[MUSIC PLAYING]
Welcome.
Thank you all for joining us for today's program
featuring Claudia Alvarez presented
as part of the Wignall museum's Home Edition.
Home Edition is a series of curated artists talks,
workshops, and discussions featuring
artists and cultural workers.
My name is Rebecca Trawick.
I'm the director and curator of the Wignall Museum.
The Wignall Museum is a teaching museum
and interdisciplinary art space that introduces Chaffey College
students, faculty, staff, and community members,
to innovative, contemporary art objects and ideas.
By fostering critical thinking, visual literacy, discourse,
and empathy.
The museum seeks to enhance the intellectual and cultural life
of our community.
We want to take a moment to recognize that we are situated
on the Rancho Cucamonga campus of Chaffey College, which
resides on the traditional and unceded lands of the Tongva
people.
We offer our recognition and respect to the elders
both past, present, and future.
And hello, my name is Roman Stollenwerk.
I'm assistant curator at the Wignall
Museum of Contemporary Art.
Visit us at www.Chaffey.edu/Wignall
to access our full schedule of programs and available
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We ask that you complete a brief survey after the session
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Thank you.
And hi, everyone.
My name is Andy Hadle.
I'm the preparator at the museum.
I'll be assisting Rebecca and Roman
with today's Zoom session.
In a moment, Claudia Alvarez will present for about a half
an hour or so with the remaining time being available for Q&A.
Thanks Roman and Andy.
So today, we're thrilled to introduce Claudia Alvarez.
Claudia Alvarez is a Mexican-American artist
living in New York City.
She received her BA from the University of California Davis
in 1999.
And her MFA from California College
of Art San Francisco in 2003.
Alvarez is currently a visiting artist assistant professor
at Pratt Institute and lecturer at New York University.
Alvarez explores notions of memory, immigration,
and identity in her work.
For drawing, painting, sculpture, and sight
responsive installation, she investigates
fundamental questions about human behavior, ethics,
and power struggles.
Her work addresses the way social, political,
and psychological structures impact our behavior
and personal interactions.
By imbuing sculptures of children
with adult characteristics and mannerisms,
Alvarez tackles issues relating to violence, empowerment,
endurance, and what they reveal about human nature.
Alvarez's work has been exhibited
in the United States, Europe, Canada, Mexico, and Japan.
Alvarez has received multiple grants
and has participated in residencies across the US,
Mexico, Japan, and Switzerland.
And her work has been included in a number of collections
at major institutions across the US and Mexico.
Please visit our website for more information about Alvares
or visit her site directly.
We'll put that link in the chat in a moment.
And we're so happy to see Claudia again.
I think it was in 2010 she participated
in a large group exhibition titled Separation Anxiety
at the Wignall Museum.
So we're thrilled to have her back.
So please join me in giving Claudia Alvarez
a warm virtual welcome.
Hi, Claudia.
Hi, everyone.
Thank you, Rebecca.
Thank you so much for inviting me and everyone at the Wignall
Museum who is involved in the Home Edition series.
Thank you Roman and Andy for being here
and participating in what we're going to be showing today.
I would like to share my slideshow of images.
It goes on a loop.
And there are images that are mixed in my painting
and sculpture and also my community projects,
residencies, and teaching.
They are all kind of intertwined together.
And I wanted to show you just how
everything's interconnected in my life
and what I've been doing.
So over the past 20 years, they have
influenced each other and the trajectory of my development.
During the pandemic, I spent long periods of time
absent from my ceramics studio in Brooklyn
when the lockdown first happened.
I avoided the subway and most of the work that I was doing
was from home in my home studio here in Manhattan.
I was mainly working with large watercolors and drawings.
So for the past few years, I've been
exploring botanicals native to Latin America,
specifically from Mexico and from the Central
Valley of California, where my family settled
in the early 1970s.
I grew up around my family's garden
consisting of plants and trees.
My mother is in her late 80s and she still
sells plants, fruit trees, every kind of plant,
and she still lives in California.
Her house has always been bursting with flowers
and many kinds of plants.
In the backyard, I played with the mud.
I worked in her garden and I even boxed--
had boxing matches as a kid around the field with flowers.
So here I am boxing and kind of beating up the local kids
and all around flowers.
So the past few years, I have been
making sculptures referencing botanical plants mainly
using porcelain, paper clay, and stoneware clay.
It has allowed me to explore a range of new images
and sculptural forms.
I don't have any images of that, I'm still developing it.
But I, hopefully, will eventually
finish that work in a few years.
Hopefully, we'll see.
So during the Black Lives Matter march
they were happening right outside my window.
I live in Manhattan and in Soho.
And I'm one block away from where the marches
were happening daily.
So with the stay at home restrictions this past summer,
I began thinking about the unicorn in captivity.
The tapestry at The Met Cloisters in New York.
I wanted to make them and recreate them.
So instead of making a white unicorn,
I made the unicorn from a black brown perspective.
