Ikeda received his B.S. degree from Portland State University in 1970. His degree was in painting and drawing, but in his senior year he realized working with clay was what he really wanted to do. Recognizing Ikeda?s keen desire to work with clay, one of his professors urged him to apply for a scholarship to study ceramics in Japan. The Japanese government awarded him the Ministry of Education Scholarship and after three years of study at Kyota City University of Fine Arts, he received his Research Art Certificate. A few years later he earned his M.F.A. degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Shortly after receiving his M.F.A., Ikeda accepted an offer to teach at Ventura Community College in California. After only one year at the community college, he accepted a teaching position at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. Ikeda has received several faculty grants, and is now the head of the ceramics department at Kansas State University. Ikeda employs an unusual off-center throwing technique that requires perfect timing and coordination. He also builds some of his works by hand. Landscapes and the organic aspects of nature serve as his inspiration.
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Nugget
Ikeda received his B.S. degree from Portland State University in 1970. His degree was in painting and drawing, but in his senior year he realized working with clay was what he really wanted to do. Recognizing Ikeda?s keen desire to work with clay, one of his professors urged him to apply for a scholarship to study ceramics in Japan. The Japanese government awarded him the Ministry of Education Scholarship and after three years of study at Kyota City University of Fine Arts, he received his Research Art Certificate. A few years later he earned his M.F.A. degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Shortly after receiving his M.F.A., Ikeda accepted an offer to teach at Ventura Community College in California. After only one year at the community college, he accepted a teaching position at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. Ikeda has received several faculty grants, and is now the head of the ceramics department at Kansas State University. Ikeda employs an unusual off-center throwing technique that requires perfect timing and coordination. He also builds some of his works by hand. Landscapes and the organic aspects of nature serve as his inspiration.
Check, Czeck, Red Roses, Red Pitcher
The cofounder of the Kansas City Artists Coalition and former art editor of Helcion Nine, Bennett has played an active role in the Kansas City art scene for nearly four decades. She has been a visiting and adjunct professor at Kansas City Art Institute and lectured at museums and art departments at college campuses around the country for many years. A graduate of the University of Nebraska and recipient of its Achievement Award for the class of 1956, Bennett continues her reputation as a prolific artist and advocate for the arts in Kansas City. Her work is included in the collections of The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. Prominent corporate collections such as Hallmark, Incorporated and Prudential Life Insurance also include her work in their prestigious collections.
Pie Hole
Empress of India I
Stella is one of the fortunate living artists to have had two retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, New York, one in 1970 and another in 1987. His work has been exhibited widely throughout the world including faraway places such as the Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art, Japan; Hypo Bank, Luxemborg; Ritz-Carlton, Millenia Hotel, Pontiac Marina Project, mural Singapore; and Gas Company Tower, Pacific Bell Building, mural, Los Angeles. Empress of India I harks from Stella?s early years when he was often quoted saying, ?What you see is what you see.? The chevron design in this work indicates nothing more than what the viewer sees. The artist often expressed his own desire to have the viewer react to shape, balance, line, and color. This formalist approach to looking at works of art was popularized by art critic, Clement Greenberg.
Pinwheel, Arrested Movement
Blue Painting
Platter with Running Hare
Ferguson was Chairman of the Kansas City Art Institute Ceramics Department for more than thirty years. Voted one of the 12 greatest living potters in 1981 by readers of Ceramics Monthly, Ferguson has received numerous honors over the years. The recipient of two National Endowments for the Arts grants for craftsmen, a Mid-America College Arts Award for Studio Art, a Tiffany grant and an Alliance of Independent Colleges of Arts grant. His awards demonstrate how he has been recognized as much for his teaching as his art work. He has a reputation for inspiring his students to develop their own idiosyncratic styles while simultaneously instilling a respect for the medium of clay and its history. He has had over 100 exhibitions worldwide including a retrospective exhibition at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City in 1995. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Syracuse, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the American Craft Museum in New York City are among the numerous public and private collections worldwide that include works by Ferguson.
Untitled
Early in Dill?s career he was employed as a printer at the infamous Gemini G.E.I. in Los Angeles. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were some of the people he encountered during the time that he worked there. In fact, when Dill moved to New York in the early 70s he lived with Jasper Johns for a few months. He learned from Johns to never discard anything. He discovered from this that when things from his older pieces were left lying around his studio, the energy from these works just seemed to seep into the new pieces he was working on. His first break came in 1971 when he was asked to do a one-man show at the legendary Illeana Sonnabend Gallery in New York. Since this time Dill has exhibited in cities as diverse as Paris, Nogoya, Japan, Helsinki, Finland, New York , Seattle and Kansas City. His work is included in the collections of Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Chicago Art Institute, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and many more museums throughout the United States and abroad. Dill developed a dialogue amongst artists during the 70s that resulted in experiments formerly not used traditionally to make art. His influences were Rauschenberg, Keith Sonner, Robert Smithson, Dennis Oppenheim and Robert Irwin, all of whom were using materials from the earth to make their pieces as opposed to easel painting.
Single
Born in Sedalia, Missouri, Patten was an only child whose parents divorced when she was very young. She grew up close to her grandfather, Marion Hall, who sparked her early love of horses. In 1965 she graduated with a B.A. in German from the University of Kansas. Later, when one of her favorite horses was accidentally electrocuted, she suffered a bout with mental illness. In a television interview nearly twenty years later, Patten recalled with certainty that it was this ?sick and pitiful? period in her life which led to her discovering she really wanted to be an artist. She acted on this realization and received her B.F.A. from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1979. The unique and rather eccentric style of art that Patten brought to her work had no precedent in the Kansas City area. Her tendency to overload canvases with layer upon layer of oil paint with a palette knife gave her works a dramatic and emotional quality. Patten preferred working with canvases of up to nine feet or more in size. Patten?s independent vision resulted in wide recognition in her short sixteen years as an artist. In 1988 she won the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship with just a few slides and a one-page resume. Her work was featured in Art in America in June of 1995. Patten was 52 when she died in December 1995, a few short months after receiving the news she had liver cancer.