Rodger Mack

Last updated • 4 min readFrom Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
Rodger Mack
Rodger Mack, Midnight Music,1990.jpg
Midnight Music, 1990, located on the grounds of the U.S. Consulate General, Barcelona, Spain
Born(1938-11-08)November 8, 1938
DiedSeptember 16, 2002(2002-09-16) (aged 63)
Education Cleveland Institute of Art, Cranbrook Academy of Art

Rodger Mack (1938, Barberton, Ohio 2002, Syracuse, New York) was an American sculptor, painter, ceramic artist and educator. [1] He is best known for his large-scale bronze and steel sculptures. His works are featured in national and international museums and gallery collections including MACBA - Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, [2] Arkansas Art Center, [3] Stone Quarry Hill Art Park, [4] the Oscar Krasner Gallery, [5] and the Grand Valley State University collection. [6]

Contents

Mack was a faculty member for more than thirty years at Syracuse University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts. He served as the school’s first director from 1982-91. [7] As an alumnus of the Triangle Arts Association, [8] Mack worked with notable artists such as Anthony Caro, [9] Jaume Plensa, and Helen Frankenthaler. [10] The Spanish/Canadian artist Jesús Carles de Vilallonga travelled to Syracuse to study with Mack and produced several sculptures in bronze and aluminum under his tutelage.

Mack's work and process has been featured in books such as Launching the Imagination: A Comprehensive Guide to Basic Design by Mary Stewart [11] and American Ceramics: The Collection of Everson Museum of Art edited by Barbara Perry and published by Rizzoli International Publications. [12]

A documentary film entitled "A Resonant Chord — Rodger Mack and the Creative Process" features his art and philosophy. It was produced by the Syracuse Alternative Media Network and features original music by Marc Mellits and Edward Ruchalski. The film was commissioned by the Society for New Music in 2014. [13]

Life and career

Rodger Mack was born on November 8, 1938, in Barberton, Ohio. He enrolled at the Cleveland Institute of Art as an industrial design student, and he was intent on using what he learned in college to advance in a career of car design. Yet after a summer job at General Motors, where Mack realized that sculptors did not actually get to design the cars, just make three-dimensional models based on designs produced by someone else, he decided that perhaps car design was not for him. Mack received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Cleveland Institute of Arts in 1961, and his Master of Fine Arts degree with a concentration in sculpture from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan in 1963. After graduating with his master's degree, Mack received a Fulbright Scholarship. This allowed him to travel to Florence between 1963 and 1964 to further his art education. While in Florence, Mack learned multiple casting techniques and created sixteen cast-bronze sculptures at the Bruno Bearzi Foundry.

Shortly after Mack's return from Florence, the governor of Arkansas asked him to help found the Arkansas Art Center, which offered a BFA degree program. Mack taught drawing, three-dimensional design, and ceramics, and also constructed a foundry with the help of students. After four years, however, the BFA program was terminated, and he elected to move on to other endeavors.

In 1968 Syracuse University hired Mack as a sculpture professor. He received tenure in 1971, just a few short years after he began teaching, and between 1982 and 1991 Mack served as the director of the university's School of Art and Design in the College of Visual and Performing Arts. During this time Mack played an integral role in the creation of the Comstock Art Facility, which provided studio space for all sculpture students to work under a single roof, along with art students working in other media. He also helped to enhance the sculpture program's enrollment size and reputation. Many viewed Mack as one of the most important bronze sculptors in the country, and it was his presence at Syracuse University that drew many students to the program. After stepping down from his position as the director of the School of Art, Mack returned to teaching full-time. Syracuse University officially recognized his excellence as a professor multiple times. In 1991 Mack received the Chancellor's Citation for Exceptional Academic Achievement, and in 1999 he received an Outstanding Faculty Award from the College of Visual and Performing Arts.

