I love listening. It is one of the only spaces where you can be still and moved at the same time. — Nayyirah Waheed — Tuesday January 20th — —

“What art does — maybe what it does most completely — is tell us, make us feel that what we think we know, we don’t. There are whole worlds around us that we’ve never glimpsed.” Greil Marcus — Tuesday January 20th — —

The idea is to die young as late as possible. — Ashley Montagu — Tuesday January 20th — —

Margaret Boozer

American artist Margaret Boozer is internationally renowned for her magnificent sculptural works, whose material hails from the very earth we walk on daily. The artist focuses with her creations on the individuality, history, and geology of clay used as subject matters. She finds her material at areas like construction sites, the direct surroundings of her Red Dirt Studio, in Mount Rainier, Maryland, or basically any place where purple, red, grey, brown, or orange clay might be found. Subsequently Boozer starts creating her works from the natural material without modifying anything. Everything is created by hand, with the sculptures ranging from more traditional forms like her paintings made out of clay, among which is for instance a delicate work of cracked white clay, named ‘Winter Landscape’, large floor installations like her ‘Dirt Drawings’ and ‘Line Drawings’, to constructions like the incredible ‘Dichotomy of Dirt’ consisting of clay disks, forming a beautiful wall-mounted work, which is our favorite piece by Boozer.

I enjoy the temporal quality of my work. You missed it yesterday? Now it’s different.

The artist creates all her work from the inspirational group art studio named Red Dirt Studio, which she founded in 1996 in Mount Rainier, Maryland, not far north of her hometown Washington, DC. At Red Dirt Studio she teaches advanced workshops in ceramics and sculpture that help students transition toward becoming professionals with their own studios. As she states herself, it is a graduate art program without grades.

At its core, Red Dirt is about what can happen when talented, smart and curious people come together and work toward greater accomplishment in their professional practice. It’s about drawing on the resources of artistic community, and at the same time giving back.

At this point Boozer is in the process of moving to a new location, an old firehouse, for which she is still searching for (crowd-)funding.

Margaret Boozer is currently based in Washington DC, and received a BFA in sculpture from Auburn University and an MFA in ceramics from New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. Her work is included in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Museum of the City of New York, The US Department of State, The Wilson Building Public Art collection and in many private collections. Boozer taught for ten years at the Corcoran College of Art and Design before founding Red Dirt Studio. Recent projects include a commissioned installation at the US Embassy in Djibouti and writing a chapter for U. S. Geologic Survey’s Soil and Culture. Recent exhibitions include Swept Away: Dust, Ashes and Dirt at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. She is especially proud of receiving the 2012 Arts Excellence Award from the Prince Georges Arts and Humanities Council at their inaugural Arts Gala Awards.

For more information on Red Dirt Studio, and to help funding the forthcoming move see here.

For more information and more work by Margaret Boozer see here