Lecture by Ceramic Art Authority Garth Clark

November 1, 2006

Garth Clark, curator, writer, historian, and dealer in ceramic art, will give a lecture titled “Answered Prayers” at 11:30 a.m. on Thursday, November 9. The lecture will take place in the Palmer Lipcon Auditorium at the Palmer Museum of Art. The lecture is sponsored by the Penn State School of Visual Arts’ John M. Anderson Artists and Scholars Lecture Series and is free to the public.

Clark, born in Pretoria, South Africa in 1947, is the founding director of the Ceramic Arts Foundation, which organizes international conferences on ceramic history, criticism, and scholarship. In 1998 he was made a Fellow of the Royal College of Art, London (his alma mater), and has received honorary doctorates from the University of Staffordshire and the Kansas City Art Institute with lifetime achievement awards from the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, and the Friends of Contemporary Ceramics. Clark was also made a Fellow of the American Crafts Council and the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts.

Clark’s writings and books have won numerous awards including the Art Critics Fellowship of the National Endowment of the Arts in 1981 and the Art Book of the Year award from the North American Society of Art Libraries in 1989 for “The Mad Potter of Biloxi”. Most recently, he was honored with the 2005 College Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism for his book “Shards: Garth Clark on Ceramic Art”.

Clark has curated several seminal exhibitions including the groundbreaking A Century of Ceramics in the United States (with Margie Hughto) in 1979, the first retrospective of Hans Coper’s work in North America, and through his gallery, has presented the first American surveys of the work of George E. Ohr, Lucio Fontana, Elie Nadelman, Anthony Caro, Arman, and others. For more information, go to: http://www.garthclark.com/.

Contact: Sarah Schwartz, ses32@psu.edu