DAVID GILHOOLY - (1943 - )

Along with Robert Arneson and others, David Gilhooly was part of the group that developed Funk Art and took ceramic art to another level. Although probably best known for his imaginative anthropomorphic frogs and other creatures, Gilhooly has had a wide career as an artist in a number of mediums and still continues to evolve. Gilhooly has given up working in clay (twice), but he is the first to state that his current metamorphosis is not the final one.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT - DAVID GILHOOLY

David Gilhooly is primarily known for his ceramic sculpture of animals, food, planets, and most particularly FrogWorld. He is a graduate of the University of California at Davis, studying under Robert Arneson and working with the group in TB-9 (temporary building 9) that evolved into the Funk Ceramic Movement in the San Francisco Bay area. A prolific ceramic artist, his irreverent, darkly humorous objects are in many collections throughout the world, and he has been the focus of a number of exhibitions. Gilhooly turned from clay to working with Plexiglas and now is working on shadow boxes using mixed media and found objects and has also worked in printmaking and drawing. He lists his hobbies as “shopping (fighting with little old ladies for jigsaw puzzles)” 1and his bad habits as “collecting souvenir totem poles and watching cartoons.”2

1. http://www.sites.onlinemac.com/cchang/vitalstats.htm 2. Ibid.

RESUME - DAVID GILHOOLY

1943 Born, Auburn, California 1965 University of California, Davis, BA 1966 University of California, Davis, MA 1967-1969 Teaching-watercolor: San Jose State College, San Jose, California 1969-1971 Teaching –ceramics: University of Saskachewan, Regina, Canada 1971-1975 Teaching: York University, Ontario, Canada 1975-1976 Teaching: University of California, Davis, California (summer school: 1971, 1975, 1976) 1976-1977 Teaching: York University, Ontario, Canada 1978, 1979 Teaching: California State University, Sacramento, California (summer school) 1990-1991 Linfield College, McMinnville, Oregon Present Living and working in Oregon

BIOGRAPHY - DAVID GILHOOLY

David Gilhooly was born in Auburn, California, in 1943. His family moved several times during his growing up, living variously in California, the Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico. Following his high school graduation, he returned to his native California to attend the University of California-Davis, receiving first his BA in 1965 and then his MA in 1967. “I first got into ceramics trying to impress a girl,” he has stated – the class he enrolled in was the first ceramics class taught by Robert Arneson at University of California-Davis. The girl who caught his eye left school to marry someone else, but the ceramics took. He became Arneson’s assistant and remained so until he received his master’s. It was there in TB-9 (temporary building 9), the metal building that housed the ceramics department, that Arneson and Gilhooly, along with students Chris Unterseher and Margaret Dodd, began making the ceramic objects that would come to be known as Funk Ceramics. The drive to make functional pieces that at the same time were grotesque and pushing the edge led to FrogWorld, the series of pots and vessels whose anthropomorphic frogs are still among Gilhooly’s best-known works. From 1968 to1984 he produced a large body of work, turning out hundreds of frog objects with names that gave clues to what his intent was when he made it.

Following graduation from Davis, Gilhooly began a series of teaching jobs, first at San Jose State College in San Jose, California. From there he went to the University of Saskatchewan where FrogWorld continued to develop. “That was the nice thing about clay,” he said. “If you didn’t like the way something really was, you could always fix it up,” and FrogWorld allowed Gilhooly to create the world as he thought it should be. In addition to clay, Gilhooly also worked in paper mache, and one of his creations, a portrait of his department chair and his wife as baboons, resulted in his dismissal. He left Saskatchewan for York University in Ontario, teaching part-time there until 1977 except for returning to University of California-Davis for a year in 1975-1976. “I didn’t want to miss the Bicentennial Year and all the FrogAmerican historic pieces that it suggested.”

Frogs evolved into vegetables, often tied up with mythology of different cultures, and soon food and frogs began to merge. FrogFood came into maturity in Davis in 1975 and 1976, and such pieces as Macaroni and Cheese with Frogs and Frogs in an 8-bean Stew appeared. His move to Davis in 1975 during the patriotic fervor of the Bicentennial year and his access to large kilns after many years resulted in a large number of frog historical characters, such as FrogFranklin and FrogWashington.

