Ann Weber - "Craft Art and Life 1980-2014"

Ann Weber before lecture

Ann Weber's lecture about her journey as an artist was insightful and revealed the significance of art mediums in contemporary art. Her career shows her creativity with materials and form. Her art education began when she attended Purdue University, where she learned about clay. Ann Weber describes two loves that she found at Purdue University. One is with medium clay. She found it an "enriching experience" to work with this medium. The second love that she experienced was with a man who was her classmate in her pottery class. They married the day after her graduation. This began her journey as an artist, and her experimentation with mediums. They traveled around a lot to experiment with their art. Ann Weber says that she believes one has to be willing to live in dire situations in order to learn things from different groups of people. One place that was significant in their traveling was in Ithaca New York where they rented a grocery store and built a kiln in the back to make their pottery.

This experience of traveling was significant to her self discovery as an artist. Eventually she branched out on her own and moved to New York where she lived on Perry Street. Now into the 1980's, She supported herself as a production potter where she made ceramics that were sold at places like Barney's and Bendels. She realized while making production pottery that she wanted to know what more she could do with clay and sculpture. She took a class with Jim Maiken who encouraged her to go to graduate school in California because that was where new things were happening with clay.

She chose to go to the California college of Arts and Crafts because she was inspired by Viola Frey who was an artist and teacher at the college. Ann Weber says she had no where to begin because all she had done up to this point was production pottery. Frey told her that she had to prove herself as an artist. she began her experimentation by making what she knew, which was production pottery. Then she would squish the clay and paint it in colors she felt had power to them like black, white, and red.

When Weber left school, she know that she was going to leave clay as her main medium. In the 1990's, she began experimenting with plaster. It was cheaper because she didn't need a kiln, but it was messy and the plaster pieces were heavy making them difficult to transport. She then tried paper mache because it was lighter. It wasn't until she got a big studio in Oakland that she discovered a the medium that would define her career as an artist. Cardboard. She used a stapler to staple strips of cardboard to create sculptures. Weber started out by making cylinders because that is what you start with when learning to use clay.      

Ann Weber went on to create more complicated and bigger sculptures using cardboard. She wanted to build cardboard sculptures bigger then she had done before. This introduced other materials to her cardboard sculptures like bronze frames to hold the shape of the sculptures and sometimes even fiber glass, which she used on a project for the Sacramento State office building. She took residencies in places like Germany, Rome, and China where her art grew and changed with her experiences in life. When I asked her when she started having groups help her with her cardboard sculptures, she said that it started in Mantua, when she had help because the outdoor sculptures were so large. She was trying to make 7 pieces in 4 weeks! Even her father came out to help with the sculptures.

Through the difficult times in her career, like her studio burning down, and having to battle cancer, she still pushed through and produced art that explored a new medium in unconventional ways. When asked where she gets her inspiration she said "look at the meaningful things in life... you want to represent you in the most important way."