Current Exhibitions

Karen Shapiro

KAREN SHAPIRO: LARGER THAN LIFE American Icons as Ceramic Sculpture

On view from December 6, 2013 to January 18, 2014.

My first recorded attempts at artistic expression were at the ripe age of five, painstakingly painting the adobe brick walls surrounding our house in Tucson.

Years later I majored in art in high school where I began working in clay and continued in this medium as a design major in college. After college and continuing for many years, my medium changed drastically to a more edible art form in the shape of a long, hard career as a pastry chef, working my way up to a position as pastry chef for Alice Walter’s world renowned Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California.

I am now happily out of the kitchen and back into the ceramics studio where I am finding great joy in working in a fresh new sculpture style. In earlier years, my emphasis was on the ‘perfection’ of abstract forms. I naturally tried to take up where I had left off many years ago but was immediately frustrated and disappointed to see that those "perfect" forms would no longer come from my hands.

Instead, I was drawn to the form of a milk carton, then to my Italian espresso pot, next to an artichoke from the market -- in other words, I found an inexhaustible source of fascinating shapes and forms staring at me from all sides.

Now I find myself jumping around from vegetables to nail polish bottles and lipsticks, to crayons and on and on ... and in addition to these wonderful objects I have also discovered the raku kiln.

The excitement of reaching into a red-hot environment with tongs, of the flaming bucket, even the choking smoke, and finding results I never dreamt of -- always changing, always so much to learn -- has given me back an enormous energy, appetite and passion for my work.

-Karen Shapiro

»» READ MORE

Holiday 2013 at Snyderman-Works Galleries

Ceramics, Jewelry, Sculptures

On view from November 7, 2013 to December 24, 2013.

»» READ MORE