member, Electric Machete Studios Art and Music Collective, St. Paul, MN • 1995 – present: Audio Engineer, Minneapolis, MN • 1992 – present: Designer, Minneapolis, MN • 1987 – 1991, 2015 – present: Air Brush & Screen Print, St. Paul, MN • 1987 – present, Muralist, St. Paul, MN

SELECTED AWARDS 2017: McKnight Artist Fellowship for Ceramic Artists, Northern Clay Center, Minneapolis, MN • 2015 – 2017: St. Paul Knight Arts Challenge, Knight Foundation, Miami, FL • 2015: Minnesota State Arts Board Folk & Traditional Arts Award, St. Paul, MN

EDUCATION 1986: MFA, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN • 1983: MA, Saint Cloud State University, Saint Cloud, MN • 1978: BS, Saint Cloud State University, Saint Cloud, MN SELECTED SOLO & GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2018: 22nd National San Angelo Ceramic Competition, San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, San Angelo, TX • Over Easy, Ash Street Project Gallery, Portland, OR • Untitled 14, Soo Visual Arts Center, Minneapolis, MN • 6 McKnight Artists, Northern Clay Center, Minneapolis, MN • 2017: Freezer Burn (solo exhibition), North Hennepin Community College Art Gallery, Maple Grove, MN • 2015: Work, Work More Work (solo exhibition), Wegman Gallery, Riverland Community College, Austin, MN • Use It, Cinema Gallery, Urbana, IL, show traveled to Kirkland Fine Arts Center, Millikin University, Decatur, IL • Resurfaced and Reformed: Evolution in Studio Ceramics, University of Minnesota, Tweed Museum, Duluth, MN • Northern Clay Center Members Exhibition, Main Gallery, Minneapolis, MN • 2012: Reflection National Biennial, Halcyon Art Gallery, Terra Haute, IN • Six Pack Show: Texas Clay Art, Coop Gallery, San Angelo, TX • Recent Altercations, Faculty Show, Central Lakes College, Brainerd, MN • 2009: Brennan, Stowell, Austin Area Art Center, Austin, MN • 2008: Leaving the Party (solo exhibition), Ridgewater Community College, Hutchinson, MN • Third Jingdezhen International Contemporary Ceramic Art Exhibition, Sanbao Ceramic Art Institute, Jingdezhen, China • 2007: Feats of Clay, Gladding, McBean Terra Cotta Factory, Lincoln, CA • NW Alabama Clay Artists & a Few Friends Invitational Exhibition, Kennedy-Douglass Center for the Arts, Florence, AL • Adjust for Normal (solo exhibition), Central Lakes College Gallery, Brainerd, MN • Ceramics Today: local,

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regional, and national talent, Flaten Art Museum, St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN • Invitational Figure Show, AMACO Brent Contemporary Clay Gallery, Indianapolis, IN • 2006: Oregon College of Craft Invitational, Portland, OR • 2004: Panevezys Alumni Exhibition, NCECA Conference, University of Indianapolis, Indianapolis, IN • Form Follows Fiction: Faculty Sabbatical Exhibition, Central Lakes College Gallery, Brainerd, MN • Invitational Figurative Show, AMACO Brent Contemporary Clay Gallery, Indianapolis, IN • 2003: National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts Clay National Juried Exhibition, David Zaph Gallery, San Diego, CA SELECTED AWARDS 2017: McKnight Artist Fellowship for Ceramic Arts, Northern Clay Center, Minneapolis, MN • 2008: MNSCU Award for Excellence • International Academy of Ceramics 43rd Annual Assembly, Xian, China • 2006: MNSCU Award for Excellence, Glaze research, Studio work, Art exhibition • Career Opportunity Grant, Minnesota State Arts Board • 1994: Arts Midwest, Artworks Fund Project Grant SELECTED PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE 2013 – present: Lecturer in Art, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN • 1987 – 2013: Art Instructor and Gallery Director, Central Lakes College, Brainerd, MN • 1988 – 1995: Director, Kiehle Gallery, Saint Cloud State University, Saint Cloud, MN • 1985: Summer Workshop Instructor, Appalachian Center for Craft, Cookeville, TN • 1979 – 1981: Elementary Art Teacher, Bemidji Public Schools, Bemidji, MN

