Display: Sculpture by Anne Currier

Sculptor Anne Currier is the recipient of the 2018 Langley H. Kenzie Award which entitles the awardee a solo exhibition at the Burchfield Penney Art Center. In Display, Currier presents sculpture from her Anamorphosis series; DP, a new series of wall-mounted sculptures created specifically for the exhibition; and Continuum, an installation of tile panels designed this year in collaboration with Boston Valley Terra Cotta in Orchard Park, New York. Opening October 12, 2018 as part of the museum’s M&T Bank Second Friday event, the exhibition will remain on view through Sunday, April 28, 2019.

Anne Currier is a sculptor whose medium is ceramic. She is professor emerita from the renowned Alfred University, New York and has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and Alfred University. In 2012, she was recognized as a Fellow of the American Crafts Council. Her receipt of the first place fellowship from the Virginia A. Groot Foundation in 2017, as well as the Langley H. Kenzie Award, have made possible her tile design project, this solo exhibition, and a catalogue about her work.

Currier’s sculpture is both a study in balance and an invitation to discovery. As she has stated, her Anamorphosis series reflects “the interplay of masses and voids. Absence and presence, light and shadow, stasis and motion are subject matter. The dimensional tension and dynamics of human figures found in Greek and Buddhist temple pediments, and most recently, the structural flatness and synthesis of planar shapes in Cubist still life paintings intrigue me.” Drawing inspiration from nature’s palette observed from her Allegany County home and studio, Currier creates surfaces reminiscent of mottled boulders, slate and rust, as well as intangible fog.

Her sculptures are in numerous private and public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art in Sedalia, Missouri; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Kyung-ju, South Korea; and the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. As invited artists, Anne Currier and Giselle Hicks will be co-teaching a Ceramic Sculpture workshop at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, Colorado August 20-31, 2018. The Anderson Ranch strives to be “a place for artistic discovery, community and dialogue.” 

Beginning in 2009, Currier has collaborated with Boston Valley Terra Cotta to create unique ceramic tiles for interior walls. Her first commission,  La Stanza di Linea, is a 14 x 40-foot wall in the Choral Room in the Miller Performing Arts Center at Alfred University, Alfred, New York. Incorporating three different tiles to create the pattern, the tiles were mounted to the wall utilizing Boston Valley’s unique clip system. Then, architects working with Boston Valley Terra Cotta on 688 Broadway, a 14-unit luxury apartment building in New York City’s NOHO neighborhood, chose one of Currier’s tiles for installation in the entryway. Now, her latest tiles will be displayed in public for the first time on two free-standing walls in the Burchfield Penney Art Center. She utilized both wheel-thrown and hand-built techniques to create undulating waves, articulated in both positive and negative profiles, and coated with uniquely formulated glazes that accentuate the rise and fall in the tiles’ surfaces. One is a semi-opaque iridescent satin white; the other is an opaque charcoal satin that breaks with a bronze sheen.

The Langley H. Kenzie Award was created to honor Mrs. Kenzie’s dedication as an artist and to support others like her. It recognizes an outstanding artist from the biennial, juried exhibition, Art in Craft Media, by granting the recipient a solo exhibition in the following year. The award is supported by the Langley H. Kenzie Award Endowment, established by her daughters, Rachel King and Mary Kenzie. The exhibition is fittingly presented in the Sylvia L. Rosen Gallery for Fine Art in Craft Media, named for the Burchfield Penney Art Center’s patron whose generous support makes possible the biennial exhibition, as well as collection development. Past recipients of the Langley H. Kenzie Award include Bethany Krull (2010), Karen Donnellan (2012), Jesse Walp (2014), and Jozef Bajus (2016), who respectively work with ceramics, glass, wood, and fiber with recycled materials.

The exhibition has been curated by Nancy Weekly, Burchfield Scholar, Head of Collections & Charles Cary Rumsey Curator at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, and Burchfield Penney Instructor of Museum Studies at SUNY Buffalo State.