by Leigh Taylor Mickelson, Exhibitions Director | Jun 2, 2017 | 2018 Exhibitions, Featured
2018 NCECA Annual Visual Voices: Truth Narratives
It is time to pull your images and your narratives together for NCECA’s 2018 Annual Exhibition, Visual Voices: Truth Narratives, our national juried invitational, curated by Winnie Owns Hart, educator, artist, filmmaker, author and critical thinker in matters of clay, art and culture. Take advantage of this incredible opportunity to put your clay story in front of a broad audience during the 2018 NCECA conference and apply now, before it’s too late! The exhibition will be held at Pittsburgh’s renown Society for Contemporary Craft, March 14- August 18, 2018.
Winnie Owens-Hart has invited artists Syd Carpenter, Roberto Lugo, Sana Musasama, Reginald Pointer, and Janathel Shaw to frame the curatorial concerns of Visual Voices: Truth Narratives. The artists selected create powerful works that speak in a variety of visual volumes that touch on personal and global issues and emotions. Their narratives, whether literal or abstract, acknowledge that intolerances spawn racial, religious, class, and gender biases in every part of the world. The sense of interconnectedness created by modern media has transformed what was once an ancestral community to now a global community. Our stories, re-told in clay, are borderless. Historically, the narrative ceramic object has engaged with the retelling of events through visual imagery codification. Clay works dating back thousands of years have enabled archaeologists to theorize on ceremonial, spiritual, and utilitarian societal markers that document the social and cultural contexts of their makers’ communities.
Winnie Owens-Hart seeks emerging as well as seasoned artists to apply. She will make selections for the exhibition from digital images and statements submitted through an online portal within the CaFE™ system to develop the exhibition. Artists whose work is selected through the review process will exhibit with the five artists invited by the curator. This is a GLOBAL call/request inviting all ceramic artists who consider their work narrative to apply for this exhibition.
Visit our website for more information, and to apply!
~ Leigh Taylor Mickelson, NCECA Exhitbions Director
Image Above: Sana Musasama; “She wanted to play sports”’ Ceramic Mix-Media; Narrative: This work depicts a girl soldier delicately holding a piece out of a game speculating on her dream of being an athlete before the war.
Featured Image: Sana Musasama; “Girl Soldiers”, Installation View; Ceramic Mix-Media; 21” X 67” X 6”; 2016: Narrative: This is an installation view of girl soldiers frozen in a moment of their lives. Each sculpture is accompanied by an object that the child solider once held close, like a fond memory or a dream that was deferred by war. The work is Raku fired to achieve multi-‐layered metallic surfaces that shimmer with various hues, which reflects light and textures as the viewer moves around each piece. Each individual sculpture is encased, placed or draped suggesting that she is being hugged or held, mimicking the way that I created her as well as freezing her in a moment before her life was deconstructed by civil war
by Leigh Taylor Mickelson, Exhibitions Director | Mar 16, 2017 | Exhibitions, Featured
Call for Entry
2018 NCECA ANNUAL
VISUAL VOICES: TRUTH NARRATIVES
ENTRY DEADLINE: Wednesday, June 14, 2017 (midnight MDT)
NCECA seeks submissions for the 2018 NCECA Annual, Visual Voices: Truth Narratives, which will be held at the Society for Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh, PA during the 52nd NCECA conference. Curator/juror, Winnie Owens-Hart has invited artists Syd Carpenter, Roberto Lugo, Sana Musasama, Reginald Pointer,and Janathel Shaw to frame the curatorial concerns of the exhibit. The artists selected create powerful works that speak to a variety of visual volumes that touch on personal and global issues and emotions. Their narratives, whether literal or abstract, acknowledge that intolerances spawn racial, religious, class, and gender biases in every part of the world.
Winnie Owens-Hart seeks emerging as well as seasoned artists to apply. She will make selections for the exhibition from digital images and statements submitted through an online portal within the CaFE™ system to develop the exhibition. Artists whose work is selected through the review process will exhibit with the five artists invited by the curator. This is a GLOBAL call/request inviting all ceramic artists who consider their work narrative to apply for this exhibition.
Apply now!
by Leigh Taylor Mickelson, Exhibitions Director | Mar 11, 2017 | 2017 Exhibitions, Featured
The highly anticipated NCECA Annual “The Evocative Garden,” curated by Gail M. Brown, opens this weekend, kicking off the 2017 NCECA conference “season” with a whirlwind of garden-centric delight and botanical wonder. The exhibition, held at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, features five artists who were invited by the curator along with 29 artists who were selected from the call for entry.
Invited artists Megan Bogonovich, Jess Riva Cooper, Kim Dickey, Linda Sormin and Dirk Staschke set the tone for the exhibit which is indeed what the curator intended: “a breadth of implied and articulated dramas… staged as a personally defined natural landscapes or more formalized garden scenarios.” The exhibit offers variety in approach to the ceramic medium as well as in conceptual interpretation of the theme, and captures the imagination as spring slowly approaches.
Participating artists include Christopher Adams, JoAnn Axford, Lisa Marie Barber, Chris Berti, Megan Bogonovich, Jess Riva Cooper, Deirdre Daw, Audry Deal-McEver, Jennifer DePaolo, Kim Dickey, Caroline Earley, Carol Gouthro, Karen Gunderman, Dawn Holder, Cj Jilek, Chuck Johnson, Tsehai Johnson, Heather Kaplan, Paul Kotula, Annie Rhodes Lee, Nancy Lovendahl, Andrea Marquis, Lindsay Montgomery, Grace Nickel, Anne Drew Potter, Jessica Putnam-Phillips, Dori Schechtel Zanger, Linda Sormin, Dirk Staschke, Claudia Tarantino, Hirotsune Tashima, Colleen Toledano, Jenni Ward, Stan Welsh.
