Wayne Higby, a professor at Alfred University since 1973, has a show at the MAG. We hadn’t seen it so we decided to stop in this afternoon, check it out and hear the talk he was giving about the work. We discussed slipping out if we didn’t care for the talk but that would have been difficult because we had front row seats, the only ones remaining.
A couple of people talked about Higby’s work and then they joined Wayne on the stage to discuss prearranged questions. They were all long winded answers, fitting for a long time teacher, so there was only time for one question from the audience. One of the two gentlemen who introduced Wayne spent quite a bit of time on the vocabulary of containment as used in the descriptive names of earthen formations. Rim, bowl, crater, basin, valley, canyon, vessel. All of these fit the structure of Higby’s ceramic pieces. They put up a slide of the Arizona landscape that looked exactly like the motifs that Higby uses in his pieces that look like bowls.
I say “pieces that look like bowls” because Higby is an artist. He says his work is not about the American West but acknowledges that it is influenced by the landscape. And then there was a lengthy discourse on the age old battle of historical bias and snobbery in art vs. craft. If this sounds rather tedious it really wasn’t. It is always fascinating to hear people talk about art. You know it when you see it.
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