Brick Store Museum hosts Cambodian ceramic artist Yary Livan

KENNEBUNK, MAINE – The Brick Store Museum works with community members to make new ideas, traditions and knowledge available to the public. This month, thanks to the partnership of Khmer families in Kennebunk, the Museum welcomes Cambodian ceramic artist Yary Livan, with an exhibition of his traditional ceramics. Livan is one of only three known Master Ceramists to have survived the 1975 Khmer Rouge Genocide, and the only one known to be living in the United States.

Livan began his studies in 1971 at the Royal University of Fine Arts in the capital city of Phnom Penh where he majored in ceramics and painting and focused on traditional Khmer ceramic forms and ornamentation. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge regime, took power in Cambodia and began a systematic genocide, primarily targeting artists, writers, and intellectuals and ultimately killing two million Cambodians. Livan survived by using his knowledge of ceramics to build wood-burning kilns needed to manufacture roof tiles.

He spent most of the 1980s and 1990s moving from one refugee camp to another, arriving in the U.S. in 2001 and was granted political asylum in 2002. That same year, Livan became a Visiting Artist, Ceramics Program, Office for the Arts at Harvard; that year he was the recipient of the Mima Weissmann Award for Study of Ceramic Arts. Since 2005, Livan has taught ceramics classes at a number of Lowell schools. In 2012 Livan received a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship, and also became adjunct professor at Middlesex Community College.

The ”Khmer Traditional Ceramic Artist” exhibition in the Museum’s contemporary Patsy Bauman Gallery will run through July 31. In addition to the exhibition, a Demonstration and Documentary event is planned for Saturday, July 9 at the Brick Store Museum during which the artist will discuss his work, traditional food will be served, and the documentary about Livan’s artwork will be shown. The exhibition is sponsored by BBSquared and community members like you. To help support this effort, visit www.brickstoremuseum.org.

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Brick Store Museum hosts Cambodian ceramic artist Yary Livan