MCCRACKEN, J.J. (American)

Hunger Project Performance Phildelphia 2009

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hunger Project 6

Hunger Project Detail

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hunger Project Performance Detail

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Hunger Project Performance 6

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hunger Project Performance 8

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hunger Project Performance a

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hunger Project 5

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IMAGES:       J.J. MCCRACKEN Google Images

WEBSITE:     J.J. MCCRACKEN

CONTACT:    

  • Artist-In-Residence, Red Dirt Studio, 3706-08 Otis Street, Mt. Rainier, MD 20712
  • To join my mailing list, click link above or send a message to: JJMcCrackenMailingList @gmail .com 
  • For other/general inquiries, contact my primary account: J.J.McCracken@gmail.com 
  • Other/alternate email: JJ@ JJMcCracken.com 
VIDEOS:

You Tube Video:   JJ McCracken Performance
The Martyr @ (e)Merge Art Fair, Washington, DC.             http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYNl8PDiu0I

Vimeo Hunger Project:        http://vimeo.com/29065131
Hunger, Philadelphia was commissioned by The Clay Studio (Philadelphia, PA) and Guest Curator John Perreault with support for development and planning provided by the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, a program of the Philadelphia Center for Arts and Heritage, funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and administered by the University of the Arts.
Hunger, Philadelphia was exhibited in support of the 44th Annual Conference of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts

Link:          Hunger Project  http://artaxis.org/ceramics/mccracken_jj/jj_mccracken.html

BIO/CV

J.J. McCracken received a B.A. in Anthropology from The College of William and Mary in 1995 and an M.F.A. in Studio Art from The George Washington University in 2005. McCracken is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, recently including a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2011), a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award (2011), and a Puffin Foundation Grant (2011).

Hunger, Philadelphia was commissioned by The Clay Studio and independent curator John Perreault. The project received support for development and planning from the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, a program of the Philadelphia Center for the Arts and Heritage, funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and administered by the University of the Arts. Additional project funding was provided in part by the William Penn Foundation (2010) and by a grant from the Harpo Foundation with sponsorship by the Arlington Arts Center (2009).

McCracken has also received a Chenven Foundation Award (2008) and both an Individual Artist Fellowship and a Small Projects Grant from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities (2008). Among other older awards, her STASIS project received “Best In Show” in the Ceramic Objects/Conceptual Material exhibition during the “Crafting Content” symposium at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville (2008).

J.J. McCracken has exhibited at venues across the United States and is currently building large scale projects with the generous support of a position as Artist-In-Residence at Red Dirt Studio in Mt. Rainier, MD.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books and Catalogues

100 ARTISTS OF WASHINGTON, D.C., by F. Lennox Campello, pub. Schiffer Publishing, Ltd., 2011

HUNGER, PHILADELPHIA exhibition catalog; pub. The Clay Studio, Philadelphia, PA ;2010

–With essay “Let Them Eat Clay” (about the work of J.J. McCracken), by John Perreault; pp. 4-15 –To order complete catalog, contact The Clay Studio at 215.925.3453 or info@theclaystudio.org

Articles and Reviews

”J.J. McCracken: Thirst,” by Danielle O’Steen; Art Papers, May/June 2012, pp. 40-1

“‘Thirst’ Comes to Brentwood Gallery,” by Wanda Jackson; The Sentinel; January 26, 2012

“Letter from Washington, DC,” by F. Lennox Campello; American Contemporary Art Magazine, March 2011, pp. 28-9

“Hunger Project: Philadelphia”; YoYoMagazine, Issue 1: AT ZERO; pp. 12-15; Winter 2011

“J.J. McCracken, taking the long view with ceramics,” by Kriston Capps; The Washington Post, Style section, p. C2 Monday, January 31, 2011

“Teach Them to Fish,” by J.J. McCracken; The Studio Potter, Vol. 39, No. 1; Winter/Spring 2010-2011 –click on “downloads” at bottom of main nav bar (far left) to access PDF of article

“Art Installation Features Hope Garden at Stenton Farm,” by Rachel Milenbach; The Shuttle, Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 1-2; February 2010

“J.J. McCracken: Living Sculpture,” by R. Stevie Jones; Ceramics: Art & Perception, No. 75, pp. 62-8; March-June 2009

“J.J. McCracken: Living Sculpture,” by Kriston Capps’ Art Voices, Issue 8, p. 42; October 2008

“Jenna McCracken, Living Sculpture”; Grammar.Police (online: http://grammarpolice.net); August 29, 2008

“The Malleable Present: J.J. McCracken,” by Chris Combs; The Washington Post Express; August 28, 2008      “Red Dirt Studio,” by Margaret Boozer; The Studio Potter, Volume 36, Number 1, pp. 24-30; Winter 2007-2008

