Join us at the Belger Glass Annex (1219. East 19th St.) this First Friday, June 3 from 6:00pm to 8:00pm for a free glassblowing demonstration led by Robert Flowers. Watch as a team of glassblowers heat and shape hot glass into a work of art. This demonstration is an open-house-style event, so pop in for a little while or stay the entire time!

In addition to the glass demo, Belger Arts has two new exhibitions opening at the Belger Crane Yard Gallery (2011 Tracy Ave.) including the annual resident artist exhibition GroundWork. New Arrivals and Robert Stackhouse: Passages continue at the Belger Arts Center (2100 Walnut St.). Spend First Friday with Belger Arts — all three Belger Arts locations are within five minutes of each other!

Belger Arts annual resident exhibition includes work by current Artists in Residence: Summer Brooks, Elaine Buss, Eleanor Foy, Sun Young Park, Adams Puryear, and Nicole Woodard. For the six artists, the past year has been one of processing and navigating uncertainty, while persistently evolving, creatively thriving, and laying the “groundwork” for what’s to come.

Summer Brooks’ figurative depictions of black women challenge constraining ideals of beauty. Pressed and carved hair textures, confront stereotypes and aesthetic standards, while her use of materials such as India ink and spray foam challenge the conventions of the ceramics medium. Elaine Buss’ sculptural forms include symbols that serve as a visual language that reveals her fascination with knowing and exploring. Her work invites the viewer to experience what has informed, comforted, and humbled her. Eleanor Foy’s work is heavily inspired by the American West. For Foy, Westerns embody and perpetuate the violence of our colonial past, and underscore our relationship to history, land, and language. Foy considers the construction of her lamps and sculptures an indulgence and a criticism of romantic Americana. Sun Young Park combines clay and non-clay materials to create large, abstract sculptures that reflect how she processes and translates her reality and explores the duality of the material and the conceptual. Adams Puryear documents pop and internet culture, combining traditional techniques and contemporary imagery inspired by the internet’s “anti-filter.” Nicole Woodard creates representations of the human experience by decorating her abstracted figurative busts and heads with drawings that reveal human resilience.

Belger Crane Yard Studios continues to host national and international artists through its Artists in Residence program. A residency provides ceramic artists the opportunity to expand their body of work or create a special project that may be outside of the scope of their routine studio practice.

In 2022, Americans are acknowledging mental health more widely — especially surrounding trauma. Many may know what it feels like to be disconnected from one’s self due to a traumatic experience that left us feeling unsafe, unworthy, and even unloved.

Reconnection explores paths to wholeness of individuals from varying walks of life and traumatic experiences, such as abandonment, domestic violence, and war. Through ceramic portraiture and animal symbolism, the work communicates each person’s reconnection to a state of authenticity. In addition, exploring how the vessel and mindful ritual can be offered as a tool towards reconnection; anchoring one’s attention to the present moment, and cultivating healing.

Artist Statement

My ceramic vessels and figurative sculptures are vehicles to investigate our human emotions and psyche. I view my role as an artist as an act of service and wonder how my work can best serve others. In contemporary America, I see many people disconnected from their emotional and physical well-being due to the many prevalent consequences of chronic stress and trauma. My work’s intention is to encourage emotional healing by sharing the lived experiences of others and through meditative interactions.

I make sculptural relief portraits to tell stories of those on the path to liberate themselves from mental prisons of childhood and adult traumas. Life-size portraits are paired with an animal (either real or mythological) establishing a duality. This creates a face-to-face conversation between the viewer and portraits as well as a symbolic relationship with the creatures — representing a reconnection to a transformed and authentic self.

My drinking and pouring forms, such as teapots and cups, help establish a relationship with my audience through sensory experience. In a guided class or alone, participants in my tea rituals are asked to notice little things about their cup, which most of the time are overlooked, such as surface, texture, weight, and temperature change as the beverage is being poured and sipped, smelled, and appreciated. This gives participants the opportunity to cultivate an awareness of the vessel, thus elevating tactile, visual, and olfactory perceptions.

My vessels and sculptures evoke raw emotions through their colorful yet earthy surfaces and a sense of motion, flow, energy, and torsion through fluid mark-making. With my pottery, I apply abstract textural marks with liquid clay to the forms. However, I carve into my sculptures resulting in recessed gestural lines.

Clay offers me an opportunity to share my truth and concern for my fellow humans. It is my desire through my ceramics to share the inspiring and healing journeys of others and educate people about introspective mindful rituals.

Artist Bio

Jason Wang is a ceramic artist who is currently a resident artist at the Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis, MN. He intends his vessels and sculptures to invoke a strong emotional response in order to further the dialogue about identity, mental health, and healing in contemporary America. Jason earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Kansas City Art Institute in Kansas City, MO. He was awarded a scholarship to partake in a workshop at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, CO and has exhibited in group exhibitions at Leedy-Voulkos Art Center in Kansas City, MO.

Passages includes more than 30 sculptures, prints, paintings, and drawings all from the Belger Collection. Stackhouse was born in Bronxville, NY, in 1942, and moved to Florida as a teenager. He was one of the first students enrolled at the University of South Florida and graduated with a degree in studio art in 1965. He later earned an MFA from the University of Maryland. His two-dimensional artwork often documents large-scale outdoor sculptures that were created with his students and volunteers. Many of them were of a scale where visitors could enter and pass through the installations. Often A‑frame wooden structures, the sculptures were literal passageways through art. Frequent imagery in Stackhouse’s output includes boats and ships (reflecting earthly and spiritual passages) and snakes (symbolic of regeneration and death). He was also especially intrigued with the process of a snake shedding its skin and slithering away afresh.

Early in his career Stackhouse maintained an active studio in New York City, while commuting to Washington, D.C., to teach at the Corcoran School of Art, and working on outdoor sculpture events throughout the country. In the mid-1990s he moved to Kansas City, teaching at the Kansas City Art Institute, continuing to create outdoor installations locally. Stackhouse and his wife and collaborator, Carol Mickett, have resided in the Tampa area for two decades. They continue to work on national public installation projects involving volunteers during the fabrication and installation process.