William Brouillard, Ceramic Artist

2009 LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD IN VISUAL ARTS

Ceramic artist William Brouillard proudly boasts of the fact that, though in his early 60s, he still takes a fair amount of risks with his art. However, he admits, that could just be a function of his self-diagnosed Attention Deficit Disorder. “I’m just not happy unless I’m working,” the affable Brouillard relates. “My wife Jessica will confirm that.”

To be fair, there’s not much Jessica or anyone can do to change that trait in a man whose earliest memories pertain to the joy he experienced simply from “doing things, making things.”

Growing up in rural Wisconsin, roughly 100 miles from the nearest big city of Minneapolis, didn’t provide the greatest formative opportunities for an artist. His high school had no art department, and he had to hide his drawings under other pieces of paper to make it look like he was doing homework in study hall or risk getting punished. Ironically, thanks to a particularly creative teacher, the punishment for goofing off in shop class, where he learned to make furniture and other useful objects, was to read poetry.

Brouillard took his budding interest in shaping physical, three-dimensional pieces that were utilitarian from clay and majored in art at the State University of Wisconsin, where he earned his BA in 1969. Then a couple of years in the US Army showed him a different side of life, and one that, while interesting, wasn’t one he cared to pursue. So, when he found himself studying clay at The New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in Alfred, NY – another one-stop-light town – he thought, “Man, this is really the life. All I have to do is work on stuff I wanted to work on.” A ceramic artist was born.

After collecting his MFA in Ceramic Art in 1976, he was a resident craftsman at The Penland School of Crafts in Penland, North Carolina until 1978. He then ventured into another favorite track in his career, teaching, working his way through several jobs before joining the faculty of The Cleveland Institute of Art in 1980. Today, he is a Professor of Art in the Ceramics Department. He divides his time between his classes at CIA and his “job” at Brouillard Studios in Tremont in the shadows of the old steel mills and industrial structures he treasures, working exclusively on the stuff he wants to do daily.

Currently, his collections are represented by more than 15 centers, including The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Detroit Museum of Art, The University of Southern Illinois, Tokyo National Museum, and Lerner Tower at University Hospitals Case Medical Center. He has also won numerous grants and awards, such as an Excellence in Design Award at the American Craft Museum, and CIA’s Schreckengost Award for Teaching.

The versatile and prolific Brouillard works in a variety of traditions. One of his shows, for example, included a Palace Art Pot, an object historically crafted to depict the wealth and power of the Palace’s owner; a fish platter, a staple of the Neo Arts and Crafts Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s; and a pun platter, exhibiting a one-line visual and verbal pun as part of California’s ceramic Funk Movement, while showing Brouillard’s wry sense of humor, as well.

“I like the way an object looks, with its profiles, silhouettes, and contours,” Brouillard concludes. “So, I’m very particular about how objects are conformed and proportioned, and my work tends to be structured with a certain amount of geometry to it.” And a little joy, too.