Through May 15, 2022 | Balcony Gallery

Earth Re/Imagined

Recently the Tweed Museum gallery spaces have been rearranged. This gallery, in the balcony, will now be designated for faculty and students to curate exhibitions working with the Tweed's curator.

For the first of these exhibitions, UMD Art & Design Ceramic Studio Area Head Liz James was invited to enlist four ceramics students consisting of art & design majors, minors, and students from various majors. They looked at the more than 750 objects in the Tweed’s ceramics collection to curate an exhibition of their favorites.

The resulting exhibition reflects their overriding perspective that this historic geological medium is one of the most important and widely used of the earth’s available raw art materials. The students were first asked to choose ten works in the collection that resonated with their aesthetics and what they felt would be a good teaching example. Their comments recorded in this exhibition inform their choices.

The students were then charged, through group discussion, to edit down the list to the pieces on view here. That there was notable choice overlap made the editing job easier. The Tweed’s ceramics collection is formidable, and this is just one of many exhibitions in its history that follows a curatorial path through it.

—James Klueg, professor, ceramics

I would like to personally thank Gabrielle Brinkley, Alexis Geer, Maren Freeman, and David Wallington for curating such a wonderful exhibition and for being stellar students. It has been an honor and a privilege working with you all.

—Liz James, assistant professor, ceramics

James Klueg’s ceramics have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions since the late 1970s and are in museum, corporate and private collections. His work has appeared in Ceramics Monthly, American Craft, Humor in Craft, The Ceramic Surface, The Ceramics Design Book, Hand built Ceramics, and Low-Fire Surfaces.

Liz James, assistant professor and ceramic studio area head, brings a westerner's perspective to Minnesota. She received her BFA from Boise State University and an MFA from Kansas State University studying under the direction of Yoshiro Ikeda. She concluded her graduate degree with a teaching residency at Glasgow School of Art. Her interests include functional and nonfunctional ceramic forms that represent a confluence of the observation of human behavior, life cycles, and forces of nature. Her work has been in galleries and exhibitions globally and is included in both public and private collections.