Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons returns to the Ceramics Program

2008-10-21T08:16:00.001-07:00

(sketches for Magda's first project this fall)

I am very pleased to announce that Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, returns to the Ceramics Program to begin a year-long residency this week. During her 1998 Radcliffe Bunting Fellowship year Magda worked the Ceramics Program creating text by fusing wire into blocks of slumped glass for her installation Spoken Softly with Mama.

Magda's first project this fall (above images) will engage the throwing skills of Rosanna's friend Ricardo and underglaze painting advice from Meng. She plans to create 40 large porcelain vases brush painted with cross-cultural imagery that includes Fidel Castro as General Chang, an African version of the Buddhist deity Guan Yin, and a Chinese landscape with a sugar cane laborer. The 40 vases will be elements of a sculptural video installation exploring the Chinese connections in her Afro-Cuban heritage. A presentation on Magda's work in progress will be scheduled in a few weeks.

Campos-Pons uses many media to connect with her complex personal and cultural history through reinterpreting rites and myths from her childhood. "My subjects are often my Afro-Cuban relatives as well as myself. My themes are cross cultural, and cross generational; race and gender expressed in symbols of matriarchy and maternity are thematic ideas." Born in Cuba of Nigerian ancestry and trained at the Superior Institute of Art (ISA) in Havana, she has lived and worked in the Boston area since arriving in 1991. In addition to teaching at the Boston Museum School and energizing the Gallery Artists Studio Projects (GASP) in Brookline, which she founded with her husband Neil Leonard, Magda has shown her work in numerous international venues. She currently has an installation at the Guangzhou Triennial, and recently had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and a retrospective at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Here is a video introduction to Magda. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5457190437445130515

Magda's work is included in a traveling group exhibition, "Black Womanhood: Icons, Images, and Ideologies of the African Body", currently at Wellesley College from September 17 to December 14, 2008. This Saturday she will be giving a performance at Wellesley College at 6 pm in conjunction with the symposium "Black Womanhood: Icons, Images, and Ideologies of the African Body"

Nancy Selvage

Opening of Allison Newsome 's Sculptures in Boston

2008-10-20T12:00:00.000-07:00

Allison Newsome teaches "Clay and the Figure" course at the Ceramics Program. She has an exhibition coming up at the Saint Botolph Club in Boston from October, 22nd to November 10th.

Opening Reception: October 22, 5:30 - 7 pm.
Jacket and necktie required
exhibition through November 10th by appointment

Saint Botolph Club On Parade
199 Commonwealth Ave
Boston, Massachusetts 02116
Tel: 617 536-7570
For directions www.saintbotolphclub.org

This year the Saint Botolph Club Grant enabled Allison Newsome to be artist in residence, and exhibit, at the Beatrice Wood Center for The Arts in Ojai, California. A film clip of Allison Working at the Beatrice Wood center can be seen at http://www.virb.com/beatricewoodcenter/videos/43768

Allison Newsome lives and works between Warren and Prudence Island, Rhode Island. Newsome's ceramic sculptures are in the permanent collection of The RISD Museum, the Newport Art Museum, Mobile Museum of Art, Alabama, and The Beatrice Wood Museum. Allison presently teaches "Clay and the Figure" at Harvard University and the Boston Museum
School for the Arts. Her work can be seen at the Clark Gallery in Lincoln, Ma. www.clarkgallery.com The Rosenfeld Gallery, Philadelphia www.therosenfeldgallery.com, and is presently in a consortium project
"All Fired Up" at EA Gallery in Port Chester NY. www.ea-gallery.net

Allison Newsome's present work addresses issues of the environment and human interaction as our landscape and human psyche have changed from the wilderness to the agrarian, into the industrial / post industrial. Allison's recent work explores fundamental, utilitarian, methods implemented on our land and water.

For the Saint Botolph On Parade exhibition , Allison has chosen to honor the work of John Singer Sargent who had his first exhibition in the United States at the Saint Botolph Club. She has collaborated with Sargent's subject matter found in works varying from his 1878 Oyster Gatherers of Cancale (Sketch) Museum of Fine Arts Boston to his Alpine Series of bathers and rock pools.

Harvard Ceramics

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons returns to the Ceramics Program

Opening of Allison Newsome 's Sculptures in Boston