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." 
    

Milton Bowens "The Mis Education of the Post Black Negro

Milton Bowen's, or otherwise known as Milton 510, uses his skill as an artist to reveal holes in societies

view of African Americans and how they view themselves.  His exhibition The Mis Education of the Post Black Negro shows that topics like racism still effect the African American Community today.

The lecture was held at Sacramento State University, where Milton Bowen's spoke about his exhibition. What made his art different wasn't just the bright acrylic colors or the cutouts from pop culture. It was the messages. During the lecture Bowen's made an influential statement;

"I paint to educate not just to decorate"

-Milton Bowens

Before delving into the issues and highlights of Milton Bowen's lecture, some background information sets it up. He developed his artist name of Milton 510 because he is the fifth child of ten children and signed everything that way so that he would feel differentiated from his siblings. Bowen's mother signed him up for art classes as a kid, where he developed his love for art.

His art shows more then just aesthetically pleasing color schemes and pictures. He tries to teach African American youth, that society is dictating too much of what they are supposed to be through media and pop culture. He brings this point up later when he talks about how African American youth are shown on the media that ignorance will get them rich fast so they aren't interested in education. Bowen's art uses interesting materials to convey these concepts.

When I asked him what kind of materials and methods he used to make this exhibition he said:
"I used a kitchen sink approach" he explained how first he would put down the old documents, then use acrylic dyes, and afterward he would apply acrylic. He uses cutouts from pop culture creating a mixed medium effect. Bowen's compared the look he wanted with a documentary, where the older parts in the art appear black and white and the the contemporary images are in color.

He wraps up the lecture with a call to action:

"Tomorrow becomes yesterday unless you do something today"

-Milton Bowens