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Six McKnight Artists

Kosmas Ballis

Eva Kwong

Fort Myers, Florida Born: 1978, Tampa, Florida

Columbus, Ohio Born: 1954, Hong Kong

EDUCATION 1999: MFA, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL • 1995: BFA, Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, MO SELECTED SOLO & GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2018: Kosmask Product Launch at AmericasMart, Atlanta, GA • Taiwan Ceramics Biennale, New Taipei Ceramics Museum (invited), Taipei, Taiwan • New Taipei Yingge Ceramics Museum (solo exhibition) Taipei, Taiwan • 6 McKnight Artists, Northern Clay Center, Minneapolis, MN • 2017: Kogei 3rd World Triennial Exhibition, Kanazawa, Japan • 2015: Zanesville Prize for Contemporary Ceramics, Zanesville, OH • Gyeonggi International Ceramic Biennale, Icheon, South Korea • 2013: 62nd All Florida Exhibition, Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, FL • 2012: Naples Arts Association National Arts Challenge, Von Liebig Art Center, Naples, FL • Kosmas Ballis (solo exhibition), Chico’s FAS World Headquarters, Ft. Myers, FL • Life, Death & Everything Between (solo exhibition), Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center, Fort Myers, FL • 2011: Craft Triennial Silvermine Arts, (Holly Hotchner, curator), New Canaan, CT • XBiennal Internaional de Cerámica, Manises, Spain (catalog) • Cheongju Craft Biennale, Cheongju, South Korea (catalog) SELECTED AWARDS 2019: Residency, European Ceramic Workcentre, Oisterwijk Netherlands • 2017 McKnight Artist Residency for Ceramic Artists, Northern Clay Center, Minneapolis, MN • 2016: Gold Prize, Taiwan Ceramics Biennale, New Taipei, Taiwan • 2015: Special Prize, Gyeonggi International Ceramic Biennale, Icheon, South Korea

GALLERY REPRESENTATION Ferrari Gallery, Dallas, TX • Jingdezhen International Studio Artists Gallery, Jingdezhen, China • KAJ Gallery, Los Angeles, CA SELECTED COLLECTIONS Gyeonggi International Museum of Ceramic Art, Icheon, South Korea • Museo Internazionale, Faenza Ceramics Museum, Italy • New Taipei Museum of Ceramics, Taiwan • Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art, Biloxi, MS (Smithsonian Affiliate) SELECTED PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE 2017: Resident, Jingdezhen International Studio, Jingdezhen, China • Lecture, Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, MO 2016: Resident Artist, Lecture, Shangyu Celadon-Modern International Ceramic Center and Museum, Zhejiang, China • Teaching Residency, Yingge Ceramics Museum, Taipei, Taiwan • 2012: Juror, ArtFest: Southwest Florida’s Premiere Outdoor Art Fair, Fort Myers, FL

EDUCATION 1977: MFA, Ceramics and Drawing, Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA • 1975: BFA, Ceramics and Sculpture, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI SELECTED SOLO & GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2018: Vessels: Containment and Displacement, Useful to Grand, Bennington College, Bennington, VT • Women Working In Clay Symposium Exhibition, Eleanor Wilson Museum, Hollins University, Roanoke, VA • Akron Soul Train Fellows, Akron Soul Train & Curated Storefronts, Akron, Ohio • Married In Clay: Eva Kwong & Kirk Mangus, Hoyt Institute of Art, New Castle, PA • Through the Eyes of a Collector, Lacoste Gallery, Concord, MA • 6 McKnight Artists, Northern Clay Center, Minneapolis, MN • 2017: Constant As the Sun, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH • Both Artist and Mother, Red Lodge Clay Center, Red Lodge, MT • Love Between the Atoms (solo exhibition), Carl Solway Gallery, Cincinnati, OH • 2016: Wood-Fired Ceramics Invitational, International Wood-fire Conference, Waubonsee Community College, Sugar Grove, IL • All Ohio Contemporary Ceramics Competition, Yan Sun Art Museum, Zanesville, OH • 50 Women: A Celebration of Women’s Contribution to Ceramics, NCECA conference, American Jazz Museum, Kansas City, MO • Across the Table, Across the Land, curated by Namita Gupta Wiggers and Michael Strand, Charlotte Street Foundation, NCECA Conference, Kansas City, MO • The Once and Future: New Now, Sherry Leedy Gallery, NCECA Conference, Kansas City, MO • Eva Kwong— New Work (solo exhibition), Sherrie Gallerie, Columbus, OH • Teapots, Red Lodge Clay Center, Red Lodge, MT • 2015: Women To Watch—Ohio, Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, OH, sponsored by the National Museum of Women Artists, Washington, D.C. • 2014: Zanesville Prize

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for Ceramics, Muskingum County Community Foundation, Zanesville, OH • Best of 2014, Ohio Designer Craftsman Museum, Columbus, OH; exhibition traveled to Wassenberg Art Center, Van Wert, OH; French Art Colony, Gallipolis, OH • Bioforms and Metacosms, Harris Stanton Gallery, Akron, OH • Yunomi Invitational, AKAR Gallery, Iowa City, IA • 2013: Eva Kwong & Kirk Mangus: Works on Paper & in Clay (twoperson exhibition), Marlboro College, Marlboro, VT SELECTED AWARDS 2016: McKnight Artist Residency for Ceramic Artists, Northern Clay Center, Minneapolis, MN • 2009: Ohio Arts Council Fellowship (Ceramics) • 2004: Ohio Arts Council Fellowship (Prints and Drawings) • 2003: 1st NCECA International Exchange Program Award to China • 1999: Ohio Arts Council Fellowship (Ceramics) • 1988: National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (Ceramics) GALLERY REPRESENTATION Michael Solway Gallery, Cincinnati, OH SELECTED COLLECTIONS Center For Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA. • Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, OH • Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN • Fule International Ceramics Museum, Fuping, China SELECTED PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE 2018: Visiting Faculty, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH • Juror, Artaxis Fellowship to Haystack Mountain School of Crafts • Presenter, Women Working In Clay Symposium, Hollins University, Roanoke, VA • 2017: Open Studio residency, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle, ME • 2016: Juror, Emerging Artist Award, NCECA Conference, Kansas City, MO

Northern Clay Center

Six McKnight Artists

Forrest LeschMiddelton

Anthony Stellaccio

Petaluma, California Born: 1974, Berlin, Vermont

Crownsville, Maryland Born: 1978, Muncie, Indiana

EDUCATION 2006: MFA, Utah State University, Logan, UT • 1998: BFA, New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, Alfred, NY SELECTED RECENT SOLO & GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2018: 6 McKnight Artists, Northern Clay Center, Minneapolis, MN • SF Design Showcase, San Francisco, CA • Concurrent Conventions, Sacramento State University, CA • 2017: Contain and Serve: A Collaboration With Arash Shirinbab, Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California, Oakland, CA • Featured Artist, Northern Clay Center, Minneapolis, MN • 2016: Forrest Middelton + Adam Field: Focus Show, Penland Gallery, Penland, NC • American Craft Council Show, San Francisco, CA • 2016 & 2015: Flower City Pottery Invitational, Rochester, NY • 2015: American Pottery Festival, Northern Clay Center, Minneapolis, MN • California Handmade, Sam and Alfreda Maloof Foundation for Arts and Crafts, Alta Loma, CA • 2014: Contrasts (solo exhibition), Louis Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts, Lubbock, TX • Bay Area Heavies, Trax Gallery, Berkeley, CA • Three Perspectives, Trax Gallery, Berkeley, CA • 2012: Image and Form, AKAR Gallery, Iowa City, IA • Covet: Art Objects, Ferrin Gallery, Pittsfield, MA • Honored Alumni Exhibition, Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Logan, UT • Colorscapes, Schein-Joseph International Museum of Ceramic Art, Alfred University, Alfred, NY • Art of the Northwest Table, NCECA Seattle, Urban Enoteca, Seattle, WA • Dallas Pottery Invitational, The Gallery, Addison Visitors Center, Addison, TX • 2011: The Greatest Holiday Show On Earth, Dunedin Fine Arts Center, Tampa Bay, FL • Mendovernacular, The Heights Waterfront, NCECA, Tampa Bay, FL • Pattern and Design, Trax Gallery, Berkeley, CA • Recent Works by Forrest Lesch-Middelton (solo exhibition), Gandee Gallery, Fabius, NY • 2010: Form and Function: Ceramic Artists of California, Reynolds Gallery, Santa Barbara, CA • Once Upon a Time: John Neely and Forrest Lesch-Middelton, Trax Gallery, Berkeley, CA

