Chris Gustin
BIOGRAPHY
Chris is a studio artist and an Emeritus Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. He received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1975, and his MFA from Alfred University in 1977. Chris lives and works in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts.
Gustin’s work is published extensively and is represented in numerous public and private collections in this country, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Renwick Gallery of the National Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Currier Museum of Art, the Crocker Museum of Art, the American Museum of Ceramic Art, and the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art.
Internationally, Gustin’s work is in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the World Ceramic Exposition Foundation in Icheon, Korea, the Yingge Ceramics Museum in Taipai, the Museo de Azulejo in Lisbon, and the Shiwan Treasure Pottery Museum in PR, China.
With over fifty solo exhibitions, he has exhibited, lectured, and taught workshops in the United States, Caribbean, South America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts Artist Fellowships, and four Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowships. He is a member of the International Academy of Ceramics and was elected to the American Craft Council College of Fellows in 2016. He was awarded the Masters of the Medium award from the Renwick Alliance in 2017.
Chris is cofounder of the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Maine, and currently serves as Honorary Trustee on its board.
artist statement
Early in my career, someone told me, “When I was little, my sister could always see things in clouds, but I never could. As much as I looked, I only saw a cloud. But after I sat with your work for three weeks, I can now look at the sky and see all kinds of things.”
That comment has always stuck with me, finding root in the series of large-scale vessels that I made for fifteen years. But as the work matured and questions resolved, a new thought crept into my studio, one that was asking me to explore the possibilities of enclosing the vessel form to speak of volume and all its possibilities for metaphor in another way.
Both the Cloud and Spirit Series explore pure form. This body of work covers a ten-year span, one that has opened doors to abstraction that are both exciting and daunting. By inviting both the hand and eye to explore the forms, I hope to evoke numerous memories, recollections that have the potential to change from moment to moment, provoking connections that go past the intellectual to the innate. By using forms that evoke humility, generosity, sensuality and fullness, I am asking the viewer to seek connections on a deeply personal level.
