ROBERT KIBLER

Professor of Art

Chair, Visual and Performing Arts Division and

Designer and Potter, URBANWARE STUDIO, Los Angeles, CA

EDUCATION:

M. A. Art, California State University, San Diego, CA

Postgraduate work in biochemistry, University of Illinois at Urbana

B. S. Biology, Southeast Missouri State University

 

PORTFOLIO

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS:

2000 - Made in L A, Gallery Eight, La Jolla, CA

1997 - Sequential Development, Invitational Exhibit, CSULA Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

1997 - Made in L A, Gallery Eight, La Jolla, CA

1995 - The Isomata Years, Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA

1994 - Tradition and Innovation in Ceramic Art, Lancaster Museum of Art, Lancaster, CA

1993 - The Kiln Gods Must Be Crazy, Brand Library Art Gallery, Glendale, CA

1991 - California Ceramics, Ontario Museum of Art, Ontario, CA

1989 - Southern California Ceramics, CSU Long Beach Gallery, Long Beach, CA

1988 - California, Paul Luster Gallery, San Francisco, CA

1987 - Connections, Great American Gallery, Atlanta, GA

1986 - Rituals of Tea, Garth Clark Gallery, New York, NY

1986 - Treasures, Garth Clark Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

1984 - Static Interference, Solo Exhibition, Garth Clark Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

1984 - Thirty Years of Southern California Ceramics, Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Park, Los Angeles, CA

This lidded vase, entitled "NIGHT GARDEN" is an example of my current work in majolica. The 34" vase is wheel thrown in sections using a terra cotta clay body, and assembled. Handles are pulled and attached after the form is assembled. After a bisque fire and glazing with an unleaded, white base glaze, the vase is handpainted with a variety of metallic oxide washes and commercial stains. Firing is at cone 05 in an electric kiln.

I have been working in clay for over thirty years and find it an ever challenging medium of expression. I like to make pots people can use, enjoy, and treasure. I want the user to connect with a pot through touch, through use. Clay is very tactile, and this is one of the first things that draws the student to it. Touch the earth; not a bad idea. Isn't it interesting that here, in the United States, with all of our technology, our virtual realities, our omnipresent computers, that we find so many potters working with their hands? The industrial revolution did not put potters out of business. The information revolution will not put potters out of business either. Why not? I think that we humans have a powerful need to connect with the earth, to form it with our hands, to coax beauty from the unformed raw clay. This kind of work is very satisfying, especially when so many people do not get the pleasure of creating with their hands. The work of so many people today involves doing only part of a process. Most working people today have become disjointed links in a broken chain,where they never experience the joy of seeing it all come together into a unified whole. In pottery making we get to experience the taking of an idea from concept to completion. So, while it would seem that mass production would have made hand-made pottery making extinct, this has not happened. There are more potters working today than at any time in history! In a way, mass production has made the unique, hand made object even more valuable, more desirable. I have no fears for the survival of pottery making in the computer age, it's just too irresistible.

 

   

 

PORTFOLIO

    

contact me at rkibler@glendale.edu