Peter Beasecker

Peter Beasecker was born in Toledo, Ohio and received a BS degree from Miami University and his MFA from Alfred University. He is a Professor of Art teaching ceramics and graduate studies at Syracuse University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts.  Beasecker has received numerous awards and distinctions in his career, including a Ford, NEA and NYFA Fellowship.  He has exhibited extensively in national and international venues, and his work is included in the collections of the Everson Museum of Art, Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, The Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Mint Museum in North Carolina.  Beasecker has been a visiting artist and workshop leader at over sixty institutions, including Anderson Ranch, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, Curaumilla Art Centre (Chile), Golden Bridge Pottery (India), Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and the Penland School of Crafts.  He was the co-coordinator of the Utilitarian Clay Symposium at Arrowmont for two decades.  He currently maintains a studio in Cazenovia, New York.

Artist Statement

 Carriers:

For several years now I have been involved with a relatively simple object reflecting a simple idea: that is to make a piece that allows for the transport of several cups (or sometimes bowls/cordials).  To ‘carry’ is my effort to construct an experience that brings the object close to one’s center, while being made conscious of weight, proportion, and scale.  The number of cups imply community and the act of carrying is a gesture of giving.  It's my ambition that the awkwardness of lifting a cup as it scrapes a wall will provide a subtle catalyst for seeing and feeling a new relationship with something as familiar and ordinary as a cup, as well as to serve as a thread for those gathered.  The absence of cups intimates’ presence, and I enjoy that inference.

 

Landscape Cups/Tumblers:

My intention is to create an abstracted, ‘sense’ of landscape that has elements both near and far, familiar and unfamiliar.  I find the straight-forward cylinder to be the most appropriate form to carry this idea/approach, so that the surface can suggest a more illusionary space, unencumbered by accommodating, say, a handle or spout.  The cups are slightly heavier than my other cups to reference a traditional ‘rocks’ glass and the tumblers are taller/narrower to be more festive.  In the best-case scenario, these pieces have their own weather pattern.

 String Series Portraits:

This piece in from a series of porcelain ‘tablets’ made to serve as a tangible reminder of the importance and weight of history.  In a very personal way, the tablets are a marker of my political awakening.  The year that stands out is 1968.  Often referred to as the ‘year that changed the world’, for me, it was the year which first illuminated the tragedies of the world outside of the comfort of our small family room in Toledo, Ohio. The portraits of individuals depicted in this series were at the forefront of my memory: Robert Kennedy, Walter Cronkite, Richard Nixon, Mayor Daley, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Martin Luther King.  Like all the portraits, this particular piece is of RFK, as he appeared in a June ’68 LIFE magazine issue, which was the main source of printed material outside the local newspaper in our home.  This ‘portrait’ began with a traditional line drawing made of string, which then became abstracted and unintelligible after the final firing.  I find the translation between known and unknown, between actual events and memory to be provocative territory for another connection to history.