“There’s A Party Over Here?” by Kriston Capps; The Washington City Paper, Galleries in Review 2007, p. 48; December 28, 2007

“Specimen,” by Jeffry Cudlin; The Washington City Paper, p. 49; March 23, 2007 “Stasis,” by Kriston Capps; The Washington City Paper, Volume 27, Number 6; February 2007

“White Meat Only, Please,” by Nina Beckhardt; The Hatchet (The George Washington University newspaper) ; February 15, 2007

“Chris Williams, J.J. McCracken at Meat Market Gallery; Part II, Stasis, by J.J. McCracken,” by Brian Barr; ARTifice: Fear and Loathing in DC ; (online: http://artificeau.blogspot.com); February 12, 2007

“Working in a Clay Mine”; Grammar.Police (online: http://grammarpolice.net); February 9, 2007

“New Sensations,” by Michael O’Sullivan; The Washington Post Weekend, On Exhibit, p. 31; August 19, 2005

“Ways of the Artist,” by Shelley Widhalm; The Washington Times, p. B1, B4; May 12, 2005

Selected Website Listings

 

“Best of D.C. 2012: Food Fight,” by Kriston Capps. Washington City Paper; 2012.
(online: http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/bestofdc/artsandentertainment/2012/best-food-fight)

“J.J. McCracken: ‘Thirst’,” by Jess Oros. East City Art , January 20, 2012.
(online: http://www.eastcityart.com/2012/01/20/j-j-mccracken-thirst/)

“The Old Power Plant: 35 Years of Ceramics at William & Mary,” by Leslie McCullough. William & Mary Art & Art History News, May 11, 2011. (online: www.wm.edu/as/arthistory/news/2011-alumni-exhibit.php)

“Art Scouts form groups at Arlington Arts Center,” by Douglas Galbi.
Ode Street Tribune; Saturday, June 19, 2010.
(review and video from Art Scouts exhibition, online at: http://ode-street-tribune.blogspot.com/2010/06/art-scouts-form-groups-at-arlington.html)

“Geophagy in Philadelphia,” by John Perreault. Artopia; April 12,2010.
(online: http://www.artsjournal.com/artopia/2010/04/star_of_doom_eastern_state_pen.html)

“It’s Alive,” by Stephanie Merry. Washington Post Online-Going Out Gurus; August 22, 2008. (online: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/goingoutgurus/2008/08/its_alive.html)

“and I’ll see you a baby of drying clay, so don’t you cry,”
“Living Sculpture Installation: Dress Rehearsal 1,”
“Living Sculpture Installation: Color 1,” and
“Living Sculpture Performances Day 1.” Popcorn arts blog; August 9-22, 2008.
(documenting exhibition installation for LIVING SCULPTURE, online: http://popcorn.typepad.com)

“AOM Visit One” and “Artomatic 2008,” plus reader comments.
Daily Campello Art News; Thursday, May 22 and Wednesday, May 28, 2008.
(online: http://dcartnews.blogspot.com/2008_05_01_archive.html)

STATEMENT — Focusing on the Living Experience—making & consuming, loss, the passage of time

J.J. McCracken constructs immersive installations. McCracken’s landscapes are composed of earth materials and activated by sound, smell, taste, and living models that move through them, focused on tasks they’ve been assigned. Sometimes, repeating cycles of productive activity yield accumulation—and then things fall apart. Other times, consumption is incessant but drones on, unable to satisfy. In McCracken’s work, there is (so far) always a foil for the notion of achievement, and there is (so far) always a reflection of the cycle of life.

Hunger, Philadelphia, a recent project, uses geophagy (clay-eating) as a launching point for a visual poem about need. Geophagia occurs worldwide, problematic in countries suffering severe food crises. During the exhibition, clay-covered models move through an arid, monochromatic landscape eating clay casts of fruits and vegetables. The excessive consumption of a visually bountiful but non-nutritive food substitute is central to the main idea of the project.

Older projects include Living Sculpture, a series of separate but interacting vignette stages built to house individual performances. Task-based activity cycles through making/un-making. Time markers that form flexible but regular intervals are made visible/audible through labor and product, and then through subsequent decomposition. Time itself appears to progress, invert, and suspend simultaneously.

Through an ongoing series of sketches she calls Slip/Skin Studies, McCracken explores thoughts about consumption and loss. There is often an attempt to recapture something missing, or a grasping at something just out of reach. Witness to the Passing of the World uses repetitive searching and discarding, and closes with a final act of gathering what is leftover as the action begins to subside. In the end, the discarded becomes the embraced.

Hunger

J.J. McCracken

Today, a child dies from hunger somewhere in the world every 6 seconds. In the interim, many more suffer “food insecurity”—persistent hunger and inadequate nutrition.

