One thing that I did this year with the help of Ellie Weber was the bringing together of the graduate ceramics students from the University of Kansas and Kansas State University. Ellie and I met last year (2016) at the KU NCECA Pre-conference, and while I was running around that event like a chicken with my head cut off (that event was amazing and being a part of its success was crazy but really good. I'll have to write about it soon.) we started talking about making more connections between the universities in Kansas. While we were both at a different Kansas university, her at KSU and me at KU, we thought starting there would be easiest. This thought fell away a little bit but then in the summer, I ran into Ellie at Pottery Northwest in Seattle, Washington and we started talking again, promising each other that we would make this happen. At first, we were just sharing dates of visiting artists and then, in October, we really started trying to plan a traveling exhibition. In February 2017, we had all of the ceramic graduate students from KSU and KU organized and putting up a show at the KSU Student Union Gallery. Just putting the work together in the same space was amazing. In addition to the exhibition, the grad students from KU gave artist talks to an audience in Manhattan, Kansas.
NCECA 2017 happened shortly after so we decided to plan a show for the end of April. This Friday, April 28th, 2017 for the Final Friday in Lawrence, Kansas, we will be having the follow-up exhibition where work from the ceramic graduate students will be shown at SeedCo. Studios. Two of the KSU students, Ellie Weber and Thea Meussling will be giving artist talks on Thursday, April 27th at 4 pm in the forum at Marvin Hall on the KU campus. I am so excited to see this project get some Lawrence love and I hope that the graduate students can keep and build on the hard work and time the Ellie and myself put into this. Below are the posters and I cannot wait.