I’d like to give special thanks to Disjecta for hosting the exhibit, and a big shout-out to our On-Site Liason Brett Binford who orchestrated the installation of the exhibit, beautifully I might add. Here’s a sneak peek:
This not-to-be-missed exhibit is easy to reach via Portland’s Blue line. Hours during NCECA are Tuesday 10:30am-5:30pm; Wednesday – Saturday 10am-5pm. Or come to the reception on Thursday, March 23rd from 6-9pm to have the opportunity to meet the curator and the artists. I’ll see you there.
Leigh Taylor Mickelson, NCECA Exhibitions Director
Want to visit pre- or post-conference? Visit http://www.disjectaarts.org/visit/ for gallery hours.
by Leigh Taylor Mickelson, Exhibitions Director | Jun 6, 2016 | 2017 Conference, 2017 Exhibitions, Conference Programming
If you have been to NCECA, you might recall visiting the Exhibitor Hall and running into some artists with their arms elbow deep in clay. This, among other things, is Project Space. If you have been working on something in your studio that does not quite fit in a gallery setting or a theatre or in any traditional space at all, Project Space might be the right place for you.
NCECA’s Projects Space is a platform for ceramic artists to create and present works during the annual conference that incorporate clay as medium in time-based, performative, relational or site-responsive work. Up to three projects will be selected to take place in spaces created in a publicly accessible area the in the Portland Convention Center adjacent to Gallery EXPO and the Commercial and Non-profit Resource Hall. Artists will create (or present or peform) their works on-site interacting with visitors from Tuesday evening through Friday afternoon of the conference.
Successful proposals will be those that engage with the concept of NCECA 2017’s conference theme, Future Flux, using the medium of clay as a central focus, and also with materials, processes, and audience in unique and unconventional ways. Artists should keep in mind that Projects Space is staged at the heart of the NCECA Conference, and works are meant to occur, grow and change throughout the duration of the conference.
As always, we are looking for something exciting. Something interactive or engaging. Something meaningful. Something that will open our eyes to a new way of engaging with clay. If this is something you are working on, we want to see your proposal!
Apply now – the deadline is June 15th!
by Leigh Taylor Mickelson, Exhibitions Director | May 31, 2016 | 2017 Exhibitions, Exhibitions, Featured
I know, there are lots of things to do… Spring is in the air, summer is on the brain… But don’t let another important exhibition deadline slip past you. NCECA’s (first ever) Annual Exhibition, entitled “The Evocative Garden” and curated/juried by Gail M. Brown, will be held during the 2017 conference in Portland, Oregon, and the deadline for entry is just days away – June 15, 2016.
This new exhibition format replaces the alternating NCECA Biennial and Invitational exhibitions, and seeks to blend impactful attributes of each of the previous models while also cultivating opportunity for curatorial practice in regard to ceramic art. Each year NCECA’s Exhibitions Director will choose a curator/juror to develop a theme and invite 5 artists from the field to participate. The remaining artists will be ajudicated from a pool of applicants.
While in Portland last week with the NCECA board, I had the pleasure of visiting the future home of “The Evocative Garden”: Disjecta Contemporary Art Center. Disjecta, whose mission is to “build ambitious programs that promote artists and engage communities” boasts 3500 square feet of professional exhibition space, beautiful vaulted ceilings, and the reputation of being “one of the region’s most vibrant contemporary art centers.” (as seen above)
So if this isn’t the dangling carrot, then let me tell you a little bit more about the exhibition. You might not be able to tell, but “The Evocative Garden” was inspired by the NCECA 2017 theme, Future Flux. Gail intentionally decided that she wanted the exhibition to somewhat stand in contrast to “the future” and its digital age, and immerse viewers in the natural world. She invited five artists to set the tone: Megan Bogonovich, Jess Riva Cooper, Kim Dickey, Linda Sormin and Dirk Staschke. About the exhibition, Gail states, “A breadth of implied and articulated dramas will be staged as a personally defined natural landscape or more formalized garden scenario. In works of ceramic sculpture, installation, object and vessel format, each participant will offer a new or recent work- some potent objects-as-metaphors, with sub-text and, others as choreographed scenes with figuration or the figure/s implied in a verdant location, in vocabularies from nuanced realism to personal symbolism. Each will be designed to reference an array of issues- nature’s fragility and sustainability, the wild and the tame, life’s appetites and dilemmas, conflict and resolution, the everlasting and the temporal- social and historic events, of the natural world and the human condition. Artists remind us that nature and the articulated garden, as context, stimulation and tactile allure, is a seductive, universal, ever present enticement.”
Gail Brown also pointed out that Portland identifies itself as The City of Roses. It abounds with lush public and private gardens and the climate to nurture them. Therefore, she seeks submissions that “visually define a garden allusion, as subject, context or setting, according to their own narrative and ceramic vocabulary.”
What a garden is or can be is as bountiful as the possibilities in clay. So, don’t let the lure of lazy days in the sun let this deadline slip you by. Apply by June 15th!