And yet, in the words of Josette Sheeran, Executive Director of the World Food Program, “There is enough food on earth for every human to have adequate access to a nutritious diet.”

More than a year ago, I began designing a multimedia sculptural installation in response to images pouring out of countries experiencing severe food crises.

The storm season was particularly harsh in 2007-08, and the world press brimmed with stories about soil runoff in already agriculturally challenged coastal countries. Food costs rose drastically as dependency on imports intensified.

Some of the images I found particularly striking depict people, most often women and children, preparing clay for sale, for consumption.

 Geophagy ge oph a gy (jē-ŏf’ə-jē; gee-off’ uh-gee) n. earth-eating; the practice of eating clay, ge.oph’a.gism  n., ge.oph’a.gist n.

Clay-eating is practiced worldwide for many reasons, including:

  • For binding (and eliminating) toxins in the body.
  • For neutralizing tannic acids and plant toxins in foods, such as in preparing acorn-meal or wild potatoes.
  • As a mineral supplement, as especially reported in pregnant women; red clays contain calcium, iron, potassium, copper, magnesium
  • As an anti-nausea treatment, to combat morning-sickness associated with pregnancy

There is a long history of human clay-eating passed down through generations across the globe, from Alabama and Georgia to Kyrgyzstan, from Korea to the Congo, from Ethiopia and Cameroon to the Caribbean and beyond. Archaeologists believe our ancestors practiced geophagy to survive the lean months of late winter because clay can suppress an appetite, combating the pain of hunger when food supplies are exhausted.

The Hunger project uses geophagy in an active installation as a launching point for a visual poem about need. Figures move through an arid, monochromatic landscape, rifling through a bountiful banquet, seeking sustenance but finding only superficial and nutritionally barren fare. The viewer is surrounded by activity: excessive consumption of an abundant but non-nutritive food source.

Philadelphia

I arrived in Philadelphia in the summer of 2009 excited to lay the foundation for Hunger, Philadelphia. I believed the topic of hunger provided a perfect stage for a food drive and planned to pair one with the geophagy installation. I also knew the work needed to be specific, reflective of this city, so I began studying Philadelphia’s response to hunger.

 

I volunteered at food distribution centers and homeless shelters. I filled shelves with canned and packaged goods, and watched them quickly cleared. I restocked, adding rows of salty, cheesy instant pasta and rice meals. I thought about the quality of the food as I stacked. It was the highly processed, preservative- and high-fructose-corn-syrup-laden foods that were most plentiful, and most desired. While the developing world was dealing with hunger in part by eating clay, in America we’re concentrating on cheap, low-quality, high-yield foods. Moreover, the Philadelphia Inquirer was running a food drive, collecting thousands of pounds of food, and I asked myself what my small project could realistically collect. I was increasingly concerned that my project’s donation would be so comparatively small and its distribution so fast that, ultimately, the families that received it would be hungry again the next day.

I began to understand that I wanted to design a more sustainable contribution. And I began to notice a vibrant urban farming movement all across Philadelphia. Industrial brownfields are converted to above-ground garden beds and hydroponic growing spaces, such as on Greensgrow Farm in the Kensington neighborhood in the northeast. Part of a city block in West Philly is transformed into slow-drip-irrigated green fields outfitted with beehives, a clay bread oven, and a composting toilet at Mill Creek Farm. The two young farmers who built Mill Creek Farm are not only concerned about food quality and fresh food accessibility in low-income urban areas, but also about the availability of culturally appropriate food.

The farmers I met were challenging Philadelphia’s urban blight by building farms to provide not only fresh fruits and vegetables where they were lacking, but also farm education. To reflect this response to hunger and food insecurity, I proposed building an education garden for Stenton Family Manor, a homeless shelter for families in the northwest section of the city. A waist-high education garden in mobile units would allow senior citizens living in the surrounding neighborhood access to plants, whether wheel chair-bound or simply unable to kneel on the ground.

A forum can develop around food, whether we are growing, preparing, or eating it together. Reciprocity and shared experiences foster communication, in turn strengthening community. Hunger, Philadelphia’s garden provides such a forum in two ways. First, during the exhibition, gallery visitors will be invited to tend the garden while viewing the project by watering plants. In turn, they may eat fresh, organically-grown produce and converse with other gallery visitors. Secondly, at the close of the exhibition in mid-May, the garden will find a permanent home at Stenton Manor. There it will bring together onsite children and neighborhood seniors for summer activities. Together, Stenton residents and local senior citizens may teach/learn to grow and harvest produce, and even prepare meals.