Mack became famous for his large-scale bronze and steel sculptures, described by one newspaper reporter as “graceful, winding, and abstract.” The artist drew inspiration for his sculptures from his every day experiences, finding creative expression in anything from the shape of a shadow on the surface of an object to musical compositions. Throughout his lifetime Mack exhibited his work nationally and internationally, and his sculptures were bought by many museums, including the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse and the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York. He had a large number of solo exhibitions in New York City, many held at the Krasner Gallery.

Publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Earle Fraser (sculptor)</span> American sculptor (1876-1953)

James Earle Fraser was an American sculptor during the first half of the 20th century. His work is integral to many of Washington, D.C.'s most iconic structures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Voulkos</span> American artist

Peter Voulkos was an American artist of Greek descent. He is known for his abstract expressionist ceramic sculptures, which crossed the traditional divide between ceramic crafts and fine art. He established the ceramics department at the Los Angeles County Art Institute and at UC Berkeley.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Hayes (sculptor)</span> American sculptor, painter, and ceramics artist

David Vincent Hayes was an American sculptor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daniel Rhodes</span> American sculptor and artist

Daniel Rhodes was an American artist, known as a ceramic artist, muralist, sculptor, author and educator. During his 25 years (1947–1973) on the faculty at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, in Alfred, New York, he built an international reputation as a potter, sculptor and authority on studio pottery.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean-Marc Bustamante</span> French artist, painter, sculptor and photographer

Jean-Marc Bustamante is a French artist, painter, sculptor and photographer. He is a noted conceptual and installation artist and has incorporated ornamental design and architectural space in his works.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Everson Museum of Art</span> Art museum in New York, USA

The Everson Museum of Art in Downtown Syracuse, New York is a major Central New York museum focusing on American art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ralph Bacerra</span> American artist

Ralph Bacerra was a ceramic artist and career educator. He lived and worked in Los Angeles, California.

Regis Brodie is a tenured Professor of Art at the Department of Art and Art History at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY and a potter. Since 1972, he has been serving as the Director of the Summer Six Art Program at Skidmore College. He also wrote a book called The Energy Efficient Potter which was published by Watson-Guptill Publications in 1982. He started the Brodie Company in 1999 in the interest of developing tools which would aid the potter at the potter's wheel.

Tetsuo Ochikubo (1923–1975), also known as Bob Ochikubo, was a Japanese-American painter, sculpture, and printmaker who was born in Waipahu, Hawaii, Honolulu county, Hawaii. During the Second World War, he served with the 100th Battalion of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. After being discharged from the Army, he studied painting and design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Art Students League of New York. In 1953, he spent a year in Japan, studying traditional brush painting and connecting with his ancestry. He worked at Tamarind Institute in the 1960s and is best known for his entirely abstract paintings and lithographs. Along with Satoru Abe, Bumpei Akaji, Edmund Chung, Jerry T. Okimoto, James Park, and Tadashi Sato, Ochikubo was a member of the Metcalf Chateau, a group of seven Asian-American artists with ties to Honolulu. Ochikubo died in Kawaihae, Hawaii in 1975.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arnold Zimmerman</span> American sculptor

Arnold Zimmerman (1954-2021), also known as Arnie Zimmerman, was an American sculptor and ceramic artist. His work ranged from monumental to miniature, and abstract to figurative, encompassing totemic vessel forms, tabletop sculpture and figures, murals, and room-size installations. He was part of a multi-decade, 20th-century shift in American ceramics during which artists challenged clay's identification with function and craft, engaging fine-art domains such as emotional expression, social commentary, figuration and narrative. Zimmerman first gained recognition in the 1980s for deeply carved, architectonic sculptures characterized by rough physicality, rhythmic surfaces, gestural presence and Italian Romanesque influences. In the mid-1990s, he shifted to figurative work that critic Donald Kuspit wrote, examined the interaction of finite man and infinite matter, artist and creative work: "There is a sense of futility and folly as well as seemingly senseless idealism and innocence built into Zimmerman's parables of the all-too-human."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sergei Isupov</span>

