Artist Talk Series

Sanford Greene is a nationally recognized illustrator and comic book artist originally from Greeleyville, S.C. Known for his work on major titles like “Black Panther” and “Batman,” Greene’s dynamic ink work and layered narratives explore culture, place and resilience.

Peter Lenzo is a widely recognized ceramic sculptor with a national profile. The New York City native, who grew up in Detroit, moved to South Carolina in 1992 after getting an adjunct position at the University of South Carolina. Peter Lenzo is known for sculptures based on traditional southern face jugs. Lenzo distorts the facial expressions and sometimes attaches bizarre, fantastical, kitsch, and grotesque objects onto a traditional face jug form. Some of his face jugs are more realistic portraits while others are pure fantasy.
     
Lenzo took his first clay class when he was ten years old at The School of Arts and Crafts in Detroit. It was not until age 14, however, that Lenzo decided to pursue clay seriously after seeing his brother turning a vessel on a potter’s wheel. At the age of 15, he was given a potter’s wheel and one year later dropped out of conventional high school. Lenzo attended an alternative program to earn his diploma and throughout continued to take pottery classes. In his twenties, Lenzo was involved in a biking accident that resulted in chronic Grand Mal seizures. Peter began working with wood, creating reliquaries and sculpture but switched to exclusively working in clay in the 1990s as his seizures got worse. His work has been interpreted as a visual expression of the painful experience of having a seizure. Some of the face jugs are covered with found objects including shards stuck into the faces as if the head were exploding. Lenzo’s work transitioned from resembling stylized traditional Southern face jugs to more realistic self-portraits. Peter moved to Oak Park, IL in 2018 to live with his brother.
   
Lenzo was selected for the 1995 and 1998 South Carolina Triennial exhibitions at the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia, the 2011 exhibition Triennial Revisited and the 701 CCA South Carolina Biennial 2011 and 2013, all at 701 Center for Contemporary Art in Columbia and Thresholds, a 2003 exhibition of Southeastern art dealing with religion and spirituality that traveled extensively throughout the Southeast.

Lenzo’s work is in several museum collections, including at the South Carolina State Museum, the Columbia Museum of Art in Columbia, SC, the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC, and the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC. His solo exhibitions including those at the Spartanburg (SC) Museum of Art, the European Ceramic Work Center in Den Bosch, The Netherlands, Great American Gallery in Atlanta (GA), Ferrin Contemporary gallery in Massachusetts, and Terra Incognito Gallery in Oak Park (IL).

Lenzo and his work have been featured in numerous books, exhibitions catalogues and articles about ceramic sculpture and Southern art. They include the Threshold catalogue, 500 Figures in Clay (2005), Robert Hunter’s Ceramics in America (2006), and Poetic Expressions of Mortality: Figurative Ceramics from the Porter-Price Collection (2006). He holds an MFA from Wayne State University in Detroit and taught at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. 

Artist Statement

    “The impetus for my ceramic sculptures came from traditional Southern face jugs. I had switched to working in clay exclusively in the 1990s. I had been making sculptural assemblages but had to stop because I couldn’t use a table saw any longer as I increasingly suffered from seizures, which are the result of brain damage sustained in a bicycle accident in my youth. Table saws and seizures don’t mix. I always had been intrigued by face jugs, especially those made by Southern slaves. I taught middle school art, and we tried to develop teaching materials to explore southern history, and so I decided to have them make face jugs. I had never made any, so I first created several myself. The first ones I didn’t quite like, and so I made some more. Each batch got better, but more importantly, when I finished a batch, I couldn’t wait to make the next one. It just seemed to be in my bones. It felt like I had made them before - that I was catching up where I had left off. I wanted to let everything go in my current life and go back to a previous one that I had discovered. I once was lost and now was found. From the jugs I came to the current, more elaborate sculptures. It started when my then 4-year-old-son Joe started to stick pottery shards, which I used for teeth, in one of my jugs. He went wild and put them all over the nose, eyes and lips. I began to help him and gradually really liked the results. My style was very different, and I had much more respect for the face, but to this day, Joe claims he made me famous.”

Peter Lenzo
December 10, 1955 - October 6, 2024