Thancoupie - Australian Art

 

 Dr Thancoupie Gloria Fletcher James  (1937-2011) was an Australian sculptural artist, educator, linguist and elder of the Thainakuith people in Weipa, in the Western Cape York area of far north Queensland. She was the last fluent speaker of the Thainakuith language and became a pillar of cultural knowledge in her community. She was also known as Thankupi, Thancoupie and Thanakupi.
"Thanakupi as she was best known, was born in the small mission town of Napranum, near Weipa where she experienced a traditional childhood of hunting and travelling with her family in time with the seasons. As part of her upbringing, her female elders taught her traditional stories and symbols that they drew in the sand. It was these symbols and stories that Thancoupie would later modify for her work in textiles and clay.
In 1971, Thancoupie travelled to Sydney to enrol in a graphic arts course at East Sydney Technical College. Here, after overcoming initial qualms associated with the sacred nature of clay in her homeland, she began her training under the guidance of Peter Rushforth, Bernard Sahm, Shiga Shigeo, Joan Grounds and Peter Travis. She became the first Indigenous person to study ceramics at a tertiary level.Thancoupie held her first solo exhibition in the backyard of her friend, Jennifer Isaacs, and through this received an invitation in 1983 to attend an international ceramics conference in Mexico. In 2001, eighty works spanning her entire career were presented in a survey exhibition at the Brisbane City Gallery and she is represented in the collections of the Powerhouse Museum, the National Gallery of Australia as well as State art galleries and museums in Queensland, South Australia and Victoria.In addition to continuing her art practice, Thancoupie spent much of the last 30 years mentoring aspiring artists from communities in Far North Queensland, Arnhemland, the Desert and the Tiwi Islands as well as holding art and professional development courses for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous students. Thancoupie helped to found the Weipa Festival on Cape York and ran holiday programs to teach bush knowledge and art to younger generations. As a community elder Thancoupie educated Indigenous children in their traditional culture and ran art education programs during school holidays.
As recently noted by Adrian Newstead, Thancoupie’s creative and philosophical motivation is best expressed in her own words.
You are here in a lifetime to help, to understand… that is intelligence. And only intelligent people have strong friendships. I wish we all have that."(maas.museum)

 

Peter Voulkos - abstract expressionist ceramic sculptures

"Peter Voulkos began working in ceramics during his senior year at Montana State College in 1949. In 1952, he completed his MFA at the California College of Arts and Crafts and went on to teach at the Otis Art Institute for five years. Afterwards, Voulkos transferred to the University of California, Berkley to establish the Ceramics Department where he worked until his retirement in 1985. Peter Voulkos has often been dubbed the father of the American Clay Revolution, otherwise known as the Craft-to-Art movement. In 1954, Voulkos’s hefty clay sculptures smashed the boundaries and constraints of utilitarian ceramics with three categories of work: “ice buckets,” “plates,” and “stacks.” While teaching at the Otis Art Institute (then the Los Angeles County Art Institute), Voulkos’s clay constructions began to embody the gestural spontaneity and visual momentum of Abstract Expressionism along with the Zen-like acceptance of imperfections that characterizes the Japanese tradition of pottery. Working with a personal structural vocabulary limited to thrown shapes including cylinders, bowls, spheres, plates, clay slabs, and whatever forms his hand or mallet could tear, press, or paddle, he fabricated a unique visceral and sculptural syntax with infinite compositional variations. To quote the artist, “I get down to the very basic forms that I really love, but they are still giving me information.” Voulkos’s one-person shows include those at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Pasadena Museum of Modern Art, CA; and the Art Institute of Chicago, IL. His work is represented in collections throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. He died on February 16, 2002."(groundsforsculpture.org)

Ceramic art Rudy Autio

Rudy Autio (October 8, 1926 – June 20, 2007) was an American sculptor, best known for his figurative ceramic vessels.Rudio Autio was born Arne Rudolph Autio to a family of Finnish immigrants in Butte, Montana. As a child, he first learned to draw by taking evening classes from Works Progress Administration artists working in Butte. He served in the Navy for two years during World War II. After the war ended, he studied art at Montana State University (then Montana State College) in Bozeman, where he first met Peter Voulkos, who became a lifelong friend. Frances Senska taught both of them. Autio earned a Master of Arts degree from Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. In 1952, Autio was a founding resident artist at the Archie Bray Foundation. In 1957, Autio started the ceramics department at the University of Montana, in Missoula. He taught there for twenty-eight years and, until his death, he was retired as Professor Emeritus.Autio's torso-shaped vessels are painted with figures and animals in a free linear style reminiscent of Matisse's drawings. They are found in permanent collections of museums around the world, including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, the Carnegie Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, the Applied Arts Museum in Helsinki, the Canton Museum of Art, and the National Museum in Stockholm.Wikipedia

Antonio Corpora

Antonio Corpora was born in Tunis on 15 August 1909. There he attended an art academy and studied under Armand Vergeaud until he went to Florence in 1930 to copy Old Master paintings. In 1931 Corpora settled in Paris, where he met Alberto Giacometti and Sergio Signori. Antonio Corpora often returned to Italy and Tunisia, where he co-founded the "Les quatres" group in 1934.
Good contacts to well-known Italian artists, including the group associated with the Galleria del Milione in Milan, enabled him to publish some of his writings. In the 1930s Corpora painted in an abstract style notable for geometric forms and strips of colour.
Late in the 1930s he briefly held a chair in stage design in Bologna but left Italy during the second world war to live in Tunis. On returning to Italy in 1945, Antonio Corpora joined forces with Guttuso, Fazzini et al to found the "Neo-cubista" group. The pictures he produced at that time were under the sway of Braque and Matisse.
In 1947 Corpora became a member of the "Fronte Nuovo delle Arti", which was notable for its social commitment. Late in the 1940s he began to reject Cubist formulae, adopting instead a freer formal idiom that by the 1950s had become Abstract Expressionism.
The work Corpora did in the 1960s can be classified as Informel yet he did not abandon geometric forms entirely until the early 1970s. From 1975 Antonio Corpora worked with a dripping technique on canvases roughened with plaster of Paris and sand, which he coated with vibrant colour. In the 1990s he continued to experiment but ultimately returned to compositions with strips of colour.
Antonio Corpora showed work four times at the Venice Biennale between 1948 and 1956 at the Venice Biennale, and, in 1968, at the Rome Biennale, winning prizes at both. The president of Italy presented him with an award in 2003 and he was made a member of the San Luca Academy.
Antonio Corpora died in Rome on 6 September 2004.(antonio-corpora.com)

Ceramic art Hans Coper

Hans Coper (8 April 1920 – 16 June 1981), was an influential German-born British studio potter. His work is often coupled with that of Lucie Rie due to their close association, even though their best known work differs dramatically, with Rie's being less sculptural, while Coper's was much more abstract, but also always functional. The latter point was noted by M. S. Thomas in his recent book "The Essential Potness." Coper always made functional vessels, principally containers for flowers (vases), fruit (bowls), candles (candle holders) including work for Coventry Cathedral and Sussex University meeting house. He made a small group of Figures in the fifties, which were not vessels and were never put on sale (see Tony Birks).
Coper was born in Chemnitz, Germany, and fled to Britain in 1939. He was interned as an enemy alien, and held in Canada for two years; on return to Britain in 1942, he served as a conscientious objector in the Non-Combatant Corps.

 In 1946, with no previous experience in ceramics, he began working as an assistant in the studio of Lucie Rie. It is from this time you will find tea sets and cups and saucers made by both Rie and Coper. By the time he left in 1958 to establish his own studio at Digswell House in Hertfordshire, he was already well known as a potter in his own right, experimenting with much more abstract forms that were at the time considered very ahead of their time. Because of the success of his work, he went on to become a leading figure in the 20th century studio pottery movement. Throughout the 1960s he taught pottery at the Camberwell School of Art and the Royal College of Art. He died in Frome, Somerset in 1981 of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

 Coper would characteristically throw his work on the potter's wheel, then alter and assemble pieces by hand to achieve the finished form. Thus, although made on the wheel, his work has a sculptural quality, but is always functional. The surfaces of his pots tend to be roughly textured and coloured with oxides, especially manganese oxide. His distinctive pots take on recognizable "forms" he termed Spade, Bud, Cup, Egg, Flower and Arrow.
Coper's work was widely exhibited and collected even in his lifetime. Today, it is found in the collections of major museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Museum de Fundatie, the Sainsbury Collection, and York Art Gallery, as well as in private collections worldwide. Among his best known works is the set of three 7-foot candlesticks on the high altar at Coventry Cathedral, commissioned in 1962.Wikipedia