SELECTED AWARDS 2018: East Bay Community Foundation Grant, Oakland, CA • 2017: Creative Work Fund grant recipient, San Francisco, CA • 2016: McKnight Artist Residency for Ceramic Artists, Northern Clay Center, Minneapolis, MN • 2014: Ceramics Monthly and Pottery Making Illustrated American Ceramic Artist of the Year Award GALLERY REPRESENTATION Clay Studio, Philadelphia, PA • Northern Clay Center, Minneapolis, MN • Penland School of Crafts, Penland, NC SELECTED PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE 2017: Instructor, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, Gatlinburg, TN • 2016: Instructor, Penland School of Crafts, Penland, NC • 2015–2016: Adjunct Ceramics Instructor, Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, CA • 2014 – 2017: President, Association of Clay and Glass Artists of California • 2012: Artist-In-Residence, Leslie Ferrin’s Project Art, Cummington, MA

EDUCATION 2016: MA, Folklore, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, KY • 2014: MFA, Ceramics, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA • 2000: BFA, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2017: Senukas Senukuose, Kvadratas Outdoor Expo, Vilnius, Lithuania • 2014: Drink from the River, Du Mois Gallery, New Orleans, LA • 2010: Handle for the Axe, Washington D.C. Arts Center, Washington D.C. • 2009: 1000 Tiny Pieces (X2), Kvadratas Outdoor Expo, Vilnius, Lithuania • 1000 Tiny Pieces, UNESCO Gallery, Vilnius, Lithuania • 2002: Osti, Applied Arts Gallery, Vilnius, Lithuania • 1998: Protrepticos, Pascal Gallery, Arnold, MD SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2018: Found Again, Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild, NCECA exhibition, Curated by Richard James, Pittsburgh, PA • 6 McKnight Artists, Northern Clay Center, Minneapolis, MN • 2017: Frontiers, Bailey Contemporary Arts Gallery, Pompano Beach, FL • 7th Annual Clay International, Juror Chris Gustin, Workhouse Arts Center, Lorton, VA • 2016: Post-Colonialism, Benyamini Contemporary Ceramic Art Center, Tel Aviv, Israel • 1st Latvia International Ceramics Biennale, Mark Rothko Art Centre, Daugavpils, Latvia • Inner Connectivity, Galateea Gallery, Bucharest, Romania • Rapprochement of Cultures, International Academy of Ceramics, Beijing, China • Unconventional Clay: Engaged in Change, NCECA Invitational, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO • 6th Annual Clay International, Juror Jack Troy, Workhouse Arts Center, Lorton, VA • Art Maryland, Juror Christopher Bedford, Howard County Center for the Arts, Ellicott City, MD • 3rd Biennial Maryland Regional Juried Art Exhibition, Arts Program Gallery, University of Maryland, University College, Adelphi, MD • 2015: Artists at Work, Smithsonian, Ripley Center, Washington D.C. • Cluj International Ceramics Biennial, Cluj, Romania • 2014: TransForm,

