Alex Stern and Jenn Kaplan Exhibit Work in Gallery 103
Gallery 103, also called the Library Gallery, is a living space that is open and visible for all visitors to the Art and Architecture Building. In spite of its small footprint, the exhibit area has a persistent impact on students, faculty, staff and visitors.
On January 30, 2023, an exhibition of the works of Alex Stern and Jenn Kaplan, titled, “RORRIM” opened in Gallery 103 on the first floor of the Art and Architecture Building.
Kaplan and Stern were interviewed by WUOT’s Todd Steed about the works in this exhibition. Listen at:
https://www.wuot.org/2023-02-09/rorrim-exploring-art-with-alex-stern-and-jenn-kaplan
This exhibition was also the subject of a feature in The Daily Beacon, UT’s student news magazine. https://www.utdailybeacon.com/arts_and_culture/campus_events/school-of-art-lecturers-alex-stern-and-jennifer-kaplan-talk-rorrim-exhibit/article_a8051c60-ad5c-11ed-ac6e-3fc854fa96e2.html
Alex Stern has lived and worked in Los Angeles. He received his BFA in Studio Art from the University of
Colorado at Boulder and his MFA in Painting from Boston University. He was awarded the Kahn Prize and the Joseph Ablow Memorial Painting Prize from Boston University in 2020. In the same year, he was featured in New American Paintings. In 2021 he was awarded residencies at MASS MoCA and CalArts in collaboration with Hauser & Wirth.
He explains his approach to art, saying, “The cross examination of art-history and contemporary culture from my personal vantage point yields a resonance of ideas from varied perspectives. Making paintings is a prayer-like practice, meditating on the unknown known, the unnamable—a transformative space where the subjective converts to the objective—all while contributing to and participating in a discourse that spans a wider continuum of history. While I approach my work with specific questions in mind, my practice includes an openness and freedom to undo or shift original intentions.”
Jenn Kaplan teaches Beginning/Non-Major Ceramic Sculpture and Beginning/Non-Major Pottery, Intermediate and Advanced Pottery and Ceramic Sculpture, as well as Figure Sculpture/”figuration in space” a graduate and undergraduate level course for the Ceramics Department at the UT School of Art.
Kaplan recently finished a year-long residency at Armory Art Center where they taught a myriad of courses ranging from Ceramic Chemistry to Wheel Throwing and Altering, Soda-Fire workshops as well as Figure Sculpture in partnership with the Norton Museum of Art. Kaplan earned their MFA from Notre Dame and BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in between which they were Lead Instructor at Penguin Foot Pottery and taught Urban Gardening at Marwen in Chicago for several years.
Jennifer Kaplan is an art-science-activist whose ceramics nurture the intimately tangled relationships between human and nonhuman living organisms. Their ceramic practice blooms out of a magnetic love of teaching, the variety of processes involved, and finding the edge of what clay is capable of. Their recent work takes form as a delicate reflection of collective grief~ frequently thrown, altered, and figurative.
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