Sergei Isupov is a ceramic artist born in Stavropol, Russia, now living in Cummington, Massachusetts, United States, and Tallinn, Estonia. He was educated at the Ukrainian State Art School in Kiev and went on to graduate in 1990 from the Art Institute of Tallinn in Estonia with Bachelor of Arts and Master of Fine Arts degrees in ceramic art. He has since exhibited widely in both solo and group exhibitions, received numerous awards, and widely collected by museums and private collectors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rupert Deese</span> American ceramic artist

Rupert Deese was an American ceramic artist. He is known for innovative design and decoration of high fired ceramics. Deese wrote "It is my hope in making these vessels that as the perception of their beauty diminishes over time, they will sustain themselves by pleasant usefulness."

Steven Montgomery is an American artist most often associated with large scale ceramic sculpture suggesting industrial objects or mechanical detritus. He received a Bachelor of Philosophy degree from Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan, and a Master of Fine Arts from the Tyler School of Art of Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Harris Deller is an American ceramist. He is well known for his black and white incised porcelain. He spent most of his career teaching at Southern Illinois University and has work on display in the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in New York as well as other collections.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Luise Clayborn Kaish</span> American artist (1925–2013)

Luise Clayborn Kaish was an American artist known for her work in sculpture, painting, and collage. Throughout her career, Kaish's work was exhibited and collected by major museums, including the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Jewish Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Kaish created monumental sculptures in bronze, aluminum, and stainless steel, which remain on view in educational, religious, and commercial settings across the United States and internationally.

Susan Hale Kemenyffy is an American artist who works primarily in drawing and print media. She is known for the innovative raku art she created in collaboration with her husband Steven Kemenyffy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sharif Bey</span> African American artist, ceramicist and professor

Sharif Bey is an African American artist, ceramicist and professor. He produces both functional pottery and ceramic and mixed- media sculpture, using a variety of forms and textures. His body of work reflects his interest in the visual heritage of Africa and Oceania, as well as contemporary African American culture. With his colorful large-scale bead sculptures, Bey explores the cultural and political significance of ornamentation and adornment.

Victor Spinski was an American artist and professor best known for his ceramic works in the trompe l'oeil style.

James Little is an American painter and curator. He is known for his works of geometric abstraction which are often imbued with exuberant color. He has been based in New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Phillips (sculptor)</span> American sculptor

David L. Phillips is an American sculptor best known for his public artwork including large bronze sculptures. Phillips has been described as a "Sculptor to Nature" because his work often combines cut stones with bronze castings in a natural setting. He also made a half dozen sculptures spread over 50 acres of the forest in New Hampshire. They range from "Toothed Stone" to the delicate placing of bronze molded leaves atop a granite fieldstone and a boulder inlaid with a whimsical bronze face.

References

  1. "Rodger A. Mack Obituary (2002) Syracuse Post Standard". Legacy.com.
  2. "Mack, Rodger | MACBA Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona". www.macba.cat.
  3. "Arkansas Art Center: Past Exhibitions". Archived from the original on 2015-09-22. Retrieved 2020-07-27.
  4. "Stone Quarry Hill Art Park". sqhap.org. Archived from the original on 2020-07-28.
  5. Canaday, John (January 23, 1971). "Works of Art From 40 Tiny Islands". The New York Times.
  6. "Grand Valley State University Art Gallery". artgallery.gvsu.edu.
  7. "Rodger Mack Papers An inventory of his papers at the Syracuse University Archives". library.syr.edu.
  8. "Alumni". Triangle Arts Association.
  9. Brenson, Michael (July 23, 1982). "An upstate farm where artists grow". The New York Times.
  10. "Triangle Artist's Workshop 1990". Specific Object.
  11. "Search Results - Powell's Books". www.powells.com.
  12. Everson Museum of Art (1989). Perry, Barbara (ed.). American Ceramics: The Collection of Everson Museum of Art. Rizzoli. ISBN   9780847810260.
  13. "Syracuse Post Standard Archives, Jul 17, 2014, p. 56". NewspaperArchive.com. July 17, 2014.