MICHELLE ERICKSON

MICHELLE ERICKSON

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BIO

ABOUT

American, b. 1960 in Hampton, VA
lives and works in Hampton, VA

Michelle Erickson has a BFA from the College of William and Mary and is an independent ceramic artist and scholar.  Internationally recognized for her mastery of colonial era ceramic techniques her pieces reinvent ceramic history to create 21st century social political and environmental narratives. Her ceramic art is represented in major museums including the Museum of Art and Design NY, the Seattle Art Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Ms. Erickson’s rediscovery of historical ceramics techniques is widely published and her contemporary art is profiled in numerous national and international publications.  She has lectured widely at institutions that include The Potteries Museums Stoke on Trent, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has designed and produced ceramics for major motion pictures such as The Patriot, and HBO’s series John Adams. 

In 2012 Michelle was artist in residence as a World Class Maker at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London where she collaborated with Nike’s 2012 Olympic Track and Field Innovation and created three exciting short videos produced by the V&A and the Chipstone Foundation.  

Erickson’s recent solo exhibitions include Conversations In Clay at Virginia MOCA 2015, You & I Are …Earth  at Wilton House Museum, Richmond VA 2016 and Michelle Erickon Distilled, The Last Drop Project at the NC Pottery Center 2018 profiled in Ceramics in America 2018. American Pickle Museum of the American Revolution December 2018. Wild Porcelain Legion of Honor Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, October 2021- September 2022

Ms Erickson was a finalist for the 2016 Gibbes Museum of Art 1858 Prize. Michelle’s 21stcentury protest ceramics are included in the historic exhibition Breaking the Chains: Ceramics and the Abolitionist Movement 2019 at The Reeves Collection Washington & Lee University. Her art was recently featured in Reshaped: Ceramics Through Time Christies London May 2019. Michelle is part of the invitational exhibition project Another Crossing: Artists Revisit the Mayflower Voyage, Fuller Craft Museum, MA July – October 2021, The Box Plymouth UK spring 2022.

ON HER WORK IN OUR AMERICA/WHOSE AMERICA?

Michelle Erickson’s satirical ceramic transfer The Party’s Over was created in 2014 and adapts Paul Revere’s 1774 engraving The Able Doctor as a modern reinvention of the use of ceramics as a democratic means for social and political commentary. Transposed portraits of key contemporary self-proclaimed ‘tea party’ politicians and activists fit alarmingly well into this brutal 18th century satire. Her latest iteration in the Party Platter series, incorporates a large version of the composition depicting the violation of an allegorical America and dually represents the broader notion of an imperiled Liberty facilitated greatly by Citizens United. Most specifically the piece speaks to the inconceivable plight of women’s rights at risk in 21st century America.

Party Platter describes America’s current political landscape through the lens of American revolutionary history. The founding of American democracy is based on the ideals of Equality Justice and Liberty but the realities of colonialism continues to challenge our Democracy in the 21st century. The original sins of Indigenous genocide, the inhumanity of slavery, and the inequity and subjugation of women are deep wounds in the American contract yet to be healed. Republican Tea party politics embodied in the Trump Presidency has exposed the wounds of institutional racism, cultural and environmental injustice and the assault on women’s rights in the 21st century.

– Michelle Erickson