Current Perspectives: Janet Neuwalder

Join us at the Kansas City Art Institute for a lecture by KCAI Alumni Janet Neuwalder ('84 Ceramics). Neuwalder is a contemporary clay installation artist, vessel maker and educator. Her work evokes a sense of history and reflects her reverence for the natural world, the microscopic and macroscopic, and the poignancy of human experience. She seeks to preserve, illuminate and memorialize universal stories.

Working primarily in clay with mixed media, Neuwalder’s installations present a world of “contemporary fossils”, objects and topographies that embody and reflect the resilience of the human spirit. These landscapes are poised somewhere between growth and decay, recognition and abstraction, beauty and viscera. Her Japanese American and Austrian Jewish heritage informs much of her work and aesthetic. Ranging from hundreds to thousands of elements, these labor-intensive forms, like migrations, seemingly float and flutter. Her paper-thin porcelain forms confirm that fragility is strength. Neuwalder’s domestic vessels offer a moment of connection and tactile beauty in our increasingly virtual world.

This event is free and open to the public.

Neuwalder has exhibited her work nationally for four decades, including at the American Craft Museum in NY, Michael John Kohler Museum, Arrowmount School of Arts and Crafts, Greenwich House Pottery, and Barnsdall Park, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, and in the Ceramics Now exhibition at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse NY. Her work is included in several public and private collections nationally. She is a Ford Foundation recipient and a documented artist of Focus on the Masters, Ventura, CA. Neuwalder attended the Kansas City Art Institute in KC, MO and the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI. She has taught for 35 years and recently retired from California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, CA. She currently lives and works in Ventura, CA.