And what that means today, as an immigrant,
I'm interested in how identity works and how we are seen.
In the work, I specifically depicted botanicals
native to African countries.
Exploring botanicals to the black brown unicorn
allowed me to think about immigration
and the connections of idea about identity, memory,
and portraiture.
I think about our history and our ideas
related to the conquest.
The idea of taking resources from a country
and the use of labor or of people as property
and ownership of land.
While looking at plants, I was interested in England's
documentation from the explorers from the 1970s exceeding
the 1700s, who discovered botanicals across America
and renamed them.
Most of the watercolors you're looking at
are taken from flowers and images from my mother's garden.
So I'd like to begin with a brief description of my art
practice and how I arrived at making this kind of work.
So my work, as Rebecca mentioned,
engages in subjects such as immigration,
violence isolation youth, and aging.
I am most interested in ethics and its function to critique.
It allows me to ask different kinds
of questions about people's ideas between right and wrong.
It allows me to think about political structures,
human behavior, human nature, rooted
in deeper personal observations of race, culture, identity,
economics, and language.
I'm interested in the primal impulses and the immediacy
of clay and also in drawing.
They somehow lead me to these topics.
In many of the installations, there are ceramic figures.
Some are painted or glazed, others are just fired.
At times they're in groupings often to create a Tableau.
I think about the creating an environment or an emotion
at times responding to the surrounding space.
Nearly all of the figures have the vesic of children yet
many display behavior of adults.
I explore the same or similar kinds of imagery
in painting and more recently in video.
Most of my work is somehow connected to the people I know
and people that I work with in communities
that I have engaged in.
In their stories, I found connections
to social issues ranging from immigration,
racial intolerance, and concepts stemming from fear, hate,
to violence.
Many of my work is based on my own experiences
and also of my family.
And sometimes they are intertwined.
The foundation of my work stems from memory,
how we remember our past, reflect upon it,
and we contextualize it through the process
of art is interesting.
I also think about memory as a way
to draw what I remember of that object to be
or the character of someone.
When I work with clay, I don't work from a model or an image,
I focus on the building process and how the sculpture emerges.
I'm interested in notions about the body
through imagination, experience, and reference to observation,
physically and psychologically.
I was born in Mexico and legally immigrated to the United States
in 1972 when I was three years old.
We became American citizens in the 1980s.
I became more aware of my identity speaking
Spanish at home and English at school around second grade
when a few boys playing at the playground
shot at me and my brother with a BB gun.
As I ran, I was shot from behind.
I'm interested in how we remember certain things
and how it shapes our identity, reimagining
what is experienced, what is observed,
and how cultural practices evolve and change
our perspective is curious in the development
of how images appear.
i remember how abstract it was to attend the Mexican rodeo
as a child in California and experience
the traditional charro costume dresses and the horses.
My sister used to perform at the rodeo with her rope
and my mother used to make costumes for her.
To me she was a Mexican cowgirl.
And I was really aware of the two cultures.
This merging, this acculturation balancing of both cultures
and adapting to being American.
An idea may stem from a personal thought or experience,
and is initially a single drawing or a painting.
It is a starting point to enter into a body of work
to explore variations on that theme allowing
a body to transition into possibly making work
that I did not plan on making.
I work between materials at the same time
on disparate ideas in search for transformational quality
in the work.
Taking the intimate or personal, to potentially find
universal connections between merging the meaning material
content intention and evolution.
I am interested in the process of how
ideas are re-contextualized, and at
times have social or cultural implications in how
we think about our collective experience.
Over the years, I sometimes revisit a concept
with a different iteration on a theme with titles
such as the dirt cleaners that you see
and the history of immigration to explore those ideas
in new materials.
In the studio, I ask how the construction
of the self through a fragmented memory
have the potential to evolve in the changing
nature of the consciousness from youth
to old aging, youth to aging.
I explore how they can coexist in the same space
visually or emotionally.
I often think about human nature and power structures.
There are many kinds of power, political, economic, cultural,
physical, and even power relating to health.
Some of the child imagery comes from the 12 and 1/2 years
I worked at a hospital.
From the age of 17, I was hired at the University of California
Davis Medical Center.
First as a patient escort, then as a Med transit driver,
driving terminally ill patients from their bed
in the hospital to the treatment centers throughout the campus.
We also served the Shriners Hospital next door.
I worked there until I was accepted
into graduate school for fine art when I was 30 years old.
During this time, I was an undergraduate at UC Davis.
I was making ceramic water jugs and distorted hearts and lungs.
I also made them with pastel drawings.
My professor at the time was Annabeth Rosen.
And one of my painting professors
is Wayne Thibeault. My memories of working with children
at the Shriners Hospital and working
with the elderly and the critically ill
at the Medical Center, influence the kind of work
that I would eventually create.
Combining child imagery with older characteristics
allowed me to address both human vulnerability and strength
simultaneously.
The children I worked with appeared mature , experienced,
wise.
The old patients were like children.
They were filled with fear and looked very vulnerable.
