The Edaren Foundation Presents: Gumbo Clayfest 2023 returns to TASI when ceramists descend on Beaumont July 6, 7, and 8!
No admission fee required, any donations accepted.
A total of NINE nationally-recognized ceramic artists will visit Beaumont, TX to demonstrate their unique works during ClayFest, only at The Art Studio! Here are some of the artists we are bringing to Beaumont for 2023 who haven’t visited in a long time. Stay tuned for more visiting artists to be announced soon!
Constant Albertson
I am white of European descent who grew up in inner city SE Washington, DC, which sits on the ancestral lands of the Anacostans, neighboring the Piscataway and Pamunkey peoples. I attended both black-majority DC public schools and white-majority Catholic parochial schools, benefitting enormously from both learning environments. What I learned from the juxtaposition of these two learning environments is that while I had problems, they were not made worse by my skin color, and that I sometimes was cut a break that wasn’t available to others through no fault of their own.
Currently I am an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Maine, teaching both art education and ceramics. I earned a PhD from Concordia University, Montréal (Art Education); a M.Ed (art, specialization ceramics) degree from McGill University, Montréal, Canada. I hold dual citizenship in Canada and the USA. My BFA, double degree in ceramics and sculpture, is from Washington University, St. Louis, Mo. USA.
My areas of research, teaching and service have in common the ceramic arts, storytelling, and social justice. My ceramic sculpture utilizes narrative as a means to explore bewildering personal, social and political issues, such as the environment, death, immigration, war, land, water, and healing. I am interested in how visual narratives can provide unexpected insight and empathy into our own and others’ realities. My doctoral thesis, Because Clay has a memory, which utilized oral history/story telling methodology,explored the interconnections between traditional instruction in the ceramic arts and teaching methodologies recommended by the Canadian Dyslexia Association for developing compensation for the specific learning disability, dyslexia. Taken from the positive psychology movement, my primary research question was, why do dyslexics succeed? Shortly after this, I became very interested in the intersections between useful teaching methodologies and environments for dyslexic students and other ‘minority’ identities. I am still asking, What conditions improve the odds for success? even when the cards are stacked.
John Eden
John Eden studied ceramics at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in London and Brighton College of Art in Brighton, England. He has taught at various colleges and universities in England, Canada and the United States. His work encompasses a range of functional vessels and sculptural work. He has shown his work internationally including China and Japan. In August 2023, he will retire from his teaching position at the University of Maine, Orono.
