03.09.16
Janet Koplos, co-author of Makers: A History of American Studio Craft, was for 18 years a staff editor at Art in America magazine, remains a contributing editor to the magazine, and also served as guest editor of American Craft magazine before its departure from New York. Among her credits in ceramic criticism are essays for books and catalogs on Toshiko Takaezu, Karen Karnes, Kathy Erteman, Richard De Vore and Tom Turner and Barbara Diduk. She is an author of The Unexpected: Artists Ceramics of the 20th Century (published in Holland) and is completing a book on American functional pottery, research for which was supported with a grant from the Center for Craft, Creativity and Design in North Carolina.
Koplos has also written extensively on other craft mediums as well as on American, Japanese and Dutch contemporary art. She lived in Japan in the '80s and published Contemporary Japanese Sculpture in 1990. She has written about 2,500 articles, reviews and essays in more than two dozen periodicals over the last 30 years, writing on Martin Puryear, Leslie Dill, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Oliver Herring, Rona Pondick, Ursula von Rydingsvard and David Nash, among others. She lectures, critiques and juries frequently, and occasionally teaches and curates. She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Minnesota's School of Journalism and Mass Communication and holds a masters degree in art history from Illinois State University. She was named an Honorary Fellow of the American Craft Council in 2010. In 2013 she relocated from New York City to St. Paul, Minnesota. In 2015 she received and Art Writers Grant from the Warhol Foundation and Creative Capital to support research for a book on the New Art Examiner, an alternative art periodical based in Chicago from 1973-2002.
Koplos' lecture will be today from 3:30-4:30PM in Student Center 310B.
