Alejandra Alvarez
Kenneth Price
Kenneth Price is an American ceramic artist and printmaker who was born in Los Angeles, California in 1935. Kenneth currently resides in Venice, CA and Taos, NM. He studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, before receiving his BFA degree from the University of Southern California in 1956. He continued his studies at the The Art Institute of California - Los Angeles in 1957 and received an MFA degree from New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 1959. Kenneth Price studied ceramics with Peter Voulkos and was awarded a Tamarind Fellowship.
Along with his influential teacher Peter Voulkos, who taught at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles during the 1950s, Price is responsible for establishing ceramics as a fine-art medium in postwar American art.
Upon visiting the Los Angeles County Museum of Arts I came across an interesting piece from the Kenneth Price collection. This piece was title Echo, 1997, which was an awesome manipulation of Acrylic on ceramic, typical of Price’s signature artwork. What I found interesting about Echo after reading about the piece, was that Price applied paint instead of glaze to the surface of the clay, a strategy which flouts traditional ceramic practice and associates his work chiefly and deliberately with the tradition of painting. This particular piece was an orange glazed color with a texture that had many small pores, which I believe to be due to the acrylic used to create it. Echo’s shape was very unique as it appears to be shaped as an ear at the top, which expanded into this bigger more miscued shape, which flared out at the bottom in waves. This unique piece defeanetly left room for lots of various interpretations.
What I took from this piece was far more then its creative name. My interpretation of this piece was that the artist was trying to say that he wanted this to be a place where people discuss and debate ideas that foster stronger communities....