In Bonuse Episode 352, Bay Area-based artist Cathy Lu talks about:
Her residency at Kohler Art Center in Wisconsin, where she was when we spoke, working on a large sculpture based on the goddess Nuwa; how she stores her ceramics outside; her bi-coastal life teaching ceramics at School of Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts while still keeping a home base in Richmond (in the Bay Area), where she returns to about once a month during the school year; how the Museum School doesn’t have grades, but has a Review Board where students’ work is reviewed at the end of semester in a very thoughtful and supportive style, and how she uses her teaching platform to encourage cultivating community, including ‘clay club,’ and as a ‘gateway drug’ to California ceramics; her year-long residency at the Chinese Cultural Center in San Francisco, where in addition to exhibiting her own work over the year, she also curated artists she was excited about into the space, including performance; her students’ tendency to stay away from art/artmaking as a career, and how much class plays a role in who becomes artists and who is able to sustain being an artist, through outside (usually family) income streams; her day jobs before teaching became her main gig, including as an artist assistant and a very San Francisco (interesting) retail job; for the first time, finding some financial security as a full-time teacher, and yet not without having qualms about the state of academia.
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