Gilhooly was widely exhibited during the 1970’s, having over 30 one-man exhibitions. Among them was a major retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in 1976. But by the end of the seventies, Gilhooly was growing tired of the clay and decided to end FrogWorld. At first thinking it was just dissatisfaction with three dimensional forms, he began rolling out large slabs of clay and setting the frog figures on them as if on a stage. However, this technique relied more on the glaze work rather than the sculpting, and Gilhooly did not particularly like glazing: “…having my idea exist in the physical world as an unglazed piece of work was, for me, the end of the creative process. Having to glaze it was a tedious, seemingly unnecessary job.”

The critics did not respond well to the 1981 Whitney Museum of American Art exhibit “Ceramic Sculpture: Six Artists,” and around the same time, Gilhooly turned to Plexiglas, intrigued by a material that not only reflected light but also diffused it. He still found it frustrating to break away from FrogWorld and the ceramics world where his work was known and the money was good. He banned FrogFood and tried to send the frogs into space, only to have them continue to evolve as planets and other celestial bodies. Finally Gilhooly began combining other materials such as Plexiglas and found objects and found the resulting mediums more satisfying. However, he didn’t complete his last clay piece until 1996 when for the second time (the first was in 1983) he gave up clay.

Gilhooly continues to evolve. Finding working with Plexiglas alone too labor-intensive, (“It was too much work. I’d have to cut out all the pieces and then finish the edges and put the piece together.”) he returned to his love of found objects. His more recent work involves framed shadow boxes which contain the sculpture and hang as a framed picture. While the style and techniques are different, the dark sense of humor is still there as are the themes of FrogWorld. Now, however, instead of “fixing up the world” in FrogWorld, he is using plastic and other contemporary objects.

He himself, however, doesn’t think this metamorphosis is his final one.

All quotes courtesy of David Gilhooly’s web site: http://www.sites.onlinemac.com/cchang/index.htm

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY - DAVID GILHOOLY

Books and Catalogs

The Animal as Muse. West Palm Beach, Florida: Norton Museum of Art, 1998.

A Bay Area Connection: Works from the Anderson Collection. Santa Clara, California: Triton Museum of Art, 1995.

Braun, Barbara. Pre-Columbian Art in the Post-Columbian World. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1993.

Ceramic Sculpture: Six Artists. The University of Washington Press. 1981.

Clark, Garth. American Ceramics 1876 to the Present. New York: Abbeville Press, 1987.

______. A Century of Ceramics in the United States, 1878-1978. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1979.

David Gilhooly. Chicago, Illinois: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1976.

David Gilhooly. Davis, California: John Natsoulas Press, 1992.

DePaoli, Geri, ed. Elvis and Marilyn: 2X Immortal. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1994.

Fineberg, Jonathan. Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being. 2nd ed. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2000.

A Fire for Ceramics: Contemporary Art from the Daniel Jacobs and Derek Mason Collection. Richmond, Virginia: Hand Workshop Art Center, 1998.

Guangzhen, “Poslin” Zhou. American Ceramic Artist Today. Beijing, People’s Republic of China, 1998.

Gustafson, Donna et al. Art What Thou Eat. Edited by Linda Weintraub. Annandale-on- Hudson, New York: Edith C. Blum Art Institute, Bard College, 1991.

Levin, Elaine. The History of American Ceramics 1607 to the Present. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1988

Landauer, Susan. Lighter Side of Bay Area Figurative. Kansas City, Missouri: Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999.

Lucie-Smith, Edward. Art Today. London: Phaidon Press, 1995.

Peterson, Susan. Working with Clay. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1999.

Ramljak, Suzanne. Crafting a Legacy: Contemporary American Crafts in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2002.

Periodicals

“After Arneson.” Scholastic Art (February 1997).

Allan, Lois. “David Gilhooly at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art.” Artweek 31, no. 10 (October 2000): 25-26.