The children were brave, strong, and somehow overcame illnesses.
The adults were afraid, bitter, at times with themselves
and with their children.
I was also careful when I carried my patients.
I had a two-year-old little boy with the pale translucent skin
with an enlarged belly on my gurney.
Working from memory and clay, the small body
appeared as a little vessel or water jug with age marks
on the surface of the clay reminiscent of an old soul.
Reminding me of my first clay vessels,
some appear to look like human organs.
I saw patients expressing great joy
when their child laughed and experience great sorrow when
their child was in pain.
The two extreme emotions are so complicated and layered.
In my work, I focus on the subtlest gesture
in the simplest case and how the two emotions can
coexist in the simplest way.
For me, that time was really powerful
because I was 17, 18, 19, 20 years old.
And to see that and to be a part of that, and to help families
was really incredible and had a big impact.
I want to somehow simplify.
I was not making work specific to a person or about death,
rather a combination of the cultural between me,
my identity, the work, and even history.
It is the child spirit in the adult
that I search for and vise versa.
The child-sized sculpture parallel adult characteristics
and mannerisms.
I'm interested in how their intimate skill reflects
and occupies our space.
Their small body frame for me, function and surrogates
to embody psychological and sociological structures
of human behavior.
Within the frame, every small body
appears a person at different stages
of aging and development.
From innocence through puberty to adolescent behavior
and through the process of aging,
I try to grasp a deeper understanding
of the human condition.
I'm reminded of the last great major paintings depicting
a small adult body in a modest sized frame.
Their faces are so human and so humble,
yet the paintings feel and seem to embody grandness
and intensity.
I worked with patients of all ages and illnesses ,
from renal dialysis patients, cancer, burn patients,
and people with rare cases.
The elderly, the children were in the most vulnerable
like the homeless and people who didn't speak
English affected me the most.
Because the child-sized sculptures
look like children with aged faces,
I began to look at child culture and the inquisitive child's
mind as they ask unfiltered questions that
parallel the ultimate nature of our questioning
notions of social structures.
The work depicting violence came about when I was reflecting
on the notions of childhood.
It led me to investigate American cartoon culture
and our exposure to violence.
I went online and typed kids with guns.
I was surprised to see images of kids in America
at the shooting range.
I had imagined I would see children, soldiers,
from third world countries.
This led to a range of questions and imagery over the years.
And in that, I search for universal themes attempting
to attempt to connect similarities
between different kinds of people.
Searching for ideas related to tolerance.
I am curious about people, their compassion,
and how inclusion begins.
The volunteer work I have done throughout the years
initially came about because someone
needed a Spanish speaking person or a commercial driver.
In the beginning, teaching happened naturally.
Instead of just driving or translating,
I wanted to also teach art.
At the same time I had a commercial driver's license
to drive an ambulance and a class C vehicle,
which is a commercial vehicle such as a large bus
and a wheelchair vehicle.
And I wound up driving big motor-homes and big buses
as well.
I did a lot of moonlighting at the Medical Center too,
driving really large buses, the 40 passenger.
And I was about 19 or 20 and about 100 pounds.
So it was really funny to see this small person
with this huge steering wheel.
In the late 1990s, I drove a group of high school students
who volunteered to work in the community around Mexicali.
I went as a driver and a translator,
and soon realized there was a need
to work with a specific group who had been overlooked.
They were young girls ages 13 to 21 who were single mothers.
I drove with a friend to the border
for our supplies and the next day
we taught a textile workshop.
The focus of the project and discussion,
was around worth and value of women in their communities.
I taught the girls how to create curved angles with cardboard
and to make various containers and how to sew fabric
around a container.
In the late 1990s, around '97 or '99 while in undergraduate
at UC Davis and at the same time taking ceramics classes,
I was working with migrant children
near Woodland California.
Teaching California history and ceramics through a program
called Arts Bridge Program.
I would revisit this area to do a ceramic installation
in the orchards and fields.
And I think the images are there.
I had made work there when I was a visiting artist and teaching
ceramics at UC Davis for a semester.
When I was 13 years old, I had worked
in that area with my girlfriends for the summer.
It reminded me of my first summer
also working as a child picking cherries.
And also during that summer when I was 13,
that we picked in the fields-- that we picked
plums and all kinds of things.
I think about the fields, the grape vines,
the cherry orchards often.
The smell of the dirt in California is like no other.
I have a deep connection with it.
For many years, I did not have a ceramic studio
and relied on residency programs to have access
to ceramic facilities.
At times spending two weeks to a few months making
projects for the year.
I applied to many programs with specific projects in mind.
It allowed me to travel to a place and focus on a project.
Some included the Northern Clay Center
in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the Bemis Center
for Contemporary Arts in Nebraska,
and the Vytlacil in Nyack, New York.
And others in France and China as well.
And usually, the first few weeks at the residency,
I would work with clay.
And after the sculptures would dry,
I would focus on painting and drawing.