As an art experience, Hunger, Philadelphia invites both observation and participation as it reflects on the issue of hunger. It contrasts the immediate gratification of a plentiful food substitute (clay is one of our few resources that is generated faster than we can exhaust it) with the sustainability offered by educational farming. The project gathers community and fosters discussion about an issue of public urgency, and about local solutions. Every voice is important, and there are many in the chorus of Philadelphia’s sharp retort to hunger.

 

the HUNGER project: 2009-2010

Hunger was a site-specific, multi-phase project (including two exhibitions and an artist residency) that examined hunger from a global perspective while it responded and contributed to the local community hosting its art-exhibition phase. Calling attention to need as an under-discussed issue in society, the Hunger project juxtaposed plenty with quality, immediate gratification with sustainability. Earth material was dug locally and made into voluptuous but nutritionally-barren cast vegetables, some of which were consumed as performative activity in an art installation during the exhibition Hunger, Philadelphia. The remaining clay was recycled into plates that homeless children drew vegetables upon. The drawings/plates were sold to raise money for the homeless shelter through the exhibition/fundraiser, Earth To Table. The project was resolved as patrons used plates to serve food in their homes and as planning began for the construction of a greenhouse that would supply fresh produce year-round to the shelter.

Hunger, Philadelphia used geophagy (clay eating) as a launching point for a visual poem about need. Geophagia occurs worldwide, and is practiced for a variety of reasons from medicinal to traditional. The behavior is problematic only where people suffer severe food crisis, when clay becomes a substitute for food. While otherwise valued for its toxin-binding capabilities, clay can also absorb nutrients, flushing them from the body and rapidly advancing malnutrition. Activity on the lower level of Hunger, Philadelphia’s installation included incessant, excessive consumption of clay casts of vegetables—a non-nutritive food substitute.

The air was thick with the smell of baking bread as models moved through this barren landscape. A soundscape emanated from the  bowels of the building, produced by a live band on the basement level of the gallery. Its vibrations moved up through the thick carpet of dead sod on the floor and were felt bodily as one traversed the space.

The upper level of the gallery featured a community space in which a garden thrived, offering mature fruits and vegetables to eat, reflecting Phi;adelphia’s very active urban farming movement.

The garden was a place to decompress and discuss the issues surrounding hunger raised by the geophagy performance on the floor below. At the close of the exhibition, the garden was donated to Stenton Manor, a homeless shelter for families in a blighted Philadelphia neighborhood. There, it would offer shelter children and senior citizens living in the surrounding neighborhood a place to gather and learn about growing food.

In the months following the exhibition, Hunger, Philadelphia’s materials were recycled and sent back out into the community in new form: a half-ton of clay and sand was donated to Stenton Manor to build a bread oven and the rest was made into plates. Stenton children were joined by children in other regions in drawing food from the garden on plates. A fall exhibition, Earth To Table, doubled as a fundraiser for Stenton. Drawings/plates were sold to raise money to build a greenhouse, so that shelter residents could grow food year-round.

.J. McCracken: Let Them Eat Clay 

http://www.johnperreault.com/id2.html

Is J.J. McCracken a ceramics or a performance artist?  Clearly she has had her eye on developments in both worlds. Given the history of ceramics and current education practice, this is not unusual. Yet interchanges between ceramics and the other arts are largely unexamined, for two reasons.

Ceramics tends to be a world unto itself, busy with itself, and charmed by itself. On the other hand, the other arts are afraid of contamination. Ceramics is dirt. Ironically, the usual form of ceramics privileges material and process, utilizing the vessel as both form and symbol. The crafts, although useful, were abstract before painting and sculpture.

Although fastidious painters and sculptors deny the ceramics template, influences in the other direction have been routinely confessed. We know that  Peter Voulkos’ free-wheeling style was inspired by action painter Franz Kline,  with earth-shaking results for ceramics.

After Abstract Expressionist ceramics came Pop ceramics and even some forays into Minimalism. Funk included ceramics, painting, and sculpture on a more or less equal basis. And then the influences seem to have stopped, or at least have not been adequately charted.

Process, however, is an invisible but ongoing crossover theme. Ceramics is not only material-based, it is also process-oriented. How something is made is equal to what it is made of.

That there are ceramics performances is not as surprising as why there are so few. The ceramics demonstration — patently performative — has a long history: Potters have routinely publicized their wares by public demonstrations, often quite theatrical. Proto-modernist George Ohr routinely offered wild demonstrations of his flamboyant skills at State Fairs  — featuring his crushed and collapsed vessel as well as those that were paper-thin. Much later, the charismatic Voulkos converted a whole generation of potters to ceramic art by his  bare-chested, brawny battles with clay. Are ceramists now too shy or afraid to be accused of showing off?

And then there are sports: Jim Melchert, for instance, and later Neil Tetkowski.

