Eden Revisited: The Ceramic Art of Kurt Weiser
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Main Floor Gallery
June 26 – September 13, 2009

Post World War II America enjoyed the euphoria of abundance. Jobs were plentiful, suburbs sprouted, and television replaced radio as the most popular media outlet. The children born in the 1950’s were the first generation to be shaped by television and its varnished glimpses of family life with shows like Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver.

Born in 1950 in Lansing, Michigan, Kurt Weiser’s childhood was influenced by these American ideals, and the fantasies of this era continue to play into the art he has produced for the past forty years. As a child he first attended parochial school and he says, “the experience just frightened me for the most part, as a child it all seemed so dark and threatening; the Latin, the rituals, I had no basis of understanding it.” Sensing Kurt’s dilemma, his parents transferred him to a public school. Even this proved challenging. He acknowledged that he wasn’t “a very good student nor interested in anything that was going on there,” and dropped out in ninth grade. He then enrolled at the Interlochen Center for the Arts, a high school devoted to nurturing young artists.

At Interlochen Weiser soon discovered ceramics. The school’s instructor, Jean Parsons, was a fine technician and dedicated teacher who had studied with Maija Grotell at Cranbrook Academy of Art outside Detroit. Parsons communicated to her young students the Scandinavian ideals she had learned from Grotell, a Finnish immigrant known for her modernist sensibility. Weiser graduated from Interlochen in 1968, receiving many awards that recognized his prescient talents.

After high school he attended the Kansas City Art Institute, and flourished in the creative environment of a professional art school. His mentor, Ken Ferguson, was an Alfred-trained ceramist with national recognition for his functional pottery. Ferguson was also the former director of the Archie Bray Foundation in Montana, where he directed their residency program. After graduation, Weiser taught briefly at the Museum Art School of the Portland (Oregon) Art Museum, working with Tom Coleman.

During the first years of his tenure, Weiser turned out well-crafted utilitarian stoneware and porcelain plates, teapots and casseroles -- essentially refinements of his past graduate and undergraduate work. Ferguson had introduced Weiser to Orientalism and this influence was articulated in Weiser’s modest forms with Shino and ash glazes. Towards the end of his Bray tenure Kurt’s output focused primarily on slip cast porcelain forms.

After 11 successful years at Bray, Weiser took on a new and appealing challenge, a teaching position at Arizona State University. In 1989, Weiser moved his family to Tempe to embark on the next stage of his career.

In Arizona he realized that continuing to refine his current style was no longer creatively satisfying. He was taken with exotic desert flora of the American Southwest, a radical departure from midwestern scenery. A visit to Thailand introduced him to yet another vastly different ecology and cultural sensibility. As his interior world became completely absorbed with new creative imagery and ideas he realized he needed to somehow integrate this into making art that was striking departure from his earlier work.

He found the answer at the breakfast table, reading the miniscule facts, advice, and believe-it-or-nots on the back of a cereal box. He recalled that as a child he was completely engrossed in all the information packed onto one box. Weiser decided his new challenge was to translate this notion into clay. His first attempts were in black-and-white, creating cast porcelain forms and covering them with intricately etched sgraffito. An art historian suggested he investigate china painting, an ancient technique first developed in China where an artist applies paint to porcelain with the same sensibility and care as if painting a scene on canvas. Once porcelain production started in Europe, china painting soon followed and Weiser found great inspiration in the china paintings of 19th-century European masters. Great china paintings reveal great luster and depth, as expert practitioners have carefully applied color layer upon layer with multiple firings.

Weiser has become one of the leading practitioners of this genre. His surreal, lushly painted porcelains build on the great traditions of both Europe and Asia. Articulating his post modernism while paying homage to his ceramic forebears makes Weiser’s work appealing and awe-inspiring. Weiser’s virtuosity as a painter is immediately evident. Closer examination of his work is even more rewarding. Lush beauty gives way to darker undertones leaving viewers plenty of room for interpretation. Kurt Weiser is an unassuming genius. He pursues dream, memory, and desire in a centuries-old medium with a 21st century sensibility.

Eden Revisited: The Ceramic Art of Kurt Weiser is organized by the Arizona State University Art Museum Ceramics Research Center, Temple Arizona, and curated by Curator of Ceramics Peter Held.