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Galateea Gallery, Bucharest, Romania • Raku Ceramics: Origins, Impact, and Contemporary Expression, Curated by Jim Romberg, Sedona Arts Center, Sedona, AZ SELECTED AWARDS 2016: McKnight Artist Residency for Ceramic Artists, Northern Clay Center, Minneapolis, MN • United States Fulbright Grant • Lighton International Artists Exchange Program Award • 2015: First Place, Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award: Visual Arts and Crafts • 2011: Second Place, Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award: Sculpture • 2008: American-Scandinavian Foundation Creative Arts Fellowship Award • 2005: United States Fulbright Grant GALLERY REPRESENTATION Cerbera Gallery, Kansas City, MO • Cross Mackenzie Gallery, Washington D.C. SELECTED COLLECTIONS Lithuanian Art Museum, Vilnius, Lithuania • The Museum of Contemporary Ceramics, Shigaraki, Japan • NelsonAtkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO • Private Collections, Washington D.C. SELECTED PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE 2018: Facilitator, Writing workshop for graduate and undergraduate ceramic majors, New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, Alfred, NY • 2016: Lecturer, Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, Israel • 2011 – 2015: Project Manager and Curatorial Research Specialist, Smithsonian, National Museum of African Art, Washington D.C. • 2011: Author, Lithuanian Folk Pottery: Inside and Out, 380 page scholarly text, hardcover, Publication organized by the Crafts Guild of Lithuania and Mintis Publishing House, ISBN 978-609-95342-0-6

Northern Clay Center

McKnight Foundation

Six McKnight Artists

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Past Recipients F Fellowship Recipient R Residency Recipient

The McKnight Foundation, a Minnesotabased family foundation, seeks to improve the quality of life for present and future generations. They use all of their resources to attend, unite, and empower those they serve.

McKnight’s arts grantees are organizations that do the following:

Arts Program Goal Minnesota thrives when its artists thrive.

The McKnight Foundation supports working artists to create vibrant communities.

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Strategies The McKnight Foundation fuels exceptional and diverse artist practice and maximizes the value of artists’ work in their communities.

Approach Ensuring that Minnesota is a place where artists choose to live and work strengthens our communities, our cultures, and our economies. The McKnight Foundation’s arts grantmaking is focused on working artists and the organizations that help them advance artistically and professionally.

Support for working artists has been a mainstay of the Arts program since it began.

In 2010, after a comprehensive evaluation, McKnight’s board of directors decided to focus on impact at the source: the artists.

McKnight Artist Fellowships and Residencies for Ceramic Artists program and this exhibition are made possible by generous financial support from McKnight Foundation, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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prioritize compensation to artists enable unique artistic opportunities facilitate meaningful relationships between artists and their communities demonstrate a deep understanding of their field respond to broad trends work to eliminate deep and persistent cultural, economic, and racial barriers

McKnight’s Arts program funds arts organizations across many disciplines that offer support structures for working artists.

It also provides fellowships and other re-granting to working artists through key partners.

1997 F Linda Christianson F Matthew Metz R Marina Kuchinski R George Pearlman 1998 F Judith Meyers Altobell F Jeffrey Oestreich R Andrea Leila Denecke R Eiko Kishi R Deborah Sigel 1999 F Gary Erickson F Will Swanson R Joe Batt R Kelly Connole 2000 F Sarah Heimann F Joseph Kress R Arina Ailincai R Mika Negishi R Mary Selvig R Megan Sweeney 2001 F Margaret Bohls F Robert Briscoe R Vineet Kacker R Davie Reneau R Patrick Taddy R Janet Williams

