Jennifer Kaplan
Location
Swannanoa, North Carolina
About
Jennifer (Jenn) Kaplan is an Assistant Professor at Warren Wilson College and a Bailey Grant Recipient.
She teaches figure sculpture workshops at Mighty Mud, were recently a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, and instructor at the Knoxville Museum of Art, have attended residencies at Cub Creek Foundation and Armory Art Center where they taught Ceramic Chemistry, Wheel Throwing
and Altering, Soda-Firing and Figure Sculpture in partnership with the Norton Museum of Art.
Jennifer earned her MFA from The University of Notre Dame and BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in between they were Lead Instructor at Penguin Foot Pottery and taught Urban Gardening at Marwen in Chicago. Jennifer has shown in the Snite Museum of Art, Red Lodge Clay Center, Companion Gallery, Kansas City Clay Guild, Saratoga Arts Center, Queen City Clay, Relay Ridge Gallery, Appalachian Center for Craft, the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center as well as others primarily in the Midwest and Southeastern United States.
Artist Statement
Emotional Expressionism in Ceramics Studios: The Universal Implications of Bravery by Jennifer Kaplan.
This essay unpacks the value of showing up bravely in ceramics studios as an educator and student, both porous to the disguised lessons of ceramic processes and how this kind of emotional
expressionism has outward implications for social change, environmental sustainability, and recording history as an entangled personal and collective experience.
Through the convergent lessons of Robin Wall Kimmerer, Paulo Freire, Donna Haraway, Parker J. Palmer, 10 years of teaching experience, and endless failures in clay, I will describe why coming from an honest and flawed “I” perspective, active listening, and hope as work can offer us theoretical insights into practical and transformative global action.
We will embrace the parallels of local materialism as a mode of agency and discuss the relational experiences of atmospheric firing and meals together as a powerful model to build speculative futures.
After this discussion, I hope we can all enter our next educational spaces with vulnerability and porosity to the unknown outcomes of play and collective action.