My first residency was during my second year of grad school.
I took a year leave of absence to participate in a six month
stay in Switzerland called for tour in the village of Reppas
Ville South of Lake Zurich.
My professor invited one MFA student a year
to apply to the program.
The residency offered a monthly stipend, a furnished apartment,
and a beautiful art studio built in the 1300s that
were the marble floors and glass elevator.
It was really beautiful.
And I worked with paper and plaster and any objects
that I can find at the time.
My second residency was in 2005 at the Bemis Center
for Contemporary arts in Omaha, Nebraska.
When I was an undergraduate in 1997 at Davis,
my ceramic professor had invited an artist
by the name of Jun Kaneko for a glaze workshop.
We made over a thousand pounds of clay
and created large plates for him to glaze.
During his lecture, he had spoke about his wife who focused--
who founded the Bemis Center, which
is an internationally known residency
and it sounded amazing.
As an undergraduate, I knew I would
apply if I went to grad school.
And right after grad school I applied to go there.
In 2004 when I graduated from the California College of Arts
in San Francisco with my MFA, I applied to the Bemis Center
and was accepted.
At the time I was teaching in Los Angeles
at Viola University.
And during this time I was also volunteering
across the border in Mexico at this orphanage called Ensenada.
I taught kids art from third grade
all the way up to young adults.
The orphanage allowed kids to stay there until they were 21
if they needed to.
I had planned to stay in Omaha for three months.
And it turned out I never moved back to California.
Since 2005, I had been living between Omaha, Nebraska and New
York City.
Spending most of my time now in New York since around 2009,
and mainly because of teaching and my studio.
While in Omaha, I was able to participate
in different communities teaching art
to various organizations, including in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Through the Hayton Art Center, I worked
with a program called the Latino Center,
helping Spanish speaking women of domestic violence
in Lincoln, Nebraska.
And this was really incredible.
As you can see in the images that we did all different types
of projects painting on fabric.
During that time, I also taught in after school programs
painting murals and also teaching ceramics
at El Museo Latino in Omaha.
And I also worked at the Hope Center,
which was an after school program in North Omaha,
teaching ceramics to local African-American kids.
And while in Omaha, I also worked with the local library
and worked with the local high school kids.
Students made clay.
I taught them how to make clay, how to make glazes.
How to design a mural and create a budget.
They did a presentation with the head librarian
and we discussed everything from the concept
to installation and maintenance.
And we created a permanent installation
at the local library there.
In 2012, I bought account finally,
and had my first studio in Brooklyn.
With the strict fire safety codes in Manhattan,
it was difficult to find a space willing to allow
me to install a kiln.
And so this was the first place that allowed
me to put an electric kiln.
And I've been there ever since.
In my studio I explore different kinds of materials.
I am curious about the potential of clay because of its range
and possibilities.
From the firmness of touch to its sensual nature
when modeling its gestural subtleties from wetness
to bone dry.
And mostly I'm attracted to the malleable qualities.
It allows me to work quickly.
It has the ability to record the movements
of the mark, the fingerprints, and the gestures
in the building process.
I am interested in all of it.
From making clay and glazes, to research and glaze chemistry,
and clay bodies.
I'm interested in the engineering process.
I love the idea of building hollow.
I love centering, weight and balance.
Shifting of hollow forms and creating asymmetrical shapes
with the hollow forms.
And it really influences my drawing and painting as well.
They go back and forth.
I feel a connection to pre-Columbian ceramics.
Its history feels so intimate and yet it is so mysterious.
I think about the imagery of Mother Earth seen in Chicano
art and in the Mexican murals.
I am curious about the cultural merging of Western art
history and Native studies.
The Virgin of Guadalupe in contrast
with Sandra Botticelli's Birth of Venus and the mother goddess
seen in the ceramic figurines of ancient Mexico.
How are they all interconnected and how do I
make sense in my work.
Delving into the various aspects of my ceramic studio
from recycling clay, raking chunks of dried clay,
vacuuming, mopping, glazing, and sometimes making clay
with my feet, all contribute to the ideas in my process.
Every aspect is important and meaningful to me.
Putting my hand inside the slimy recycled clay
reminds me of playing with mud as a child.
And also the various tasks my mother did while gardening,
digging a huge hole in the backyard
in order to mix her magic recipe of dirt.
I always thought of her combinations
of dirt and fertilizer to have magical powers.
Her herb plants could heal anything and anyone.
Her fruits and flowers grew like Jack and the Beanstalk.
Responding to the raw nature of clay and its processes,
my approach is mostly intuitive.
For me, clay is a way to draw with coils in three dimensions.
I work back and forth.
I sometimes approach things formally or aesthetically.
At times, I think about specific events and their social impact.
What is happening in the world abstractly
enters intuitively in my process.
I try to use the idea of fragmented narratives
to approach different kinds of stories
as a way to understand relevant issues
and how they connect universally.
