Touching Earth: Women Creating Communities
Maria DeCastro Priscilla Hollingsworth Mary Martin Erin McGuiness Nita Schwartz Nancy McNary Smith Ceil Sturdevant Cheryl Tall The artists in this group adhere to a variety of personal identities, including ethnicity, international origin, and beliefs. However, we are all personally committed to communication and the sharing of ideas. This is made clearly evident in our ceramic work. When we meet with each other (whether in real time and space, or digitally), we continue to build the connections that we have with each other. We are all, in a variety of ways, committed to building communities that operate locally but intersect nationally and internationally. Most of us have met or interacted with each other in various artist residencies from the Watershed Center in Maine to various locations around the world. All of us have shown together in various combinations at past NCECA conferences. A number of us are educators at various levels, from K-12 schools to universities, as well as studio education and workshops with a regional or national draw. Some of us have degrees in the ceramics field, while others have learned by taking workshops and then branching out on our own. Several of us have deep connections to Pittsburgh: Sturdevant and Martin are career teachers in respected local programs; Smith is a noted Pittsburgh artist who teaches in her own studio; Hollingsworth returns to the city often to visit family. Some of us have deep roots in other regions of the U.S., such as the Southwest or the Southeast – or have chosen a new location for themselves, such as California. We are committed to building connections and ideas that resonate widely and inclusively. We do this in various ways: through creating and exhibiting work in clay, through working side-by-side at artist residencies, and through teaching. All of the exhibiting artists are connected by a web of relationships across time, space, and ideas about clay. While we have exhibited our work together as a group, we have yet to all be physically present in the same room at the same time. This exhibit would be an ideal opportunity for our work and our selves to come together. Sadly it is all too often the case that people with different ideologies and backgrounds find themselves at odds with one another. What we strive to achieve in Touching Earth: Women Creating Communities is to come together celebrating our differences as individuals and uniting through the empowerment that comes with being women, being artists, being ceramicists. Touching Earth:Women Creating Communities celebrates our differences as individuals uniting through empowerment that comes with being women, being artists, being ceramicists. |
Exhibition location at the Carnegie Coffee Company132 East Main St
Carnegie, PA 15106 (412) 275-3951 |