Studio Sessions
Work of Walls
with Rosa Glaessner Novak
March 2025
About the Studio Session
What is a wall? When is a wall a wall (a material mass) and when does it become something else (a sculpture or a symbol, perhaps)? When is a wall an impenetrable entity and when is it a permeable barrier? When does a wall contain, house, divide, or perform multiple of these actions at once? What is the work of walls?
In this Studio Session we look at the how and why of wall building and its relationship to ceramics. We consider the building materials of walls from brick to concrete, the workers who have historically built walls and their labor organizing based upon wall building, and the work that walls perform once made. The out-of-print, pocket-sized book from 1927, Little Blue Book No.1232, Practical Masonry: Cement and Brick Work, will become our guide for abstractly translating pragmatic and conceptual questions about the work of walls into the work of clay.
About the Lead Artist
Rosa Glaessner Novak is an artist working across ceramic practice, archival research, and Risograph printing. Her current work traces histories of land, labor, and materials involved in the production of art and the built environment. Previous projects have included archival research and writing on the artist and designer Edith Heath, explorations of the work of women in land art, and the co-creation of Mutual Stores, an artist-run collective and residency program in Oakland, California.
Rosa holds a BFA in Ceramics from California College of the Arts and is currently completing her PhD in the History of Art at the University of Michigan. She is a member of CAVE, an artist-run collective in Detroit, a member of the Marxism Lab at the University of Michigan, a proud member-organizer of the Graduate Employees Organization local 3550, and a co-founder of the Risograph press, Each and Every. She is writing a dissertation on the history of clay workers’ organizing in the twentieth century United States.
Logistics
This session is scheduled for Sundays March 2, 9, 16, 23 from 10 am - noon PST (that’s Los Angeles time).
Registration is $250 and includes all four sessions.
Participants gather via Zoom.