Topic: College of Fine Arts
September 22, 2015
Anders Ruhwald, Number 1, 2013, glass, ceramic, wood, David Owsley Museum of Art. Purchase in honor of Peter Blume on the occasion of his retirement 2013. Photography by Steve Talley.
A Ball State University exhibition, Anders Ruhwald: One Thing Follows Another (And You Make It Happen), has been selected for inclusion in the prestigious 2015 Cheongju International Craft Biennale of Korea. Ruhwald’s exhibition will be featured in the main Biennale exhibition, The Making Process, which is on view through Oct. 25.
The exhibition resulted from the first major collaborative programming between Ball State’s David Owsley Museum of Art and its Marilyn K. Glick Center for Glass. Ruhwald, artist-in-residence and head of ceramics at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., developed the concept for the installation during an artist residency at the Glick Center from 2012 through 2013. By comparing and contrasting one design executed in three media—ceramics, glass, and wood—Ruhwald was able to focus on issues of materiality, form, and perception. The installation premiered at the Owsley and then traveled to Urban Glass in Brooklyn, New York.
The theme for 2015 Cheongju International Craft Biennale—considered the largest craft-related venue of its kind in the world—is "process." Featuring art works that exemplify this perspective, the main exhibition explores the expanding definition of craft that has resulted over the years because of new technologies, tools and materials and production methods.
Brent Cole, director of the Marilyn K. Glick Center, said the event is the perfect context for understanding Ruhwald's installation. "Over a two-year period, nine totems were made by hand in a collaborative process," he said, "a process that involved both established and emerging artists working in the different media at two locales, Cranbrook Art Academy and the Glick Center here at Ball State.”
The Danish-born Ruhwald is best known for his ceramic forms that focus largely on the perception of the domestic object. For this exhibition, he used the urn and the vase–quintessential ceramic forms—as building blocks for three distinct sets of monumental totemic sculptures, each form almost five feet high.
Initially produced in ceramic by Ruhwald in his Cranbrook studio, each totem was translated into glass by a ten-person team consisting of faculty and select undergraduate and graduate students from the Glick Center. Several of Ruhwald’s students at Cranbrook then translated the ceramic forms into wood. Initially envisioning the wood and glass sculptures as “ghosts” of the ceramic totems, Ruhwald discovered that each material imbued the form with a distinctive identity. For Ruhwald, “the concept is about translations, communications, and authorships. It is about how forms make sense through various materials and through a range of people’s hands.”
Anders Ruhwald: One Thing Follows Another (And You Make It Happen) was organized by Ball State University’s David Owsley Museum of Art in conjunction with The Marilyn K. Glick Center for Glass and curated by Davira S. Taragin, Consultative Curator. Support for the residency and its presentation at the David Owsley Museum of Art was provided by ARTS ALIVE!; The College of Fine Arts at Ball State University; The Friends of the David Owsley Museum of Art; and the Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass.