Fri 11/19 @ 4-7PM
California ceramicist Clayton Bailey (1939-2020) was a practitioner of a genre that has been dubbed “funk art” or “nut art,” a style that can appear to be “outsider” art with its freewheeling pop culture motifs, although he was in fact a highly trained artist. Much of his work features recurring tongue-in-cheek sci-fi images, such as robots and skeletons; he even created a mad scientist persona.
After his death, Akron’s Curated Storefront project, whose mission since 2016 has been to put art displays in empty storefronts, acquired almost all of his collection from his estate. In the spring they put 100 of his pieces on display at the Landmark Building in downtown Akron “as we peer into the wild, warped mind of renowned ceramist and prankster Clayton Bailey.”
Now the collection, dubbed “Clayton Bailey’s World of Wonders,” is moving to a couple of new Akron locations, splitting into two new exhibits. The Institute for Human Science and Culture (IHSC) (73 S. College Street) will house “Kaolithic Curiosities,” a collection of Bailey’s mythical characters that explore the artist’s attractions to monsters and a mid-20th-century vision of outer space, including a “jolting skeleton,” remnants of Bigfoot and a mutant blob. “Mechanical Molecules,” featuring Bailey’s robots and other mechanical creations, will be on view at the downtown Polski’s storefronts.
There’ll be a “soft opening” of “Kaolithic Curiosities” at IHSC Friday November 19 @ 4-7pm where visitors can check out the results of this artist’s distinctive imagination. It will be on view through August 2022. “Mechanical Molecules” will open in January.
Go to curatedstorefront.org for more information.