From an intimate relationship between mother and child
to global concerns related to power,
territory, and the environment, to ethically
social and humanitarian concerns and how
they interface historically, and how can I
have a voice as a brown person.
The overarching themes in the world
propel me to work at ideas in my studio
and ask questions about my role.
How will I contribute to and/or be active in a community.
It has led me to different kinds of community service.
From teaching workshops to creating public projects
ranging from murals.
In schools, working in schools, after school programs
to having socially engaged discourse with students
and also young kids as well.
Since 2009, I have worked in the surrounding Boroughs
of New York with underrepresented youth
in elementary schools and high schools.
First with Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation and now
with Art Yard Brooklyn.
I combine art history and basic art techniques
such as teaching gray-scale painting combined
with learning about civil rights movements
as you see in some of the slides that I am showing working
with middle school kids.
And in this particular project, we
were working with a theme titled The Year of Freedom.
And each year Rush and Art Yard has a theme.
And each year we make projects.
And at the end of every six months
we have exhibitions with the kids.
And they learn how to give talks, how to be docents.
And so it's pretty exciting to see them grow and develop.
Teaching art at the Young Women's Leadership School,
we used our bodies and the movement of our hands to draw.
We did a meditation with our eyes closed.
We drew with our both of our hands
while I guided the students on a journey,
visualizing fast and slow marks with charcoal,
making long gesture glides or short aggressive marks.
We hung the large drawings and projected the videos
we made for our exhibition.
You can see this-- during the exhibition with the videos,
you can see, the sound of the charcoal
and the movements of the charcoal.
I was really excited to see that.
And at California State Summer School for the Arts
where I taught at CalArts campus,
I was there from I think 2006 to 2011.
We were only there for one month.
And we had three weeks and each student
created three large sculpture to make
a collaborative installation.
And I gave them readings.
We would discuss articles and readings.
And in this particular case, we made
a chess set and we responded to the readings and discussions
of the Art of War.
And each year when we made the chess,
I did that about three years in a row.
Each time we also would come up with a different theme
and so the imagery was completely different as well.
In Miami, I work with young men in detention centers.
And the following year I work with several coed centers
around Miami area.
We created a project and displayed it
at the lobby of the Perez Museum during the art fair in Miami.
Each project starts with a lesson and a concept in mind,
but the students bring the content.
And each one has a story.
And working with the kids at the detention center,
it was really amazing to see them kind of open up and be
willing to tell their story.
By this summer, I taught a workshop on Zoom with Art Yard
, with the theme on community.
We looked at artists who were engaging
in communities virtually because of the coronavirus pandemic.
We created art with materials available to us,
making work about the environment, social justice,
and looking at creative ways to collaborate.
And this led to a new body of work
that you can see in my Instagram or I can eventually
show it at some point.
In my studio, I work across materials, and I teach this--
I teach in the same way as well, exploring materials
that best can explore that idea.
I have been drawing since I was a child.
And in seventh grade I used to draw for my classmates.
I was making ink drawings on white pillowcases.
I had several stolen from my locker in junior high.
My first paintings were on fabric.
I was around 13 or 14-years-old.
My mother used to sew baby blankets
and give them every time we had a new baby in the family.
She also would sell them for baby shower and christenings.
She would say make an angel or make a Teddy bear
or make a unicorn and so on.
And I would carefully, very fine with the fine brush would paint
whatever she wanted on there.
And I would try not to make a mistake.
During that time my mother was painting on aprons
that she sewed.
She sold them at the local cannery where she worked.
She painted directly from the tube,
which is the opposite of what I was doing.
And she also used to write on them in Spanish.
And her writings were usually very vulgar.
She would say something-- she would write something
like [SPANISH] or [SPANISH] or anything that would make
the ladies from her work laugh.
And they would wear them to work.
And this really kind of allowed me
to think about loosening up and being
very gestural in my paintings.
And just-- because SHE would also paint images just
from right at the tube.
And so they were very abstract and I just
thought that was really enlightening for me to have
the ability to loosen up.
When she was diagnosed with breast cancer in her early 80s,
I wanted to revisit that work with her.
After her recovery, I asked if she wanted to collaborate.
Our discussions led to what would an image look like
and what would it look like now versus then.
And also, what would happen if we used bright colors
in the fabric.
I painted the blankets during a residency
I did at El Museo Del Barrio in New York
and exhibited them at the end of the residency.
In drawing, I think about line and gesture.
I am drawn to the subtleties of drawing.
There is an ink drawing by Isabel Bishop
from 1935 of a mother and child on a couch.
And in that image, I think about it a lot.
In the image you can see volume, you can see value,
you can see line drawing, gesture drawing,
large wash of shadow.
And there's a little section that renders
a fine detail in the face.
The feet are drawn with control or you
could see with the simple abstraction
of the outline of the foot.
And I often think about that and how I may translate that
into the surface of the clay.
In other words, how would I create a composition
around three dimensional sculpture
to have ideas of making a line embedding that into the clay,
creating gesture with my hands or with my thumbs,
reflecting the movement of the building process,
and how would I work detail--
what areas would I pick a little detail
and what areas would I smooth out and how would
I show the fingerprints.
