Clay Art Center

For the premiere exhibition in our new space, we wanted an established artist from the New York area, whose work offered compelling insight into our environment and community.  Zimmerman’s work, with its intimate portraits of New York’s inhabitants amidst architectural abstractions of the city’s landscape, offers just that.    About his work, Zimmerman states “The focus of this installation of narrative ceramic sculpture is the city and its denizens. The architectural fabric of the city is like a stew; the inhabitants are the spices for the stew. With this analogy I start by making a group of simple hollow rectangular clay shapes that form buildings, roadways, and walls, loosely suggesting the built urban environment referencing different historical periods. The cross section of each architectural part is roughly 13 cm. This constant dimension corresponds to the regularity of the street plan of Manhattan and the way the footprint of buildings conforms to common lot sizes of the gridded block…

…“I mix memories of my life and experiences in the 30 years I’ve lived in New York with the study of historical events to achieve dream-like narratives. I’m interested in bringing in to focus what is seen in one’s peripheral vision on the streets of a city -- pedestrians, workers, homeless people, accidents, parades, fights, crimes, police actions to name a few -- situations of all types seen fleetingly out of the corner of one’s eye. This periphery is an important existential terrain from which I pour narratives of everyday life into my clay work. Knowing where you are but still being able to be surprised by where you are; discovering meaning in terrain you no longer notice on a daily basis. I have a recurring dream about walking down a familiar street in the city and suddenly seeing an alley that I never saw before. I walk down the alley and find different people, architecture and neighborhoods; sometimes I’m in the past in something like a Jacob Riis photograph. I can feel safe or mortally threatened  - it’s different each time.

“This dream is a metaphor for my art-making process and specifically for this installation I call New Lost City. The reality of the radical changes due to gentrification in the parts of New York I frequent are producing in me feelings of wonder, displacement and longing that mirror the turbulent and unsettled interior psychological terrain of my dreams. Working on this project is “waking” me up more to the realities of city life and the meaning and metaphor in the built environment and allowing me, through my work, to touch a deeper level of understanding about the human condition.”

Arnie Zimmerman is an actively working artist with a professional career starting in 1980 after graduating with a MFA from The NY State College of Ceramics at Alfred, NY in 1979. Arnie’s main focus has been studio work primarily using clay and the techniques he learned in his training as a starting point for making sculpture. Over the last 25 years the conceptual arc of Arnie’s work has traveled from abstraction to narrative sculpture using the figure. Arnie is best known for the series of monumental vessel form series made throughout the 1980’s. Prime examples of this work can be seen at: The Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY. The Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI. Contemporary Art Center, Honolulu, HI, National Museum of American Art, Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, Shigaraki,  Japan. Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit, MI. The Frost Art Museum, Miami, FL.  Arnie has been awarded many prestigious grants over the last 25 years these include 3 grants from the NEA, 3 grants from NYFA, Arts International, Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund International Artists Grant for residency in Portugal. In 2005 Arnie was awarded a Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant.  From 2005 thru 2009 Arnie worked on a multi media collaborative installation titled “Inner City” shown three times in Portugal, The Netherlands and United States. Arnie has taught and lectured at scores of Colleges and Universities throughout the world with his last teaching position at Hunter College, City University of New York.  Arnie has lived and worked in NYC since 1981 his studio is in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.