What We Talk About When We Talk About Craft is a play on the Raymond Carver story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Carver's story recounts a group of friends striving to characterize their understanding of love through their experiences, obstacles and joys.
RCI invites you to engage in this virtual conversation with our guests in a wide ranging dialogue about how creative folks and craft communities are faring in these times. It is an opportunity for us to introduce ourselves, gather and connect the scattered Oregon College of Art and Craft community.
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Panelists
Marjorie dial
Marjorie Dial was born in Columbia, SC. She holds an MFA in Craft from Oregon College of Art and Craft (2019) and a BA from Yale University (1994). Dial is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice includes sculpture, print-making, and writing. She develops bodies of work through space-specific interactions, research, and frenetic making. Her interests lie in the capacity for work to shift meanings, engage in story-telling, and attune to information outside of conscious awareness. In 2018 Dial founded an artist residency in North Carolina called Township10. This project focuses on the intimacy, intensity, and transformational qualities of studio life.
Her work has been shown in exhibitions, at venues including Eutectic Gallery, Portland, OR; Front of House, Portland, OR; Ash Street Project Gallery, Portland, OR; T Project Gallery, Portland, OR, and Hoffman Gallery, Portland, OR. Dial received the MFA Award of Distinction at OCAC and was invited to attend the Center for Contemporary Ceramics at CSULB as a Resident Artist in 2019.
brenda mallory
Texture and repeated rhythmic forms are instrumental to Brenda Mallory’s abstract compositions and installations. She uses reclaimed materials sewn together with crude hardware or mechanical devices in ways that imply tenuous connections and aberrations. She is interested in ideas of interference and disruption of long-established systems in nature and human cultures.
Mallory lives in Portland, Oregon but grew up in Oklahoma and is a citizen of Cherokee Nation. She received a BA in Linguistics & English from UCLA and a BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art. Mallory has received grants from the Oregon Arts Commission, Ford Family Foundation, Regional Arts & Culture Council. Awards include the Eiteljorg Museum Contemporary Native Art Fellowship, Native Arts and Culture Foundation Fellowship, and Ucross Native Fellowship. Residencies include GLEAN, Crow’s Shadow, Jordan Schnitzer Printmaking Residency, Signal Fire, c3:initiative, and Bullseye Glass.
photo credit: Mario Gallucci
iván carmona
Iván Carmona was born in 1973 in Philadelphia, PA. At the age of 2 his parents moved back to Puerto Rico. While growing up in Puerto Rico, Iván developed a strong visual vocabulary of images that have come to influence his work today. With representations of Spanish colonial architecture, dense colorful vegetation and complex textures and patterns.
Influenced by the Modern Art movement Iván explores biomorphic form, monochromatic saturated color and multi disciplinary materials to convey specific content in three-dimensional objects.
Through the use of tropical landscape and traditional cultural idiosyncrasy, one can see how deeply Iván identifies with the structure and beauty of his home. Employing imagery, form and texture, Iván’s exploration of the relationship between human emotions, culture, identity, and geographic connections, enables him to capture the complexity, personality and history of his art.
In 2015, Iván received his Bachelor of Fine Art from The Oregon College of Art and Craft in Portland, Oregon. He was a recipient of numerous national awards, including: 2020 Hallie Ford Fellows, The Student Scholarship Award for Outstanding Academic and Artistic Achievement, the Dean’s Scholarship, the Commitment to Craft Scholarship, “Best in Show” at the Hoffman Gallery Juried Student Show, the 2015 NCECA Undergraduate Award for Excellence, the Studio Potter Undergraduate Merit Award (Providence, RI), the 2014 Huntley-Tidwell Scholarship to attend the Penland School of Craft in Asheville, NC. His work has been published in the publication ‘500 Figures in Clay, Vol. 2.’ “2015 - 2019 CONNECTIVE CONVERSATIONS: Curator/Critic Tours and Lectures,” New American Paintings, No. 151, Pacific Coast Issue. University of Oregon. 2020 His work has been exhibited in numerous galleries in USA, Puerto Rico, and Latin America. His pieces can be found in public and private art collections internationally, including the Boise Art Museum, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, and at the Gifu Prefecture High School in Tokyo Kouryu, Japan.
joshua west smith
Joshua West Smith is an artist, furniture maker, and educator who lives in the Inland Empire of Southern California. He teaches Art and Art history at Los Angeles Trade Technical College. As an artist, Smith has shown his work in California, Georgia, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin, Texas, and Mumbai, India. He has been producing custom furniture for clients since 2007 and since 2016 he has exclusively done so through the Los Angeles-based interior design firm, Reath Design.
Smith received his MFA from the University of California Riverside in 2016 and his BFA from the Oregon College of Art and Craft in 2008. Before pursuing higher education Smith had a fine job working as a welder, fabricator, and machinist in heavy industry.
emily ENDO
Emily Endo is an artist and educator based in Joshua Tree, California. Endo received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2006 and a MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2010. Their work has been included in exhibitions across the country at venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Craft (Portland, OR), LVL3 (Chicago, IL), Bellevue Museum of Art (Bellevue, WA), Bullseye Projects (Portland, OR/Latheronwheel, UK), Disjecta Contemporary Art Center (Portland, OR), New Mexico State University (Las Cruces, NM), and University of Nevada Sheppard Contemporary (Reno, NV). In 2013 and 2018 they were awarded a Project Grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council (Portland, Oregon). Endo has lectured at the American Craft Council (Minneapolis, MN), Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), Glass Art Society (Glasgow, UK), School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL), and Rochester Institute of Technology (Rochester, NY). Their work has been featured in Art Ltd. Magazine, Frontrunner Magazine, American Craft Magazine, Interior Design Magazine, LVL3 and Bad at Sports. From 2013-2018 Endo served as an Assistant Professor and Fibers Department Chair at the Oregon College of Art and Craft (Portland, OR). Endo lives and works in Joshua Tree, CA where they are the co-director of the High Desert Observatory, an art and craft education studio.
moderated by: karl burkheimer
Karl received his MFA from the Department of Crafts and Material Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University and a Bachelor of Environmental Design in Architecture from North Carolina State University. His work has been exhibited nationally, including recent exhibitions in Los Angeles Valley College, Seattle, Washington, at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, Oregon, the Society for Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the Portland Art Museum in Oregon. His critical writing has been published in Ceramic Monthly, and he has received several awards of recognition as well as institutional funding, including a Professional Fellowship, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; an Individual Artist Fellowship, Oregon Arts Commission; Project Grant, Oregon Arts Commission; Faculty Achievement Award, Oregon College of Art and Craft; the 2013 Contemporary Northwest Art Awards at the Portland Art Museum; 2013 U.S.-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship; and the 2016 Ford Family Fellowship in Visual Art.