ArtDiction magazine, Vol. 37, Spring 2024, Sculptures & Installation: Cover story “Sculpting Emotion” on my work and process. See pages 38 to 49.
Spotlight article on my work in the April 2019 issue of Ceramics Monthly magazine:
Originally published in April 2019 issue of Ceramics Monthly, page 80. http://www.ceramicsmonthly.org . Copyright, The American Ceramic Society. Reprinted with permission.
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Mark Jenkins in the Washington Post, September 8, 2023: Style Section, “In the Galleries” — Review of my collaboration with photographer Gary Anthes Figure and Ground at Studio Gallery, Washington, DC:
“Interspersed with Anthes’s photos are nine of Corson’s distinctive pit-fired ceramic figures, most of them anatomically correct men. Perhaps most akin to the photographer’s work is “Rabbit Hole,” which positions a sitting man inside a metal hexagon whose interior is mirrored to fracture and yet amplify the figure. Crouching, kneeling or stretching, the local sculptor’s singed bodies are taut and poignantly solitary. Gentler are his ceramic heads of boys placed on stacks of children’s books, suggesting emotional and intellectual growth and not just stark physicality.”
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Mark Jenkins in the Washington Post, December 12, 2021: Style Section, “In the Galleries” — noting my piece in “Expansive exhibit celebrates works and legacy of beloved abstract sculptor,” a tribute show to Nancy Frankel at Studio Gallery, Washington, DC:
“Among the pieces whose sensibilities seem closest to Frankel’s are . . . Chris Corson’s glazed-ceramic ‘Same Inside,’ whose boxlike forms appear to melt at the core where they intersect. All are substantial in material and execution, yet conjure a sense of vulnerability and transience.”
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Mark Jenkins in the Washington Post, September 16, 2018: Arts & Style Section, “In the Galleries” — review of my show Being Human at Studio Gallery, Washington, DC:
“Also at Studio is “Being Human,” a selection of Chris Corson’s pit-fired ceramic sculptures of nude male torsos. These charred, earthy figures are similar to the ones he exhibited at the same venue a year ago, but with a twist. As before, the Maryland sculptor’s statues are mostly headless. This time, though, Corson provides supplemental objects that can be inserted into the main statue’s open neck holes. One statue is outfitted with five small figural sculptures to be added at the viewer’s whim; another offers rocklike forms with transferred-photo faces of the artist as a boy. These mix-and-match pieces have a primal humanity, but their interactivity doesn’t make them any less personal.”
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Mark Jenkins in the Washington Post, September 10, 2017: Style Section, “In the Galleries” — review of my show Speak to Me at Studio Gallery, Washington, DC:
“Offering an inadvertent contrast to Sarna Marcus’s eggy paintings [discussed earlier in the column], Chris Corson crafts ceramic nudes, all of them clearly male and all but one headless. There’s even a figure that peels open his skin and muscle, splitting his chest like one of Marcus’s fleshy sacs.
“Corson says he focuses on the torso because it ‘shows the essence of who we are.’ Yet the local artist also is intrigued by the surfaces, varied in texture and hue because he employs three firing methods. Most of the skins glimmer with sooty, metallic blacks. One is white, the better to serve as at the billboard for a few choice words from Emma Lazarus’s ‘The New Colossus.’
“The selection includes six large photographs of Corson’s work by Stuart Diekmeyer. Each is different, yet all show the same sculpture, which Corson fired repeatedly to yield different patinas. Without altering the form, the sculptor and his collaborator write a tale of metamorphosis.”
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Video about my 2019-2020 protest works, from a virtual tour of my studio in the Fall of 2020 (15 minutes):
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Blog Post Interview on the website of Studio Gallery, Washington, DC, September 16, 2019:
Jonathan Kamholz in AEQAI, September 23, 2017: “The Place of the Nude” — review of 9th Annual NUDE: Exploring the Uncovered Human Form at Manifest Gallery, Cincinnati, OH:
“It is easier to see what the other sculpture here, Chris Corson’s “Self-Confidence” (2015), is doing in this company. A raku-fired torso, there is something forensic about the piece, which is missing arms, legs, and—of course—head. It ends up being both monumental and mysterious. Like a number of works in the show, it seems allusive to earlier works—it has the prominent, muscular belly of Rodin’s naked, striding Balzac. Interestingly, even with all of the most telling parts missing, it suggests an abbreviated version of a complex self that both can’t be avoided and doesn’t want to be seen.”
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John Shipman, Executive Director of The Delaware Contemporary, in his juror’s statement for the catalog of Cartes Blanches, a 2016 exhibition of the Washington Sculptors Group:
“I am especially drawn to the works of artist Christopher Corson. In Fire and Self-Confidence, I celebrate with Mr. Corson these aged vessels, tested and pushed forward by the heat of transformational experiences, or frozen and crazed by what we hold under our skins, which always bubbles to the surface. The older we get, the more we understand these works, yes?”
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Ben Simons, Director of the Academy Art Museum, Easton, MD, in his juror’s statement for the catalog for the Maryland Federation of Art’s 2019 Winter Member Show at the Circle Gallery, Annapolis, MD. Simons gave my piece the second place monetary award:
“As a juror, I am drawn to work that has the ability to evoke a whole world, whether imaginatively unbounded, or as a self-contained microcosm. . . . In the sculpture “Bare Earth”, a huddled ceramic figure presents the post-9/11 reality of a sheltering, charred human body that expresses all of the nobility of survival and endurance.”
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“First Place Prize for Sculpture” monetary prize awarded by Kim Bannister, Director of the Julio Fine Arts Gallery at Loyola University in Baltimore and juror for the Maryland Federation of Art’s 2018 Winter Member Show at the Circle Gallery, Annapolis, MD.
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“Best in Show Bronze” (3rd place) monetary prize awarded by Lily Wei, independent critic, ArtNews contributing editor, and juror for Art in Clay II: Figuratively Speaking, a 2014 exhibition of the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition.
Chris Corson Sculpture 