Penn State Laureate Chris Staley talks about art, life, pottery and

The Sludge
of Clay
Penn State Laureate Chris
Staley talks about art,
life, pottery and why he’s
inspired by Finland
by D.K. Higgins
“Y
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ou need to know yourself before you can find a voice in something you’re
doing,” says ceramic artist and Penn State Professor of Art Chris Staley.
“How do you take your thoughts and feelings and add something to, in my case,
this 10,000-year-old tradition of making pots? How can you add to that tradition where there’s some sort of poignant personal expression taking place that’s of
quality? For any artist, that’s a hard thing to do. There’s a lot of mediocrity out
there.”
While growing up, mediocrity was not encouraged in the Staley household. “I
wasn’t a very good student in terms of grades,” Staley admits. “My mother was
very success-oriented. Her father was the president of MIT and the first scientific
advisor to [President Dwight] Eisenhower, so she was freaked out that I wasn’t
very good at math and didn’t really excel. So I just gravitated to things I could do
with my hands.”
Staley’s father, Paul, was a plant manager for Proctor & Gamble, and the
company transferred him every two or three years—from Boston to Long Beach,
Calif., to Kansas City, Mo., to Weston, N.J. “Because we moved all the time, I was
always the new boy in class, and it was hard to remake friends,” Staley recalls. “So
I’d spend all my time outdoors in the woods, my brothers and I, and I’d just play
with sticks and dirt. As soon as I got in an art class I thought, ‘God, I can actually
use my hands to make something.’ I just felt this profound sense of connection.
There was something very salutary about it.”
By the time Staley entered high school, Paul had been named CEO of an international chemical company called PQ, headquartered in Valley Forge, and his
family settled down in the Philadelphia area. Staley was a standout athlete, particularly at rugby and football. Although he was somewhat undersized, he was a quick,
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aggressive linebacker and captain of the Conestoga High School
football team that won the Central League Championship in 1972.
When he graduated the following year, he decided to enroll as an
art major at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, mainly
because it was a perennial Division III gridiron power.
“I had these allusions that maybe, if I could lift more weights and
get bigger, I could do really well in Division III football,” Staley
says. “And then maybe I could play professional football. But I
tore the cartilage in my knee and had several operations. It became
pretty apparent that I wasn’t going to do anything much with athletics, so I put all my energy into being an artist.”
While Staley had skills in drawing and painting, he was a natural
with the potter’s wheel, and clay became
his primary medium. After earning his
bachelor’s in fine arts at Wittenberg in
1977, he applied to a number of graduate
schools, including Alfred University in
western New York—a veritable mecca for
aspiring young potters. “Everyone wanted
to go there,” Staley says. “It was the most
competitive place to get into, and it had
the best facilities and the best faculty.
Everyone sort of mutually agreed that Alfred was the best graduate
program in ceramics in the country.”
It is now famously known throughout the art world that Staley
was turned down by every graduate program he applied for, but
it was his rejection by Alfred that stung the most. (He remembers
collapsing to the floor when he heard the news.) However, his
high school art teacher, Paul Bernhardt, was an Alfred alum and
he arranged for Staley to show his work to Robert C. Turner, a
brilliant, internationally known potter and a faculty member at
Alfred.
Turner told him, “The work just isn’t mature enough. It’s not
developed enough. You need to go someplace where they can really
teach you about making a better pot.” Turner recommended the
Kansas City Art Institute so Staley could study with Ken Ferguson,
another giant in the field of ceramics. “Ferguson was probably the
greatest teacher, many would say, in the 20th century in this country,” Staley says. “So that’s where
I went, and frankly, that’s where
I really grew. It made me have
tremendous convictions about
the power of education.”
Staley attended the Kansas
City Art Institute for a year
and, under Ferguson’s tutelage,
put together a new portfolio,
submitted it, and was accepted
everywhere he applied, including Alfred University, still his
“
first choice. While at Alfred, he had the privilege of studying with
Turner just before his retirement from the university in 1979. Staley
considers Turner, who died in 2005, to be the most influential artist
he has ever known.
His next stop was the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design.
“I was hired as a technician, initially,” Staley explains. “I was ready
to build kilns and shelving units, but the director of the ceramics
program told me to clean out the basement of the building, so I was
just loading up dumpsters with trash. And I’m thinking, ‘I got my
MFA to empty trash?’”
Fortunately, his prowess with the potter’s wheel would deliver
him from these janitorial indignities. “Since I was a really good
thrower, they asked me to teach some
throwing classes. Eventually they offered
me an adjunct teaching job at RISD, so it
felt like I scratched and clawed for it. But
it’s a competitive world in the sense that
if you want to teach at the college level
you’ve got to be able to articulate your
ideas in a pretty concise and provocative
way for people to want to listen. RISD
was a blessing, because there was really
some top-notch faculty there, and I was completely taken aback by
how much they had to say. And I felt very sheepish, but I asked one
of them, ‘How do you guys know so much? I feel like I can’t contribute.’ And I’ll never forget what the person said. He said, ‘We just
read. Everyone’s reading books. We’re reading all the time, and then
you just share that.’” Staley has been a voracious reader ever since.
In 1985, he was hired by Wichita State University as an assistant
professor, and he also began to do one-person exhibitions at the
Garth Clark Gallery in Los Angeles and New York. “Garth Clark
was the preeminent figure in the field of ceramics,” Staley says. “I
mean, he was making it financially in midtown Manhattan selling
ceramics! No one had ever done that before! So I was one of his
marginal artists, not one of his blue-chip people, but he stayed with
me. He said, ‘I want you to bleed for me. When you have a show,
you give me everything!’”
Showing with Clark led to other important exhibitions, including
a group show called “American
Potters Today” at the Victoria
& Albert Museum in London.
