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The Brownsville Herald ■ Sunday, December 15,1996 ■ Page 3BLucero’s art a labor of love, ideasBy JOAN BRUNSKILL Associated Press WriterNEW YORK - The exhibition of Michael Lucero’s ceramic art at the American Craft Museum is a flowering of seriously play* ful hybrids. The last thing it evokes is conventional pottery at a craft museum.A brightly-glazed, child-size figure with one rotund body stacked on another, and a tiny head under its arm, sits in an antique stroller. A man-size ' devil trickily assembled from leaf-like shards dangles from strings; large earthenware hearts are stacked up totem-style.These are three of the works in “Michael Lucero: Sculpture 1976-1995.” The California-bornartist, interviewed at his studio in downtown Manhattan, acknowledges debate among curators and museums about defining his art: ceramics or sculpture?The Metropolitan Museum of Art has his work in its permanent collection — as do Washington D.C.’s Hirshhom Museum and the craft museum.Lucero inclines toward just presenting the work to “let people make up their own minds.”The exhibition is headed for further showings around the country at a range of museums: the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art Design, Kansas City, Mo.; the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art.What Lucero’s varied works have in common is that they are built largely of clay; their surfaces are painted with a brilliantly wayward variety of images; they face profound issues of our day.They are engaging in the best sense: “You view them with a sense of delighted discovery,” wrote the New York Times critic.“I think the hand-made quality is one of the most important things about my work,” Lucero said, “the fact that it has been worked over and over, that it has been worked with love — though that’s uncool in this post-Modem world.“I want to get my hands all over a piece, and have people know I’ve done all this work and put all this information into it for you.”Ideas touched in the three works cited — well, just for starters take recycling, as with the antique stroller; hanging shards that play against the convention of standing figures on a pedestal; the heart as Mayan symbol of the earth’s vital rhythm.At the museum’s media preview, curator Barbara Bloemink called the two decades of work on show a “dialog between traditional definitions and new applications,” exploding traditions, ignoring definitions.“Lucero is never satisfied with a motif or idea. Within a short time he’s pushed it beyond where you could have imaginedit.”Lucero, 43, began using clay as a student in California, delighted by its qualities and its glazes’ colors. As a painter, he found flat surfaces limited and began to paint on the clay shapes he built.Lucero brings up the issue of beauty — “For some reason contemporary artists are not interested in making beauty part of their work. My feeling was, art was always about making something beautiful.”The exhibition traces Lucero’s sculptural adventures chronologically — first, shard works, followed by a group of large heads in Brancusi-like repose, their surfaces alive with with dream images; then an earthy group, fish, frog and beetle forms.Slender “totems” of stackedobjects tower up close to 10 feet; series of pudgy seated figures, radiant with color, are loosely based on pitcher shapes; the most recent combine found objects with ceramic work.Surfaces and shapes jostle provocatively, drawing from an exuberant mix of references — from pre-Columbian to African art history, classical, avant-garde and popular culture.Moths and frogs are favorite images, as are bar codes used sardonically to comment on art’s commodity status and practically as a spot for the work’s date. Faces replicate, surreally, on the backs of heads, on breasts, as disembodied hypnotic eyes, as a moth-mask. Symbols and images make visual puns, tell stories, evoke landscapes, moods, nightmares and oppression, warn of pollution.No computer-assisted art here. Lucero emphasizes his belief in the hands-on aspect of making art. “It’s important that people take time to do this labor of love, to discuss these ideas,” he said.
Newspaper Details
Brownsville Herald
Brownsville, Texas, US
Sun, Dec 15, 1996
Page 25
Full Page
Clipped by
Susun W.
USA 13 Nov 2021
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