Collection: True Grit, Selected By Lexa Walsh (online exhibition)

About the Exhibition

These artists get to the essence of what makes ceramics so wonderful- its imposed and inherent meaning, its ability to playfully perform mass, structure, architecture, figuration, and gooey, chunky painterliness.  All of these works have qualities I strive for myself as an artist coming back to clay after 30 years away from it. 

About the Selector

Lexa Walsh is an artist and cultural worker based Oakland, CA.

She is a graduate of Portland State University’s Art & Social Practice MFA program and has a BFA in Ceramics from California College of Arts and Crafts. She was Social Practice Artist in Residence in Portland Art Museum’s Education department. She was a recipient of Southern Exposure’s Alternative Exposure Award, the CEC Artslink Award, the Gunk Grant and was a de Young Artist Fellow. Walsh has participated in projects, exhibitions and performances locally and nationally at Apexart, di Rosa, The Lab, NIAD, Oakland Museum of California, Portland Art Museum, Smack Mellon, Walker Art Center, and Williams College Museum of Art, and has done several international artist residencies, tours and projects in Europe and Asia.

Her upbringing as the youngest child of fifteen informs her work, as does practicing collectivity while coming of age in the post punk cultural scene of the 1990’s.  She founded the experimental music and performance venue the Heinz Afterworld Lounge, and worked for many years as a curator and administrator at CESTA, an international art center in Czech republic, whose team created radical curatorial projects to foster cross-cultural understanding. Walsh co-founded and conceived of the all women, all toy instrument ensemble Toychestra who has performed at SFMoMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Exploratorium, and Cité de la Musique. She founded and organizes Oakland Stock, the Oakland branch of the Sunday Soup network micro-granting dinner series that supports artists’ projects.

She is currently a 2018-19 Kala Print Public awardee, and has recently revisited making ceramics after a long hiatus.