I asked McCracken if she knew of Melchert’s Changes (1972). Melchert — who later became head of the visual arts department of the National Endowment for the Arts — dunked his head in clay slip and, with several others, was filmed as the clay caked and cracked. Not only did she know of this obscure precedent, impressively she had sought out the artist. She also admires Tetkowski’s Ground War (1991) clay protest-performance, in which he embedded live ammunition into wet clay, and admires his Common Ground Project (2000), which incorporated clay and handprints from 188 countries.

Though McCracken claims pioneer performance artist Carolee Schneemann as her primary influence, she also mentions ceramists with whom she feels kinship: Margaret Boozer, founder of Red Dirt Studios in Maryland and known for her Dirt Drawings (pools of clay left to harden and crack on floors); Andree Singer-Thomson, who has instigated full-body, clay-slip collaborative performances; Walter McConnell, who creates accumulations of unfired slip-castings of found toys and other objects.

McCracken, however, may be the first ceramic artist to make clay performances, which she prefers to call “active installations,” the center of her practice. Performances? Well, they are mostly tableaux vivants, installations with a live component. Even her multipart Living Sculptures (2008) was as much about duration and changes over time as it was about simultaneity and/or multiple vignettes. Many of her works live beyond the theatrical moment as installations or objects that continue to change.

McCracken’s preferred process is slip-casting, but she also explores unfired clay. In traditional ceramics, forms are preserved by the action of heat. Eschew firing, as McCracken does, and you uncover change and vulnerability..

How might one symbolically preserve unfired clay vessels? In plastic bags as in Stasis (2007), or in Mason jars, preserved in corn syrup, as in Nurture/Sustain (2006)? The Stasis vessels, bagged like toys or portions of candy, remain untouched in art galleries, but when shown in ceramics venues some are crushed by busy fingers determined to probe and squeeze. And of course, corn syrup is not the best way to preserve anything — including one’s health. The clay figures disfigure and begin to dissolve.

McCracken now continues her investigation of clay as food beyond utilizing techniques of food display (plastic bags) and food preservation (sealed jars).  She discovered that geophagia, or eating clay, is a hidden tradition, not only among poor African-American women from the South (particularly during pregnancy), but also in many cultures worldwide. Here, McCracken’s background in anthropology comes into play. Eating “white dirt” is said to appease all aches and pains as well as alleviate nausea and intestinal irregularities. Men too sometimes crave clay, but if so, shamefully. Is this because it is associated with women’s ailments and thought of as female food?  But I discovered that clay is mixed with sugar into edible patties called bon-bon de terre among the poor in Haiti, apparently without the gender taboo.

During McCracken’s residency at Philadelphia’s Clay Studio in preparation for her work at the nearby Painted Bride, she began to study inner-city hunger and how she could address it. The Hunger Project, filtered through her art vocabulary, is the result.

A banquet table of slip-cast, unfired-clay fruits and vegetables is periodically visited by clay-soaked performers at dinner time. In this monochromatic world, they slowly and methodically break off pieces from the duplicated fruits and vegetables and eat them. In contrast, on the floor above is a fully functioning garden, later to be donated to an institution serving the poor and hungry. In that way, mass-produced, sometimes less-than-nutritious food — represented by the clay banquet — is contrasted to homegrown edibles.

The first work I saw by McCracken was Stasis. In an all-white environment guarded by a punch-clock, performers in white produced perfect little clay vessels. These were sealed in plastic bags and then labeled and priced, thus presenting an example of the division of labor and a metaphor for products programmed to disintegrate. But the laboratory-like sterility was strangely beautiful. And poignant. Some of these deep themes are reiterated in The Hunger Project.

McCracken’s complicated new work is not simplistic agitprop; in art or ceramics contexts, that would be like preaching to the already converted. We are all against consumerism; we are all against hunger. McCracken addresses those issues, but her work exposes additional meanings. Certainly she is expanding ceramics by deconstructing ceramics. But her critique is not only media-specific, it is oddly poetic. Loss is not a popular topic, and accumulation and decay are not the usual ceramic themes. Her work turns loss into art’s gain.

John Perreault 2010 for Clay Studio, Philadelphia  

Washington Post Review

Art review: J.J. McCracken sculptures in ‘Climate, Control’ at Civilian Art Projects

By Kriston Capps Sunday, January 30, 2011; 8:29 PM

It’s been clear for some time that J.J. McCracken ranks among the smartest artists in Washington. Historically grounded and conceptually rigorous, she continues to push the boundaries within the ceramic arts, typically counted as one of the most conservative art forms around. Her sculpture in “Climate, Control,” a three-woman show at Civilian Art Projects, once again meets the high bar she has set for herself: the District’s best political artist.

In five sculptures on display (and close-up photos of the works), McCracken references late-Bronze Age pottery from the cultures that once occupied present-day Iran and Cyprus. Her designs are modeled after Eastern pieces in the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries collection. (One exception is a reproduction of an effigy pot from late post-classic Mesoamerica.)

She sculpts the clay into vessels, but she doesn’t fire them in a kiln, so they look like lumpy, earthen versions of their museum counterparts. In her faux-ancient relics, McCracken incorporates one of the most important developments of the present-day American empire: high-fructose corn syrup.

Each vase is made using a mix of clay and mushed-up Wonder Bread, whose third listed ingredient is HFCS. So each piece is covered in fuzzy, green patches of mold, which feed on the sugars embedded in the clay.

Her sculptures are set under gorgeous glass bell jars, which give the work a clinical vibe (and keep the pieces from stinking up the gallery). The jars encasing the sculptures she molded as recently as two weeks ago are foggy with condensation, while the ones she began three years ago have settled.

That McCracken plays a long game speaks to her educational background in anthropology, as well as her novel studio practice. Her clay is sourced locally; that’s a hallmark of Red Dirt Studios, where she is a member. Founded by Margaret Boozer and an incubator for artists like Laurel Lukaszewski and Mary Coble, Red Dirt is as progressive as studios come in the District, despite the focus on a seemingly traditional medium like clay.

McCracken has pushed this medium far beyond the tedious debate over what objects constitute art and craft. She has instead investigated clay for its specific qualities, isolating the medium’s defining material and contextual qualities through the use of sculpture and performance.

For one of her first projects in Washington-“Stasis,” a 2007-8 performance and exhibition at the now-defunct Meat Market Gallery-McCracken and assistants set up a mobile pottery production line that quickly threw, vacuum-sealed, then hung pieces of pottery along the walls, like tagged-and-bagged cuts of meat.

Fast-forward to 2010, when the artist took on Philadelphia in a months-long piece that saw her living in Old City, growing vegetables and building an installation for the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts. For “Hunger,” she and several artists covered themselves head to toe in clay-which is apparently a freezing experience-and engaged with clay casts of vegetables and fruit along a banquet table. She spent last fall repurposing the clay as dinnerware sets and a bread oven for an area homeless shelter.

As it happens, McCracken started the project on exhibit at Civilian before her more recent public performances-so in a sense, this work is from an earlier period. Her work in this exhibition doesn’t have a performance element, unless you count the three years McCracken waited as the mold grew on the clay. But for McCracken, who thinks about artifacts and living conditions for empires past and present, three years is nothing.

J.J. McCracken’s “Mold” series is on view alongside work by Jan Razauskas and Millicent Young in “Climate, Control” at Civilian Art Projects through Feb. 19. The gallery, at 1019 7th Street NW, is open 1-6 p.m. on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.

Kriston Capps is a freelance writer.

WASHINGTON POST REVIEW

J.J. Mccracken, Taking The Long View With Ceramics

By Kriston Capps Monday, January 31, 2011

It’s been clear for some time that J.J. McCracken ranks among the smartest artists in Washington. Historically grounded and conceptually rigorous, she continues to push the boundaries within the ceramic arts, typically counted as one of the most conservative art forms around. Her sculpture in “Climate, Control,” a three-woman show at Civilian Art Projects, once again meets the high bar she has set for herself: the District’s best political artist.

In five sculptures on display (and close-up photos of the works), McCracken references late-Bronze Age pottery from the cultures that once occupied present-day Iran and Cyprus. Her designs are modeled after Eastern pieces in the collection of the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries. (One exception is a reproduction of an effigy pot from late post-classic Mesoamerica.)

She sculpts the clay into vessels, but she doesn’t fire them in a kiln, so they look like lumpy, earthen versions of their museum counterparts. In her faux-ancient relics, McCracken incorporates one of the most important developments of the present-day American empire: high-fructose corn syrup.

Each vase is made using a mix of clay and mushed-up Wonder Bread, whose third listed ingredient is corn syrup. So each piece is covered in fuzzy, green patches of mold, which feed on the sugars embedded in the clay.

Her sculptures are set under gorgeous glass bell jars, which give the work a clinical vibe (and keep the pieces from stinking up the gallery). The jars encasing the sculptures that she molded as recently as two weeks ago are foggy with condensation, while the ones she began three years ago have settled.

That McCracken plays a long game speaks to her educational background in anthropology, as well as her novel studio practice. Her clay is sourced locally; that’s a hallmark of Red Dirt Studios, where she is a member. Founded by Margaret Boozer and an incubator for artists like Laurel Lukaszewski and Mary Coble, Red Dirt is as progressive as studios come in the District, despite the focus on a seemingly traditional medium like clay.

McCracken has pushed this medium far beyond the tedious debate over what objects constitute art and craft. She has instead investigated clay for its specific qualities, isolating the medium’s defining material and contextual qualities through the use of sculpture and performance.

For one of her first projects in Washington – “Stasis,” a 2007-08 performance and exhibition at the now-defunct Meat Market Gallery – McCracken and assistants set up a mobile pottery production line that quickly threw, vacuum-sealed, then hung pieces of pottery along the walls, like tagged-and-bagged cuts of meat.

Fast-forward to 2010, when the artist took on Philadelphia in a months-long piece that saw her living in Old City, growing vegetables and building an installation for the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts. For “Hunger,” she and several artists covered themselves head to toe in clay – which is apparently a freezing experience – and engaged with clay casts of vegetables and fruit along a banquet table. She spent last fall repurposing the clay as dinnerware sets and a bread oven for an area homeless shelter.

As it happens, McCracken started the project on exhibit at Civilian before her more recent public performances, so in a sense, this work is from an earlier period. Her work in this exhibition doesn’t have a performance element, unless you count the three years McCracken waited as the mold grew on the clay. But for McCracken, who thinks about artifacts and living conditions for empires past and present, three years is nothing.

Capps is a freelance writer.

J.J. McCracken’s “Mold” series is on view alongside work by Jan Razauskas and Millicent Young in “Climate, Control” at Civilian Art Projects through Feb. 19. The gallery, at 1019 Seventh St. NW, is open 1-6 p.m. Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.

Thoughts on “Teach Them to Fish,” by J.J. McCracken 

Published in Vol. 30, No. 1 of Studio Potter, a journal promoting discussion of the technology, criticism, aesthetics, and history of ceramics.

I recently met a girl who, at seven, was wise beyond her years. On the topic of hunger, she noted first that she herself had gone to bed with a full belly last night. She followed that statement, with: “if we who have food and a family do not feel happy, why should the kids who don’t have the basic stuff even want a better life? I have my mom and dad, my own bed, and food; I’m very happy.” We were drawing on plates while we talked. I had been recycling clay from an installation I had done recently in Philadelphia and using it to make plates. I invited children to draw on the plates. which were then sold at a fund raiser to improve the quality of food at a homeless shelter in Philadelphia.

I remember when I was seven. My grandfather insisted on his independence. He hated the thought of using food stamps. He spat the word welfare in disgust and made do, shooting squirrels if he had to and using newspaper in the outhouse. Yet he was always the first to give around the community. Cash-poor, he spent his great wealth of other resources, looking in on elderly and disabled neighbors and teaching kids to fish and hunt responsibly. To grow and can food, and to tie sound knots and build things. He distributed leftovers from our meals to those who were ill or who just needed a little help putting food on the table. Later, when he was forced to rely on Medicaid to pay for hospice care, we hid this from  him. Injury to his body was bearable, to his pride was dangerous. My grandfather was a great giver. but a terrible receiver. I am learning that sustainable systems require both. I have been working on a project about hunger for two years. It began as a design for an active installation that uses geophagy (eating clay) as a launching point for a visual poem about need. Then. I was invited by The Clay Studio to produce a new performative piece in conjunction with the 2010 NCECA conference in Philadelphia. With this official commission. I was able to further develop the project and make it site-specific to that city. The hunger project had three phases. In the initial stage, during a summer spent as a guest artist in residence at The Clay Studio, I studied Philadelphia’s responses to hunger and food insecurity. I wanted to run a canned food drive in addition to constructing an installation about geophagy, all as part of an eventual exhibition. Pitting the consumption of a nonnutritive food substitute (clay) against the charitable act of donating food would juxtapose abundance with quality and making-do with giving. Clay-eating (a practice with traditional, cultural, and medicinal roots) occurs worldwide and is problematic only in regions experiencing extreme food short ages because malnutrition is exacerbated by consuming clay. Valued for absorbing toxins, clay also binds nutrients, which are then excreted from the body. I worked at food-distribution centers and homeless shelters across the city to conduct my site research, and found that highly processed, preservative and sugar-laden foods are most often donated, and most popular. Questioning what my small project could realistically collect in donated nonperishables, I grew increasingly concerned that this effort would be so comparatively small and its distribution so fast that the families receiving it would be hungry again the next day. As I sought a more sustainable solution, I began to notice a vibrant urban farming movement all across Philadelphia. Throughout the city I met farmers who are concerned not only about food quality and fresh food accessibility in low income urban areas (sometimes known as food deserts), but also about the availability of culturally appropriate food

