Join ceramicists Marie Herwald Hermann and Anders Herwald Ruhwald in conversation with Shelley Selim, Curator of Design and Decorative Arts at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Hermann and Ruhwald will talk about their latest projects as well as their partnership in work and life. Hosted by James Zemaitis, Director of Museum Relations, R & Company.
ABOUT THE PANELISTS
Shelley Selim is the Curator of Design and Decorative Arts and Interim Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, where she provides curatorial oversight of the museum’s design and decorative art collections, as well as its two historic homes—the Lilly House and the Miller House and Garden. She was previously the Jeanne and Ralph Graham Assistant Curator at Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and a curatorial assistant at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. She has lectured and written widely on design, craft, and art.
Marie Herwald Hermann currently resides in Chicago and Copenhagen. Typically poised on modest shelves, her ceramic objects sit in serene, self-confident perfection, or wiggle themselves into amorphous blobs, as if evading attention. Taken together, they assemble themselves into abstracted still life sculptures, or perhaps encoded sentences, communicating a message quietly but intensely. In a discipline that tends towards the obvious when it comes to color—either basic brown or garishly polychrome—her palette is deeply considered, tending toward unorthodox yet harmonious color combinations. These effects are further extended through the subtle manipulation of glazes, in a range from glossy to matte, and the inclusion of other, softer materials such as silicone. All of these techniques bind themselves together to create microcosms, miniature worlds, in which traditional associations with ceramic (function, ceremony, decor) are present as if in a half-remembered dream. Marie Herwald Hermann’s pieces are in the permanent collections of the Cranbrook Art Museum, MI, the Danish Arts Foundation, Denmark, the Denver Art Museum, CO, to name a few.
Anders Herwald Ruhwald is Danish-born, based in Chicago, Detroit, and Copenhagen. During his time as the head of ceramics at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Ruhwald produced imposing atmospheric meditations on urban upheaval, transforming entire interior spaces into permanent art installations. These rooms were populated with semi-abstracted figures, on which Ruhwald often left the impression of his innumerable fingerprints, as if to say, “I was here.” Since relocating to Chicago, Ruhwald continues to use clay as an extension of the self, creating total environments and large-scale freestanding objects that encourage material investigation and personal reflection. He has exhibited at venues including the Clay Studio, Philadelphia, Cranbrook Art Museum, MI, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, MOCA Cleveland, and Volume Gallery, Chicago, among many others.