Kathy Erteman

Ceramic artist Kathy Erteman creates vessels as meditations on elegant functionality while disregarding utility. Her work embodies the idea of nonfunction derived from function in a straightforward, clean manner. Erteman loves the simple, the direct, the pared down, the well-executed.

Erteman’s practice includes throwing clay on the wheel, often retaining the ridges of the method on the interior while smoothing the exterior for her glazing technique. She modifies a monoprint technique, placing rough volcanic glaze onto paper, applying the paper to the clay body. She uses varying thicknesses and densities to create the range of effects within her work. Erteman has usually worked with tightly thrown or molded vessel forms, so the monoprint images provide a foil to the precision.

Erteman has been working professionally with ceramics for over 40 years, beginning her career as an intern for Judy Chicago for the “Dinner Party.” Erteman has had extensive exhibitions throughout the United States as well as within the Taipei Museum of Fine Arts, China. She has served as a professor at Parsons School of Design and the State University of New York at New Paltz; she has also given lectures at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem, and at the US Embassy for Tibet in China, where she was a Cultural Exchange Grant recipient.