The show is: Ceramic sculpture offering contemporary expressions of mythological, art historical, and political themes.
William Foley
After receiving Bachelor’s Degrees in Art and Economics from UC Davis in 1972, Bill got an MA in Fine Art from Humboldt State in 1975 and, given economic necessity, stopped making art soon thereafter. But his loving wife Maryann has continued to believe there is a latent brilliance he will manifest if just given the opportunity and the venue. This space has turned out to be the venue and you will judge whether the result of his efforts is brilliant.
While at UC Davis between 1968 and 1972 Bill spent as much time as possible working among a later to become famous group of ceramic sculptors including Bob Arneson, David Gilhooly, Richard Notkin, Donna Billick and Marilyn Levine. Their influences have lain dormant in him for forty years in something like fossil form – apparently sufficiently “vitrified” to endure the hiatus.
Bill’s work is not at all figurative and tends to be either topical or funny or cryptic or sometimes just a shot at a pleasing shape. His intent is to do something with each piece that will call to mind the iconic, the ironic or the puzzling or the trite. Once in a while he shoots for profound, but that’s a harder target. Some of the trite or funny pieces in this show started out as attempts at profound that ended up on the rocks.
Maryann Steinert-Foley
Maryann Steinert-Foley completed a BA in Art Studio, with honors, at the University of California, Davis in 2011 and received the Departmental Citation for Outstanding Performance from the UC Davis Art Department Faculty. Her interest in sculpture derives largely from the years she worked in the historically fertile and creative atmosphere of TB-9 – the WWII era temporary building on the UC Davis campus which still serves as a ceramics teaching facility and is widely considered to be the place where, beginning in the mid ’60s, Bob Arneson and others oversaw the elevation of ceramics from craft to fine Art. The TB-9 idea that work ought to show “evidence of the artist’s hand” is prominent in Maryann’s sculpture.
Maryann currently shows with b sakata garo in Sacramento, the Pence Gallery in Davis, and the Epperson Gallery of Ceramic Arts in Crockett. Her work is represented in numerous private and public collections.