Staley has now been showing at
galleries and universities around
the world for more than three
decades.
However, the stint in Kansas,
which lasted four years, was a
disaster. “Everything imploded at
Wichita. I got married, my wife
left me, and I was devastated,
I like delicate,
sensitive things,
but there’s also this
very aggressive
element to the
work as well.
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Publicity shot for the European Ceramic Workcenter, 2005
At Witchita State, 1988
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”
The Archie Bray Dark Period, 1990
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Sliced Black Apple Covered Jar, 2009
Half Moon Covered Jar, 2009
element to the work as well.”
After a year at the Bray, Staley applied in 1990 for a job at Penn
State. Considering his reputation as one of the finest young potters
in the country, it was no surprise that he was offered the position
of assistant professor of ceramic art. “Penn State had already had a
bit of a history because of that conference called ‘Super Mud’ and I
thought there was a lot of potential here. And it was relatively close
to my folks down in Philadelphia, so I took the job,” he explains.
“It’s been phenomenal, honestly, in terms of the students I’ve been
able to work with and the support I’ve gotten from the administration. I’ve put a lot into it but I’ve also felt really supported. I’ve gone
through quite a number of deans and directors but, by and large, it’s
been a really positive experience.”
Staley has now been happily married for 20 years. His wife, Kate,
is a child psychologist, and they have two teenage daughters, Tori
and Rowan.While he acknowledges that State College is an ideal
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place to raise a family, he believes there are professional advantages
to the area, as well. “You can really double down and focus on something if you need to. My wife’s from New York City, and there’s a
tremendous energy there that can be draining. I feel like it’s a little
different here,” Staley says. “I just think that there’s a lot to look
forward to in this town, in terms of it evolving and changing. It can
have a real small-town mentality, which isn’t necessarily in concert
with being a real progressive university.”
Last spring, Staley was named the Penn State Laureate for the
2012-13 academic year. The Penn State Laureate, a university position established in 2008—coincidentally, the same year that Staley
was named a Penn State distinguished professor—is “a faculty member in the arts who strives to bring greater visibility to not only his
or her own work but also to the arts and the university,” according
to the Penn State website. As part of his function as laureate, Staley
has created a series of videos about art and creativity with filmmaker
Cody Goddard. Video titles include: “How Do You Grade Art?”;
“Body As Vessel”; “Can You Teach Creativity?”; and “Creativity in
Sports” (with Penn State Coach Bill O’Brien).
“I’ve been visiting the Commonwealth campuses, and we’ll keep
doing that throughout the year,” he explains. “And then I’ll be
Work in Progress: True Grit
Covered, 2009
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absolutely devastated,” Staley says. “Then the director of the job
there didn’t get along with the dean, so he came back to ceramics and basically cut me off at the knees and tried to get me out
of there.” In 1989, Staley resigned from Wichita State, placed his
belongings in a storage facility, packed a van with a few meager possessions and a potter’s wheel, and headed to Helena, Mont., home
of the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts, the Bray for
short, where he was an artist-in-residence for a year.
“People over the years have fondly called it a halfway house for
potters,” Staley says. “That’s where the three giants in clay really
got started—Rudy Autio, Peter Voulkos and Shoji Hamada. That’s
where Ken Ferguson was the director. So it had a legendary reputation. It’s gone on to be this international ceramics center.”
Staley did some of the best work of his career at the Bray, including a series of spectacular black pieces that have a decadent, industrial quality. “When I was doing that work, it really spoke to me. It
told me something. I started using black clay, and I was tearing it
up. It was like … when you’re in a fit of rage and you want to just
break something? That’s what I was doing with my work. It was the
catharsis of the divorce and the s**t that happened at Wichita State.
I like delicate, sensitive things, but there’s also this very aggressive
Still Life, 2006
giving a few public talks, continuing with the videos … and doing
some writing. I’m thinking of an essay titled ‘Teaching with Tears.’
I don’t think there’s enough emotion and feeling in education, so
I started teaching a class two years ago called ‘Art and Life: Where
They Intersect.’ And that’s really why I became a laureate. It was
because of that class. That class brought me to my knees. It made
me cry. Because I’ve never been in a learning situation where students were so engaged.”
In the first “Art and Life” class, Staley asked the students to write
a short autobiography and then read it aloud in front of their classmates. Of the 24 students, eight of them were in tears as they read.
Staley scanned the classroom and noted that when the readers were
crying, the rest of the class cried along with them.
“There’s so much artifice and bull***t in our culture. I mean, no
one listens,” Staley says. “That’s why Finland’s been ranked number
one [in education] for the last 10 years. The average high school
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teacher in the U.S. speaks 85 percent of
the class time. In Finland, it’s 40 percent.
So what’s happening is that the students
are engaged and taking ownership of
their own education. Here it’s all about
memorization and testing. They don’t
even test in Finland! Very few tests, very
little homework, and they’re blowing us
away! Here we pour money and do more
testing. We just don’t get it. So part of
being a teacher is listening. It’s creating
space. And if you want your students to
talk, all you have to do is ask a question
… and leave it to silence. People want to
fill the silence.”
Staley explains that he’s a true believer
in the power of silence, especially since
he began attending Quaker meetings 12
years ago. “People just sit in silence until
whoever feels moved by something larger
than themselves gets up and speaks from
the heart. I ask my ‘Art and Life’ class,
‘Why did you sign up for this class?’ And
I’ll never forget one student who said, ‘I
don’t like small talk. I like big talk. And I
hope we talk big talk in this class.’”
“And big talk is this,” Staley says, tapping his chest. “It involves the heart and
the stomach and the hands and real stuff.
And all of that, in some way, comes back
to the sludge of clay.” •SCM
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