Global artist shares experience with students

 
Beth Cavener Stichter and her work in progress. (Photo by Phyllis Shier)
 
 
PULLMAN – Artist Beth Cavener Stichter was inspired by her parents and – thanks to a gift to WSU – she was able to pass on some of that inspiration to WSU art students last semester.
 
Cavener Stichter devoted three days to demonstrations, studio visits with students, slide shows and a lecture detailing the development of her career and the process she goes through to create art that resonates with the public.
 
Her visit was made possible by the Florence Forst Artist in Residence Fund, which allows students to connect with established artists and art historians through exhibits, seminars and public lectures.
 
The fund was established in 1992 by Edward and Florence Handy Forst. Florence Forst (B.A. ’36, English), a designer and psychology professor, credited her artistic development to her association with professional artists, including Washington State College painters E. Harley Fletcher and Clyfford Still.
 
Established artist
Cavener Stichter’s accolades include a coveted first-place Virginia A. Groot Foundation grant, which recognizes artists with “exceptional talent and demonstrated ability in ceramic sculpture or sculpture.” Her work has appeared in a number of galleries, including the Garth Clark Gallery in Manhattan, the Renwick Art Gallery in Washington, D.C., and Claire Oliver in New York.
 
“The Four Humors: The Phlegmatic,”
the piece Beth Cavener Stichter
demonstrated and worked on
during her WSU visit, has been
sold to the 21C Museum in Louisville,
Ky., where it will join the permanent
display in March.
Her most recent body of work, “On Tender Hooks,” was on display through Dec. 5 at Claire Oliver, and she is creating another body of work for the gallery this winter.
 
Cavener Stichter, who lives in Garfield, Wash., holds an M.F.A. from Ohio State University and a B.A. from Haverford College, where she triple-majored in physics, astronomy and fine arts. Her father, a molecular biologist, taught her to study things from the most minute to the grandest scale. Her mother, an art teacher, inspired her love of art.
 
“She taught me how to express that awe and fascination with the world around me through my fingers,” Cavener Stichter said.
 
Slow start
Though well established now, Cavener Stichter told students that creating art that connected with the public was a struggle.
 
“What I really wanted from my work was to make people feel and think about certain things that were moving me,” she told WSU students in her lecture.
 
Translating those ideas into sculpture that her audience would relate to took years of effort. Early hybrids of animals and humans looked “fantastical,” Cavener Stichter said. Her attempt at sculptures with “awkward human bodies” and “trapped animal personas” looked “creepy, dark and emotionally charged with a primal sense.”
 
While she liked those pieces, they missed the mark when it came to the public.
 
“When I showed them, it freaked people out! Nobody empathized with them, so that didn’t work,” she said.
 
Finding her muse
She tried again – this time taking an animal body, endowing it with human characteristics, and having it express human emotions. That combination struck the artistic balance she sought.
 
“For me this was the most exciting moment of my life,” Cavener Stichter told students. “Finally, this weird science experiment, artist vision and emotional content were coming together in one piece. I felt like I knew where I was going for the first time in my career.
 
“Cavener Stichter has a fresh take on the medium of ceramics with her very expressive works,” said senior fine arts major Trevor Park. “Her work is an exploration of the senses … it moves beyond craft and into the realm of narrative.”
 
“I want to thank WSU and the community at large,” Cavener Stichter told the audience at her lecture. “I can’t tell you how much you’ve given back to me over the past two to three days . . . not only about what I’m doing but also sharing with me (your) own work and excitement about making art and communicating with the community at large. It’s just been such a high.”
 
For information about the Forst fund and giving to the College of Liberal Arts, contact Ellen Jampol, senior director of development, at cla.giving@wsu.edu or 335-3830. Make an online donation at http://libarts.wsu.edu/college/give. To give to WSU, see http://foundation.wsu.edu.
 
 
“Transforming gifts” is an occasional series about the ways gifts to WSU have changed and improved how the university fulfills its missions of research/scholarship, teaching/learning and service.