And also, I think about it formally.
How would I think about that in terms
of painting the sculpture.
And I do think about ideas of painting and the relationship
to it.
So in other words, the physical relationship
of sculpture to painting.
And so that's really allowed me to kind
of just look at the sculpture as a canvas in a way.
And I think for that reason, a lot of the times
I don't glaze them heavily or sometimes I
don't add any surface to them.
Because I'm more-- in that particular sculpture,
I may be more interested in the fingerprints
and the marks of the clay.
I sometimes gesso my sculpture and oil paint them.
And I treat the oil paint kind of like a patina.
I often under-glaze them and mix the under-glazes
in the same way that I would treat watercolor oil paint.
So I take the powdered ceramic pigments and I mix
slip with it.
And sometimes I mix fret or some ceramic material
that will melt it a little bit.
And I try to treat that as a painting as well.
And sometimes I just simply add water color
to the ceramics directly.
As you can see in some of the images there, that some of them
are--
they're labeled so you can see which ones have watercolor
and which have oil paint and so on.
I also like to treat the surface of the ceramics
with other materials as well.
I add plaster, gesso, gold pigment,
all kinds of other things.
In the exhibition titled Acercate,
which means to come close, I applied oil painting,
watercolor, and some gold pigment to the stoneware
after the firing.
In 2014, I received a research grant
from Art Matters in New York and a residency at SOMA
to work in Mexico City, where I had a solo exhibition
at Centro Nacional de las Artes, which is the National Center.
My first few days in Mexico, I made paper clay with my feet.
My research involves studying ancient ceramics, mostly
naturalistic figurines that were depicting everyday life.
I mainly looked at work from the Steven Higgin collection,
which are a really sweet little miniature figurines.
And I also spent a lot of time at the Anthropology Museum.
The collection influenced the sculptures
I made for the exhibition there in Mexico.
I think I was there for--
I think it took me about a month or two to make the work
and wind up being--
I think it was like 12 or so sculpture.
During that time, the Senate also
arranged for me to speak with students at the art school
there called La Esmeralda.
And I was also invited to give a lecture at the National
Autonomous University in Mexico, where I met with students
in the Ceramics Department.
Spending time in Mexico City really kind of influenced me.
And I have been back there several times.
And I feel like I have a lot more research to do there
and to learn.
So I'm really excited about that.
A similar sequence of events unfolded
during a residency in Japan in 2016
where I also worked with the local clay.
The residency was timed to coincide with the SASAMA
International Festival in Shizuoka,
which brought together artists and professionals
from across the world and also in undergraduates from Japan.
It was really amazing to be in Japan,
because the little village that I was in there
was no children or no young people.
I think the youngest person was 50-years-old.
So it's 50 and older.
And the residency location used to be the elementary school.
And it also was converted into a residency and a spa
and some other types--
It was used for a multipurpose event.
And the high school had been transformed into a museum,
a ceramic museum.
I was listening to the stories of the local people who
were saying that it was really sad to see
their last young person leave the town.
So I think after their last seniors graduated
from high school, they closed the high school
and they'd converted into a museum.
And so I wanted to make a sculpture that
references the idea of memory.
And so I made a mother and child with seven standing sculpture
around the center of town.
As soon as you enter the town you can see the sculpture.
And again, I was working with ideas of memory.
And for me, the idea of memory I try
to use that abstractly on the surface of the clay.
The festival, in Japan, featured a series
of lectures, demonstrations, and exhibitions
that I participated in.
They also had a small food fair and an art fair
of local ceramic potters.
And the permanent installation was around the green tea
factory in the village, which was the main production
of that town.
So I was only there for three weeks.
And so I think within the first week and a half
I made all that work.
And basically, they basically built a film around my pieces
when they were still wet.
And we fired them still wet.
And the local people were cutting the wood
and building the kiln.
It was really amazing that it happened
so quickly and so fast.
And so it was really just incredible to see that.
So that's what I've been doing these last 20 years, Rebecca.
I think it's been 10 years since I last saw you.
But so, yeah, if anyone has any questions.
I know that the images are scattered in and out.
And I kind of did that on purpose,
because you can just see how I talk
about going through a new iteration of an idea.
I visit the same idea over and over again.
And I think-- because I feel like it's--
I go through my sketchbook and I think I have this great idea.
And then I go back to 2007 and that's the same idea.
But it's a new iteration of that.
And so I feel like there's so much--
I think the first couple of statements
that I made were kind of loaded.
And there's so much things that I can do with that just one
simple research with the surface and the texture
and the face and the memory, and all those kinds of things.
Thank you, Claudia.
What a beautiful and generous presentation.
I know at the beginning or maybe it
was even before we let everyone in,
you made a comment about how your work and your life
is so intertwined.
