Artist Talk with Paul Briggs

Visiting artist Paul Briggs will give an artist talk on Wednesday, October 14, at 5:00pm in the Upper Traylor Gallery in the Rogers-Traylor Art Building. This event is free and open to the public. An opening reception with refreshments and snacks will be available after the talk. No RSVP required.

Briggs’ Gravity series revolves intrinsically around Black perseverance. The works in the exhibition, on display together for the first time, dramatize resisting the seeming inevitability of being pulled in specific directions by external forces.

Paul Briggs works primarily using pinch-forming and slab building processes and overall, his work is about art making as inner development, broadly understood. He creates distinctive, high relief pinch-formed ceramic vessels and penetrating slab-built sculptural forms, both genres often have interior space. The former is his meditative practice, and the latter offers him opportunity to philosophize concretely and assess traditions that impede the possibility of ongoing equanimity in individuals and communities. Briggs was a 2024 NCECA Demonstrating Artist. He teaches at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University and resides in Alfred, New York.