UNSEEN AND MISREMEMBERED

About the Exhibition

Much of the natural world is concealed or obscured from us. We think we know. I think I know clay. I walk on the clay under my house and the clay under all of Chicago every day but it is unseen.

I stripped away all of the vegetation in the field by my barn and exposed the clay surface I have never seen. I strapped a camera under the belly of my mule and rode her all over that field. With every step the clay flew into the air. I replanted the field and don’t see the clay anymore.

I was given soil borings from downtown Chicago. Pipes driven 30 to 40 feet into the clay ground. Pipes filled with the clay to be tested before a skyscraper is built on top of it. We never see the exposed clay in Chicago.

Encyclopedias were written to record and explain everything. Hundreds of years ago scientists travelled the earth in search of the unknown and unseen. One returned to France, hired an artist to draw the animals from his description for the encyclopedia he was writing. Misremembered or inaccurately explained, the artist drew the mule.

About the Artist

Katherine L. Ross has been a member of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago faculty since 1981 and is now Professor Emeritus. She received her Bachelor’s degree in 1976 from the State University of New York at Fredonia and her MFA in 1980 from Tulsa University.

Recent exhibitions of her work include the 65th Scripps Annual, Jingdezhen National Ceramic Museum, China; Sanbao Ceramic Art Museum, China; The Centers For Disease Control Museum in Atlanta; Kohler Art Center, WI; San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, TX; and the Urban Center for Contemporary Art, MI. Katherine is the recipient of many awards and grants including the Chicago Artists International Program Travel Grant, Arts Midwest/NEA Grant, Indiana State Arts Commission Master Fellowship, Banff Center for the Arts Residency, and the Williamson Memorial Artist in Residence at Indiana State University. She was named a Walter Gropius Master Artist for 2012 by the Huntington Museum.

Katherine has worked with several architects including Michael Graves to produce porcelain objects for the Taubman/Kalisman residence, and Ullman and Fil Architects to restore terra cotta facades. Other architectural projects include the the Rare Book Room of the Makinac Island Library, the terra cotta façade restoration of the Merrott Building in Indianapolis, chimney pots for John Bryan’s Arts and Crafts museum house, P.E. Geurin Co. porcelain fixture production, and residential installations for the Manuel Pererias and W. H. Zahn houses in Chicago.