No Fear: Ann Weber's Art of Mastering Transitions

Going back to 1991, when Ann Weber first started working in cardboard, she had been experimenting with many different materials because, after graduating from CA. College of Arts and Crafts, [now CA. College of the Arts] she said knew she wasn’t going to continue working in clay. 

Ann came to school as a production potter, from the craft world. For 15 years she had a pottery studio/store in upstate New York in Ithaca. Later, in New York City, she made pottery that she sold in pottery stores, specialty stores and in craft fairs up and down the east coast. 

Eventually, she burned out on the business so she took a class with Jim Mackons at Greenwich House pottery, who was doing one of a kind pieces. Mackons told Ann to attend graduate school and to go to the west coast because that’s where artists were using clay as an art material. 

Ann had all kinds of schools to choose from and she chose Viola Frey, because she was a woman — “the lone woman in the pack.” Ann had seen her work at the Whitney and a show in 1984 in New York City. 

When she came out to California, she said she had no idea what to do. She had ended her lease on her pottery studio in New York, she sublet her apartment on Perry St. between Bleaker and W. 4th and she didn’t know if she would return to New York.

“I just knew I wanted to stop doing what I was doing,” Ann said. “But I really was in a huge  quandary and had no idea how to find my way from production pottery to making art. So I started sitting in on Viola’s classes where she would sit on the potter's wheel, giving classes to the freshmen and 18 year-olds and showing how you could make little lumps, and then pile them up and make a sculpture and that was interesting to me. 

Her teacher, Viola Frey said, “You are a beginning artist for the first 10 years out of school,” 

So, Ann experimented with plaster, painting, printmaking, paper mache, fabric by Klaus Oldenberg and her father had a canvas company from which he sent rolls of canvas to her. She did that for four to six years. Then she moved into a second-floor studio in Oakland. Carrying plaster up the two flights of stairs wasn’t an option and there was no elevator. 

“I had all these cardboard boxes that were flattened in the middle of a new 100 sq. ft’ studio,” Ann said. “I thought, make the forms out of cardboard, who cares what the material is. I found that I could cut them into strips and use a [plier] stapler to staple them together and make large organic forms, like I had been making them in clay. I felt like it was just another material to experiment with but it's now been decades, over three decades and I feel like there are infinite possibilities.

“I came to art school thinking they were going to teach me how to be an artist. Their idea, at art school, is if someone is coming in, it’s their journey. The artist has to figure out how to find a way in art.”

She knew I was struggling and she told me to go look at some real art. Look at some Kandinsky ...” 

   ~ For the rest, listen to our episode and how Ann had her Eureka moment.

https://annwebersculpture.com/