Residency Artist - Visual Arts

Angelica Pozo

1193 Holmden Ave.
Cleveland, OH  44109
Phone: (216) 241-6936
Fax: (216) 861-6566
Email: angelica@angelicapozo.com
Website: www.angelicapozo.com

As a ceramic artist working primarily with tile and sculpture, my work easily moves between the realms of painting and sculpture. While continuing to create studio work for gallery exhibitions, my biggest endeavors fall in the world of public art. There I have often been called upon to create work that pertains to very diverse subject matter. I have enjoyed researching and learning about new worlds of information and like sharing that enthusiasm with residency participants. They get to see that art making is not merely taking tool and material to hand, but requires much pre-thought, preparation and often some research in order to get a concept across. In the process they gain hands on experience for the Fine Arts Academic Content Standard Benchmarks: Connections, Relationships and Applications and Creative Expression and Communication. I am comfortable working with any age group of any experience level and particularly like to encourage collaborations. I have had two wonderful residencies at an early learning center where pre-schoolers learned how to create ceramic sculptures and have recently completed an intergenerational residency where the 7th and 8th graders of a school were paired with Senior Citizens from the general community to create tile panels depicting important milestones in a person's lifetime. Other residency projects have involved creating expressions of cultural or communal identity, collaborating with a poet and a dancer for inter-disciplinary residencies and an examination and representation of the local flora and fauna. While ceramics is my main medium, if a kiln is not available at the site, I am most willing and capable to find a way to work with other materials.

My studio work has mostly been inspired by flora and nature as well as referring to femininity. With that influence, the work has engulfed various series from tile and wall pieces to 3-dimensional sculpture and installations. My most recent series has me working in a new way of creating separate components in a somewhat bead like manner. These are later stacked together to create "stemmed" flower forms growing out of what appears to be a small tentative piece of turf. With these I am playfully exploring different types of clay and different forms as I create artificial plants as stand-ins for the natural ones we continue to drive to extinction day by day. Through all the different transitions, making environmental statements has continued to be a big motivation behind my work.

I have been a professional full-time self-employed artist for more than 22 years. As such I have continuously moved back and forth between creating public art, studio work and my involvement in a variety of teaching artist and arts in education experiences. I started my arts training in 2nd grade with oil painting lessons which continued up through sophomore year in art college where I discovered clay and promptly switched my school and my art major. I moved on to receive my BFA in ceramics from SUNY College of Ceramics at Alfred University in Alfred, NY and my MFA in ceramics from University Michigan in Ann Arbor. I have authored the book Making and Installing Handmade Tile, which has positioned me within the national and international ceramic arts community as one of the leading authorities on handmade tile making. That has also expanded another avenue of work which is being called upon to conduct tile workshops throughout the country.