And it's interesting to see how your influences, your community
service and teaching, and the themes
you investigate, you research, your travel, all of it,
keeps informing everything that you're doing in the studio.
That's really incredible.
I don't know if this is just personal knowledge
from my experience with your work in 2010
or if I read this somewhere.
But I believe many of your children
are almost lifelike but not exactly lifelike.
Can you talk about your choice of scale
and equally, if you're making those same choices in your 2D
work as well.
Yeah.
In my sketchbook, I have really small, little smaller
scale stuff.
But in general I do like to work almost life-size,
kind of like a five-year-old.
And I think part of it was that I was haunted by the children
that I had worked with in the picking
up of these little bodies.
And so I wanted to keep them to a scale that kind of existed
in the same space but at the same time,
we're just slightly off to reality.
I wanted to really think of a more as magical space
or surreal kind of space.
But they do feel that there are life-size in a way.
I think the biggest ones I have made
are anywhere between 40 inches.
If you see the mother and child, those are life-sized.
But the ones that I have done in the last 10 or 15 years
are anywhere between 34 to 36 inches.
So it's somewhere around a third,
three-year-old or four-year-old.
And I like that you can enter them
and you have to kind of move your body down to them.
And with the work titled A Falling,
the sculptures are looking up at you.
And I think that was a conscious thing to think about,
how can I change the physicality of us not going down.
What would it look like if you were just looking down at them
and they were looking up at you.
And so I played around with that a little bit
like how can you physically--
how can they have that space and have a grandness.
Even if I just put one piece in a space you know--
I had someone here that came to cut my hair and he said,
I can't stop thinking about that sculpture that's looking at me.
And I had it like way on the other side of the studio facing
the other way.
But yet, they can feel it in the same space.
And I just thought that was so interesting
like how can I make it as subtle as possible
even if the back is turned.
So I do play with that idea as well.
It's like when I put them in a space
sometimes I just show the back.
And it kind of brings hopefully, brings someone
to come closer to them.
Gabriela has a question in the chat.
Where do you see your garden installation taking you next?
That's really interesting.
I'm not sure yet.
I'm really thrilled.
I've been doing it for a long time
and I've been thinking about them for a long time,
I just haven't glazed them or most of them I have not glazed.
And I'm not sure exactly what kind of environment I'm
going to create for them.
But most likely they will have one figure or some figures
interacting with them in some way.
But I think the most exciting thing
about working with the garden pieces
is that I'm really dealing with gravity.
I'm dealing with asymmetrical shapes.
I'm dealing with negative space underneath them.
I'm creating roots underneath them.
And I'm also figuring out creative ways
to fire them and creative ways to put them together.
And I'm also mixing various kinds of clay.
So every three months I change the clay body.
Even though the flowers are still porcelain,
I'm still working with various clay bodies
to see that unpredictability.
So I'm kind of curious about that.
But I have been looking and researching botanicals
and making drawings of them and kind
of researching where they came from
and what part of California or what part of Mexico
they're from.
And then how I can kind of mutate them
into a sculptural shape, you know.
So I'm curious.
And I think one of the things that I might
want to do in the future is to do a residency so that I
may make them larger as well.
Because in my studio I can only make them around 37 inches
without fragmenting them.
So I have been able to lay them in parts
and then attach them to look like they're one piece.
But I don't like to fragment them.
I don't like to make them look like they're
broken or separated.
We have another comment and question
in the chat from Priscillas.
They say amazing presentation, exclamation point,
you have an amazing body of work.
Where do you keep all of your pieces?
That's a good question.
[LAUGHTER]
They are all over the place.
My husband and I have a storage in Nebraska.
He bought a dance building.
So I didn't usually need to store them.
I had a gallery early on and was able to find places for them.
But as the time goes by, they're hidden everywhere.
I have them in corners and closets
and they're all over the place.
So yeah, they're building up.
So someday I'll have a big installation of them.
I like that you have a lot of little children hiding
all over the place, I think that's a--
Yeah.
The studio has really high ceilings.
As you can see they're super high.
And so the closet areas are super high.
And so if a closet looks this big,
I can probably put about 20 pieces in there
and doesn't that look like they would fit, so.
I wanted to ask, a lot of the work that we saw
existed in your studio or in various residency
spaces, galleries, museums.
But a lot of the work was also out in the landscape,
in architectural spaces.
Can you talk a little bit about showing your work
in spaces beyond museums and galleries
and traditional spaces like that?
Yes.
I don't know if you remember the swing installation in the slide
show.
That was in 2005.
I made them at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts.
And I was going to initially install
those at the Cherry Orchard's that
is down the street from my house where I grew up.
I always imagined them being there.
And because I never went back to Omaha
and because those pieces are placed already,
I never got the chance to kind of fulfill that idea.
And so I've been thinking about the orchards and the fields
for a really long time.
And when I was in Davis, I only showed
about two or three pieces that were at the grapevines
and a few other places.
But I took the rest of the pieces
and I photographed them in my mother's backyard.
