Visiting Artists: Billie Theide and Shane Harris

Lecture
February 21, 2014
Richmond Center for Visual Arts
5:30 p.m.

Porcelain workshop
February 21 and 22, 2014
Sculpture studio K1118, critique space K1206 and metals/jewelry K1150
9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Workshop

This hands on workshop will introduce participants to small-scale plaster moldmaking, hand building on a miniature scale, low fire glazes, lustres, and decals. Students will prepare damp boxes, make small plaster drying bats, and make one or more one- or two-part small plaster molds for press molding and porcelain slipcasting. Students will create unique three-dimensional forms by combining slip cast elements with hand built elements. Students will be introduced to low fire glazes and metallic lustres. Commercial and handmade decal processes will be demonstrated and participants will have the opportunity to make laser toner decals.

Billie Theide

Billie Theide holds a M.F.A. from Indiana University in Bloomington and a B.F.A. from Drake University in Des Moines. She is the recipient of a Visual Arts Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and five Artists Fellowship Grants from the Illinois Arts Council. Her creative work has been included in over 450 invitational, competitive, group and one-person exhibitions. Theide's work is in the permanent collections of the de Young Museum of the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco in California; Museum of Arts & Design in New York; the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.; Evansville Museum of Art in Indiana; Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, Czech Republic; National Museum in Wrocław, Poland; Porcelain Museum in Riga, Latvia; Civic Art Gallery in Panevėžys, Lithuania; Sonny and Gloria Kamm Collection in Los Angeles; and Sanford M. and Diane Besser Collection in Santa Fe. She is a distinguished member and past-president of the Society of North American Goldsmiths. Theide is professor of art in the School of Art + Design, the James Avery endowed chair in the College of Fine and Applied Arts, chair of Studio Arts and chair of ceramics and metal at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Shane Harris

Shane Harris' ceramic sculptures represent a playful perspective on intimacy and relationships. He slip casts porcelain and coalesces the miniature forms with toys, hair, jelly paint and balloons to explore sensuality, vulnerability and intimacy. There is a subversive quality to his work. Harris holds a M.F.A. in Ceramics from Indiana University in Bloomington and a B.F.A. in Ceramics and Sculpture from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. His creative work has been exhibited in the NCECA Biennial, Tampa Museum of Art in Florida, and Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati. Shane Harris' work is in the permanent collections of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University and Eastern Washington University in Cheney. Shane Harris is Professor of Art in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Illinois at Springfield.