Anderson, A. “American Art Pottery.” Portfolio 2, no. 1 (February–March 1980): 94-97.

Burstein, J. “What You Didn’t See at the Whitney.” American Ceramics 1, no. 3 (Summer 1982): 18-23.

Cheng, DeWitt. “David Gilhooly at Micaela Gallery.” Artweek 37, no. 4. (May 2006) 17- 18.

“Civilizations.” Ceramics Monthly 26, no. 2 (February 1978): 53-58.

“Civilizations in Clay.” Craft Horizons 37, no. 6 (December 1977): 28-35.

“David Gilhooly.” Ceramics Monthly. 46, issue 3 (March 1998) 24.

Folk, Thomas. “Davis Funk.” Ceramics Monthly 41, no. 10. (December 1993): 32-35.

_____. “Plasticity and David Gilhooly.” Arts Magazine 62, no. 2 (October 1987): 66-67.

Lee, Hoe-eon. “The Phenomenon of Modern Ceramics.” Novel Object (1996): 261.

Loach, R. interviewer. “David Gilhooly in Conversation with Roberta Loach.” Visual Dialog 2, no. 1 (September – November 1976) 13-17.

Morgan, Kerry. “Beyond Frogs and Clay: Works on Paper by David Gilhooly.” Stanford University Museum of Art Journal XXV-XXVII (1996-1997): 57-62.

Natsoulas, Tony. “From the Feet Up.” Ceramics Monthly 43, no. 6 (June-August 1995): 68-69.

Rauchmann, Susanne. “The World According to David Gilhooly.” 2029 Magazine. no. 10 (1995): 60-62.

Schwartz, Judith S. “The Clay Artist as Social Critic.” Pottery in Australia (Australia) 28, no. 1 (February 1989): 52-57.

Sewell, D. et al. “Contemporary American Crafts (Philadelphia Museum of Art). Bulletin (Philadelphia Museum of Art) 87 (Fall 1991) 1-56.

Simmons, C. “Life with Frogs: David Gilhooly (Meyer Breier Weiss Gallery, San Francisco, California: Exhibition Review.) Artweek, 13, no. 19 (15 May 1982): 4.

Zhou, Poslin. “David Gilhooly and his Frog World.” Artist Magazine (1997.2) 392-393.

Videos

“Clay Figures, Animals, and Landscapes.” American Craft Museum. CP787W, VHS.

“Clayworks.” American Craft Museum. CP-778W, VHS.

“Contemporary Ceramics.” American Craft Museum. CP-800W, VHS.

“Contemporary Clay Diverse Soup Tureen Forms.” American Craft Museum. CP779W, VHS.

GALLERIES / WEB SITES - DAVID GILHOOLY

Larry Evans Gallery, 333 Grant Avenue, #407, San Francisco, California 94108

Art Exchange Gallery, 49 Geary Street, San Francisco, California 94108

WEB SITES - DAVID GILHOOLY http://www.davidgilhooly.com Artist’s web site; last revised February 20, 2006 http://www.sites.onlinemac.com/cchang/vitalstats.htm Older web site of the artist http://www.art2u.com/artist/gilhooly.html Interview and images of more recent work http://www.masterworksfineart.com/inventory/gilhoolybio.htm Comprehensive biography with images http://www.askart.com/artist/G/david_james_iii_gilhooly.asp Index of links http://wwar.com/masters/g/gilhooly-david.html http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/gilhooly_david.html Index of links www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/gilhooly_david.html Guide to pictures of works in art museums and image archives www.artofnote.org/Gilhooly.htm www.magnoliaeditions.com/content/gilhooly/gilhooly.htm Magnolia editions – David Gilhooly www.lib.ucdavis.edu/ul/about/art/gilhooly/php Gilhooly’s duck Descending Staircase http://www.tfaoi.com/newsm1/n1m248.htm Review of “We Live in the Bizarro World: Assemblages by David Gilhooly” http://www.ceramicstoday.com/articles/gilhooly.htm Gilhooly talks about the secret life of frogs

February 2007