And then also in other places around the little town
that I was born-- that I was raised in.
And so I really I'm trying to find a space for them that
have a personal feel to them, but also
a feel that other migrant people can relate to as well.
And I think the fields working in Willow Springs Elementary
and working with the kids in that area,
I really wanted to connect with them
and have a conversation with them.
And also take art to them as well.
And so I thought that would have been a way for me to do it.
But I also have some I photographed them
around New York.
I just took my intern like--
I also do internships with the New York Arts Program.
So every semester I have an intern that works with me.
And in one particular semester, she just
carried my pieces all over New York and photographed them.
And I did want to put them in downtown, but there's already
a little girl there that I really did want to see--
put them in the context of this figure being in an empty space
by themselves in a city and what that would feel like.
I'm not sure if it's a question or a comment.
But I remember in the beginning of your presentation
you had mentioned the unicorn.
And I think it's kind of an interesting symbol.
And I was wondering if you would be able to elaborate maybe
a little bit more on the history of that and that incorporation.
Yeah.
I really took a different direction during the lockdown.
And I was really moved by what was happening with the Black
Lives Matter marches outside and the idea
that we were kind of trapped inside.
And my partner is also an artist and he'll
make a huge stroke in like a second on a huge canvas.
And I really wanted to think about the concept of what
it is to be locked in for a really long period of time.
And so I took the finest brush that I
could find like with two or three hairlines
and I researched all these different botanicals
from Africa where they came from, what part of Africa
they were.
And I tried to think of any color, any value.
I try to change the value in the tint of each flower
and have five to six or seven different colors in one little
stem and how I can do that.
And I think part of it was echoing
that idea of being in isolation and being trapped
and at the same time what was happening outside
you know with the Black Lives Matter.
And the idea that this unicorn, this white unicorn
is considered to be magical, and the meaning of that,
the meaning of white and the meaning of black.
And then and I started thinking about what
about the brown perspective as well.
And so some of the smaller unicorns I made
were various tones of browns as well.
But at the same time, I really wanted to talk about beauty.
Beauty and ideas of Africa having rich resources
in the same way that I was looking at the botanicals
from Mexico and California of having a rich resource
in history with botanicals as well,
since I had been looking at them for a long time
and putting them in my watercolors.
So I wanted to kind of bring those ideas together somehow.
And also with the concept of an animal.
I have been making animals for some time as well.
And some of them kind of look like me
in some way, at least that's what people tell me.
They're like oh, your portraits people
say that they're a little bit about you
or they look like you.
But I think your--
somebody told me, I think your dogs look more like you
than your figures.
And I thought that was a really interesting comment
because they do.
You can see the humanistic qualities,
the humanistic emotion, in the same way
that you would see the figures.
And so I think I try to think about the unicorn and the idea
of making a portrait.
How closely can I make it human and yet still be a horse
or still be a unicorn.
And I also think about that when I'm actually
making drawings and watercolors of dogs and cats
and birds and things like that.
It's like I try to think about changing the eyes to make them
look more human or creating some more
reflection in the facial features to give it an attitude
or to make it more human in some way.
And so I think that conceptually,
that idea kind of falls into questioning
the humanity of animals.
I don't know about you, but I'm hooked to animal videos
on the internet.
And so the humanity of animals and in relationship
to the humanity of human beings, and the kindness
and also the opposite of that.
The violence, and the terror, and all of these things.
And when I think--
I don't know if you remember the sculpture titled
Inoncencias Brutalidad, the innocence brutality,
of the dog barking at the girl and the girl
barking at the dog.
But that sculpture came about because when
I was thinking about fear and violence,
I was thinking that when a dog barks at you
he's usually afraid.
And I've found that really interesting
to see that in humans as well.
A lot of the times when someone attacks you--
I try to be--
I try to think this person's hurting
or this person has their story and so I'm not going
to attack back type of thing.
And so I think that's where that kind of came from.
Is like the relationship between anger, violence, attack,
and compassion, and how can they intertwine
in the same image in some way.
I hope that the dog's eyes are fearful
but the teeth are growling.
At least that's kind of what I'm thinking
about when I make them.
Gabriela asked sort of what aspect of Cuban sculpture
are you drawn to and why.
I am not familiar with Cuban sculpture.
I mean, the only Cuban that I'm really
responded to is Ana Mendieta And I think part of it
is because she went to Mexico a few times
and was really influenced by the culture there.
And hence the Mother Earth performance in sculptures
came about through her trips to Mexico.
And so she's one of-- she's a Cuban artist
that I look at and really fond of.
And really interested in her theories
and feminist theories and writings.
Well, a huge thanks to you, Claudia.
We appreciate your generosity and time today.
And thanks to all of you who attended and shared
some of your afternoon with us.
We appreciate you.
A reminder to visit our website to sign up for future episodes
or to see archived episodes of Home Edition
like this one which will be there in a few weeks.
Thanks again, Claudia.
Thank you all and please take care.
And we'll see you next time.
Thank you so much.