Jeremy Anderson Returns to Minnesota With a Ceramic Tribute to His Roots
The Galerie Creative Mind ceramicist heads home to unveil whimsical vessels, totemic lighting, and bronze furniture imbued with the spirit of Midwestern architecture
Long before Jeremy Anderson co-founded the influential New York studio Apparatus or delighted aesthetes with his personality-packed ceramic vessels and toothsome lamps adorned with tassels, he was a starry-eyed teenager in suburban Minnesota, quietly absorbing the water towers and grain silos that stood like beacons in the region’s wide open spaces. “The imagery by Bernd and Hilla Becher really stuck with me,” Anderson tells Galerie of the late German artist duo renowned for their stark black-and-white photographs of postwar industrial architecture arranged into grids, personifying each one based on facade features alone. “They looked like characters in the landscape.”
The Galerie Creative Mind ceramicist now returns to his home state for a solo exhibition inaugurating the newly opened Prospect Refuge Gallery in Minneapolis. “Homecoming: Objects of Origin,” which opens June 13, assembles an ensemble cast of finned vessels, whimsical lighting, and Anderson’s growing body of cast bronze furniture. The title reflects multiple layers of return: not only geographically, but to his earliest creative impulses and the emotional textures that continue to shape his practice as one of today’s most exciting ceramicists. “This work is about returning to the place where it all started,” says Anderson, whose embrace of clay enables him to revisit childhood curiosities.
That homegrown sensibility is palpable in the presentation. Anderson’s signature “piccolos”—vivacious vessels with off-center openings and layered, bodily forms—often read like abstracted figures in repose. A breathtaking new bronze console table, made of 152 hand-cast components, signals ambitious new experiments in scale and weight while preserving the tactile imperfections that define his practice. “We don’t overwork the welds,” says Anderson, who plans to explore the material further with bolder, unexpected furniture typologies. “I want people to see the hand in the work because everything is moving in the other direction. I love having a practice that’s a return to the handmade.”
The exhibition is also a debut for Prospect Refuge Gallery, the latest venture from designer Victoria Sass, who has cemented her fast-rising interiors firm as one of the Midwest’s go-to purveyors of character-driven spaces imbued with charm and craft. Launching a gallery seems like a logical next step after she branched out with a lustrous lighting collection for fellow Minneapolis studio Hennepin Made two years ago. Her gallery, perhaps the first collectible design dealer in the Twin Cities, aims to propel the narrative-forward craft sensibilities that define her interiors—and have long been percolating in her backyard—into the global design conversation.
“I’ve always loved telling the stories of objects and discovering that one special piece, the one that brings a space to life,” Sass tells Galerie. “Opening this gallery is as much for myself and my clients as for the community. It’s a resource I’ve long wished existed in my city, so I decided to build it.” And she sees Anderson as an ideal choice to inaugurate the program. “Jeremy is, in many ways, a cultural export from the Midwest,” she explains. “He helped shape the global design conversation through Apparatus and has become one of the most respected voices in collectible design. Now, to welcome him back as an artistic ‘import’ feels incredibly full circle.”
That journey—returning home with newfound perspective and not forgetting where you came from—ascribes “Homecoming” with a profound emotional resonance. “It was an opportunity to show what I’m doing to my family, friends, and the community where it all started,” Anderson says. “I first picked up clay at my high school and learned to throw on a kick wheel. There’s something about the Midwest that sticks with you. This place was very formative for me.”
“Homecoming: Objects of Origin” will be on view at Prospect Refuge Gallery (201 6th St, Minneapolis) starting June 13. Scroll to see more works from the exhibition.