Phase Il of the project was the exhibition Hunger, Philadelphia at the Painted Bride Art Center. in the Old City neighborhood near The Clay Studio. The main floor of the gallery housed a banquet table piled high with clay casts of local vegetables, set in a landscape built of locally dug clay. Clay covered live models ate clay vegetables while a soundscape emanated up from the bowels of the building along with the enticing smell of baking bread. The upper level housed the garden, where viewers were invited to eat ripe vegetables right off the vine. At the close of the exhibition, the garden was relocated to Stenton Manor. Excited children encircled us as we unloaded the trucks, and we had to stop and rope off the area to avoid accidents. I promised to return in a couple of months to teach them how to draw the food they grew. and then I began planning Phase Three. The final stage of the Hunger project began when I de-installed the exhibition. A half-ton of the clay and sand I used was donated to Stenton Manor to build a bread oven. The resultant yawning turtle shaped oven baked and served its first loaf three months later. The rest of the clay was recycled into plates on which children from the shelter (and children in other regions, on behalf of the shelter children) made drawings of foods from the garden. My return to Philadelphia over the summer coincided with the final stages of construction of the bread oven. My own excitement at seeing it was met by that of the children (and a few older residents) itching to learn to draw their favorite vegetables on the plates I had made. Corn and watermelon were the favorites, but green beans and peppers were also hugely popular. No one even asked to include a hamburger or a pizza, although fast food is the only food available in this neighborhood. As I explained that the drawings would be sold to help improve the garden, children began scrawling their own names across plates they wanted everyone to know about the author of each creation. Where uncertainty about their drawing talent had begun the day, pride now surged, they were helping the cause. I was most awed when a very young someone wrote ‘Buy Good’ across a plate to encourage others to join him in thinking about food quality and health before hitting the dollar menu at McDonald’s. An exhibition at The Clay Studio called Earth to Table opened with a sale of the decorated plates. Project supporters offering a $100 donation received an original drawing about quality food, on a plate made from locally dug clay. All the proceeds were invested in building a greenhouse at Stenton Manor so that residents may farm year around, improving the quality of the food served to children and their families while also engaging minds through farm education. Last month. I was drawing with a family on plates for the fund-raiser. This family is struggling but not destitute. The threat of poverty is a constant in their lives, and some days the grind is really hard. We talked as we drew: about kids living at the shelter, about hunger. and about helping children develop tools that build self-sufficiency.  As I watched the same sequence unfold, lack of confidence in their drawing skills shifting to pride, I saw that Earth to Table wasn’t just teaching this family about drawing, It was also setting an example for the children, of giving to other children less fortunate. And it was brightening the parents’ outlook, their daily worry was momentarily dispelled as they began to feel able. The father told me this project was a glimmer of hope. The world he knew brimmed with discouragement.

It was not that they hadn’t wanted to help those less fortunate, but cash-poor and incessantly worried about their own plight, they just couldn’t process the needs of others while barely meeting their own. The Hunger project allowed them to give in the only way they could, in a non-cash form. These drawings, a form of currency that would better the lives of families struggling harder than they. were a source of pride. Presently I define charity as an offering at arm’s length. There is a stigma attached to accepting handouts that degrades the morale of the poor. For some, it’s downright embarrassing. For others, the feeling of shame simmers, fueling apathy, anger, resistance to change. The Hunger project seeks instead to build mutually beneficial relationships. I am a student of the work I make, guided by research and interested in connections between people. Once, during this project, a wise friend told me that eating alone is worse for one’s health than smoking. While I am usually careful about the source and the stuff of my food, I am guilty of cradling the phone on my shoulder and eating an apple with one hand while pouring molds with the other. I eat en route and I eat for fuel, not because I enjoy food. The Hunger project, at its heart, is a farming-feeding circle, connecting people to one another. New friends in this circle spend the day growing food, and the evening preparing it. After all this effort, there is no skimping. An invitation to join means sitting down to talk, eating together, and appreciating the quality of the meal. Similarly, drawing with kids is a timeless pause, and a chance to see the world through someone else’s eyes. A lifelong student finds education everywhere; looking is learning. It is in the looking that I locate my sense of wonder, and in gaining new perspectives that I receive sustenance.

Urban farmers challenge Philadelphia’s blight by providing both farm education and fresh fruits and vegetables where they have been absent. To reflect this grassroots response to hunger and food insecurity, I built a mobile education garden for the upcoming exhibition. This garden would be a tool for fostering self-sufficiency, community engagement, and improved food quality. Gallery visitors could eat together and discuss the issues raised by the rest of the installation. At the close of the show, the garden was to be relocated to Stenton Manor, a homeless shelter in a struggling neighborhood. Stenton’s brand-new Hope Farm (the shelter’s sole source of fresh produce) was at that time preparing for its second growing season, and the education garden could directly en gage the surrounding community the waist-high mobile units allow neighborhood senior citizens, whether wheel chair-bound or simply unable to kneel on the ground, access to plants. These seniors visit the shelter and help teach the children living there about growing, harvesting, and preparing food. The enrichment runs both ways.