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Kurt Weiser
Iguana , 1992, china paint on porcelain,
17 x 9 x 5.” Collection of the ASU Art Museum. Gift of the FUNd at Arizona State University and the Museum Store.

Kurt Weiser has taken China painting, a ceramic tradition associated with decorative and production work, and redefined it. Painting on eccentric forms, often suggestive of fruits or other organic forms, he creates ambiguous images that are simultaneously beautiful and distorted. The figures, often women, have attenuated limbs and fingers that intertwine with floral elements. Here the woman cradles an iguana, her oddly-shaped face pensive--- or vacant.

Weiser, born in Lansing, Michigan, in 1950, studied ceramics with Ken Ferguson at the Kansas City Art Institute and earned a Master's of Fine Arts at the University of Michigan in 1976. He was director of the famed Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts in Helena, Montana, from 1979 until 1988. In 1989, Weiser came to Arizona State University, where he is now a Regents Professor. His work is including the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Museum of Contemporary Ceramic Art and Institute of Ceramics, Shigaraki, Japan; Helsinki Museum of Applied Arts, Finland; and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Since 1982 he has exhibited with the Garth Clark Gallery, New York, and the Frank Lloyd Gallery, Santa Monica, CA. The ASUAM will originate a mid-career exhibition of the work of Kurt Weiser to tour nationally. This project, generously supported by The Windgate Foundation, will be shown at the ASUAM in 2008.

Marilyn A. Zeitlin