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filler@godaddy.com
Signed in as:
filler@godaddy.com
I've been a potter since 1972, when I began the first of 5 summers studying with Marguerite Wildenhain at her studio, Pond Farm, in Guerneville, CA. I built a studio in the basement of my parents house in Chevy Chase, MD, that same year and began to sell my work.
The experience of working every day in my own studio with a self-determined routine, and selling my work to an excited audience was transformative, and deeply rewarding. Just a few years earlier in high school in Oakland, CA , when I first began to think about the life of an artist as both highly unlikely, and uniquely free, I never would have guessed that I would be a potter, nor that I would be living at the age of 23 a relatively radical, and independent life. It was and remains a complete miracle.
Many summers of my life have been spent rock climbing and mountaineering in the American West, whose arid clarity, encrusted, patinated rocks, and brilliant light affected and became an elementary structure of mind and work. I rarely use exterior glazes, and favor a dry, textured surface impregnated with color.
In this context, if the form of my work is like the light, and the clouds, the water and rocks, then the enshrouded intaglio of a complex surface is referentially like all Neolithic pottery in alliance with subliminal experience, and the surreality of ordinary life.
For me, 'this is this'-the totality of the autochthonous form, visceral, tactile, luminous. Of my current work, artist and academic Rebecca Bafford writes: "Your work in the gallery is spectacular--earthy, sensual, compelling. It was hard to look away from it."
EDUCATION
1972-78 Pond Farm Workshops, Guerneville, CA, Marguerite Wildenhain, director
1971 Hanover College, Indiana, BA, Theology and Literature
TEACHING
1973-2017 Sidwell Friends School, Washington, DC, adjunct instructor in art
2009 Hood College, Frederick, MD, adjunct instructor in art history
1984-2000 Maryland State Arts Council, Artist-in-Education Program, resident artist
1991 Deep Springs College, Deep Springs, CA, adjunct instructor in art
1973-1974 Montgomery College, Rockville, MD, adjunct instructor in art
EXHIBITIONS/SHOWS
2024 NCECA Conference, Monocacy River Pottery Group, Richmond, VA
2024 NOMA Gallery, Frederick, MD Ceramic Invitational
2023 Waverly Street Gallery, one person show
2023 NCECA, Concurrent Exhibition,"Texture as Subliminal Experience."
2023 Cumberland Valley Art Exhibition, WCMFA, Hagerstown, MD, (also 2018, 2019 2020)
2019 53rd Annual National Drawing and Small Sculpture Show, Del Mar College, TX
2019 Twin Cups, Missouri Western State University, St. Joseph, MO
2009 Montgomery College Art Gallery, Rockville, MD, group show
2007 College of Southern Maryland, La Plata, MD, one-person show, "Surface Tension"
2005 Harford Community College, MD, NCECA, 2005, Concurrent Exhibition
2002 Smithsonian Craft Show, Washington, DC, participant (also, 1994 and 1997)
2002 UC, San Bernardino, “Ripples: Marguerite Wildenhain and her Students”, group show
1984 Washington County Museum of Fine Art, Hagerstown, MD, one-person show
1976 Havre de Grace Art Show, Havre de Grace, MD, “Best in Show”
MUSEUM COLLECTIONS/ GRANTS/ AWARDS
2007 NCECA Special Session Speaker, “Notes from the Paleolithic Project,” CAA, NYC
2002 Maryland State Arts Council, Individual Artist Award
1999 Maryland State Arts Council, Individual Artist Award
1999 Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
LECTURES/ PUBLICATIONS/CONFERENCES
2017 “Who is Marguerite Wildenhain,” NCECA 2017, Portland, OR, lecture
2010 Critical: Santa Fe, ceramic art conference, Santa Fe, NM, organizing team member
2009 “An Incident in Class,” Studio Potter, Winter, 2009
2008 “Hunt Prothro: Surface Tension," Ceramics Monthly magazine, March, 2008
2008 “Accommodations of Desire,” NCECA 2008, Pittsburgh, PA, lecture
2007 “Memoir of Marguerite: A Student Recollection”, in Marguerite Wildenhain and the
Bauhaus, South Bear Press, ed. Dean and Gerry Schwartz
2006 “Notes from the Paleolithic Project: Transience and Singularity,” NCECA, 2006, lecture
1986 “Rob Barnard at Anton Gallery, WDC,” The New Arts Examiner
1980 “Marguerite Wildenhain, Sustained Presence,” American Craft, September, 1980
Who is Marguerite Wildenhain
Recent Commission by Eleni Valasis. Images and Voiceover by Artist, Marian McLaughlin, Text by Hunt Prothro