Ceramic artist to visit HMA; show to open Jan. 14
Jan. 12—HUNTINGTON — A display of ceramic work will open Saturday at the Huntington Museum of Art.
Donna Polseno will visit the area at the end of March to speak about her work and to present a three-day workshop.
The child of an artist, Polseno was influenced by her parents. Her mother was skillful and handy and her father, a naturalist, was a painter and illustrator whose work supported the family.
She received a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1972 and earned an MAT from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1974. Upon graduating, she and her husband moved to rural Floyd, Virginia, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where they built a studio and a family.
"I have made many different types of pottery over my career but have always been interested in the way decorative elements can be used to enhance a form, whether one is using an elaborate pattern or the simplest marks," Polseno said, noting surface treatments draw inspiration from the natural world — the shape of leaves, grasses, flowers, birds and abstractions of these forms.
Beginning in the 1980s, she blazed a creative trail parallel to her pottery: ceramic sculpture. Her figurative ceramic sculptures center around the metaphor that women are the spiritual vessels of life, capable of giving, nurturing and protecting.
Polseno's ceramics have been featured in major museums and galleries across the country. She is represented in numerous private, corporate and museum collections such as the American Museum of Ceramic Art, Pomona, California; the St. Louis Museum of Art, St. Louis, Missouri; and the Mint Museum of Contemporary Crafts, Charlotte, North Carolina. She has received two National Endowment for the Arts Grants and a Virginia Museum Fellowship.
Throughout her successful career, she has balanced the demands of being an award-winning studio artist and a noted educator. She has taught workshops at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, Banff Center for Arts and Creativity, and Penland School of Craft. She has led college summer programs at Alfred University and the University of Michigan and, from 2004-2020, she taught ceramics part-time at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, where she created and directed the annual Women Working with Clay Symposium. For many years she has taught at La Meridiana Ceramica School, an international ceramics school in Certaldo, Italy, where she and her husband also maintain a small house and studio.
The artist will discuss her work in a free public presentation at HMA at 7 p.m. March 30, with a reception following. A three-day workshop titled "Integration of Forms and Surface" will be presented from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. March 31 through April 2, 2023 at the museum.
The exhibit will continue through April 8.