2002 F Maren Kloppmann F Keisuke Mizuno R William Brouillard R Kirk Mangus R Tom Towater R Sandra Westley

2007 F Mike Norman F Joseph Kress R Greg Crowe R John Lambert R Lee Love R Alyssa Wood

2012 F Brian Boldon F Ursula Hargens R Pattie Chalmers R Haejung Lee R Ann-Charlotte Ohlsson R Nick Renshaw

2003 F Chuck Aydlett F Mary Roettger R Miriam Bloom R David S. East R Ting-Ju Shao R Kurt Webb

2008 F Andrea Leila Denecke F Marko Fields R Ilena Finocchi R Margaret O’Rorke R Yoko Sekino-Bové R Elizabeth Smith

2013 F Keisuke Mizuno F Kimberlee Joy Roth R Claudia Alvarez R Tom Bartel R Sanam Emami R Sarah Heimann

2004 F Andrea Leila Denecke F Matthew Metz R Eileen Cohen R Satoru Hoshino R Paul McMullan R Anita Powell

2009 F Ursula Hargens F Maren Kloppmann R Jonas Arčikauskas R Cary Esser R Alexandra Hibbitt R Ryan Mitchell

2014 F Kelly Connole F Kip O’Krongly R Jessica Brandl R Jae Won Lee R Amy Santoferraro R Andy Shaw

2005 F Maren Kloppmann F Tetsuya Yamada R Edith Garcia R Audrius Janušonis R Yonghee Joo R Hide Sadohara

2010 F Linda Christianson F Heather Nameth Bren R William Cravis R Rina Hongo R Naoto Nakada R Kevin Snipes

2015 F Ursula Hargens F Mika Negishi Laidlaw R Kathryn Finnerty R Lung-Chieh Lin R Helen Otterson R Joseph Pintz

2006 F Robert Briscoe F Mika Negishi Laidlaw R Lisa Marie Barber R Junko Nomura R Nick Renshaw R John Utgaard

2011 F Gerard Justin Ferrari F Mika Negishi Laidlaw R David Allyn R Edith Garcia R Peter Masters R Janet Williams

2016 F Nicolas Darcourt F Sheryl McRoberts R Eva Kwong R Forrest Lesch-Middelton R Anthony Stellaccio R Kosmas Ballis

2017 F Xilam Balam Ybarra F Mic Stowell R Derek Au R Linda Cordell R Ian Meares R Bryan Czibesz

Northern Clay Center

Northern Clay Center

Northern Clay Center’s mission is to advance the ceramic arts for artists, learners, and the community, through education, exhibitions, and artist services. Its goals are to create and promote high-quality, relevant, and participatory ceramic arts educational experiences; cultivate and challenge ceramic arts audiences through extraordinary exhibitions and programming; support ceramic artists in the expansion of their artistic and professional skills; embrace makers from diverse cultures and traditions in order to create a more inclusive clay community; and excel as a non-profit arts organization. We strive to meet our goals through ongoing exhibitions that feature contemporary and historical ceramics by regional, national and international artists; classes and workshops for children and adults at all ages and levels of proficiency; studio facilities and grants for individual artists; and a sales gallery representing many of the top ceramic artists in the region and country.

Staff Sarah Millfelt, Executive Director Jill Foote-Hutton, Coordinator of Artist Services and Storytelling Tippy Maurant, Director of Galleries and Events Emily Romens, Galleries Coordinator Board of Directors Bryan Anderson Nan Arundel Mary K. Baumann Craig Bishop Heather Nameth Bren Evelyn Browne Nettie ColĂłn Sydney Crowder Nancy Hanily-Dolan Bonita Hill, M.D. Patrick Kennedy Mark Lellman Brad Meier Debbie Schumer Rick Scott Paul Vahle

Director Emerita Emily Galusha Honorary Directors Kay Erickson Warren MacKenzie Legacy Directors Andy Boss Joan Mondale

Photographs of ceramic works by Peter Lee Design and portraits by Joseph D.R. OLeary (vetodesign.com) Kosmas Ballis portrait by Sebrie Images Anthony Stellaccio portrait by Anthony Stellaccio

2424 Franklin Avenue East Minneapolis, Minnesota 55406 612.339.8007 www.northernclaycenter.org