The Grunwald Gallery at Indiana University Bloomington is pleased to present the exhibition Balancing Act: Christyl Boger. The exhibit contains works from Boger’s career as a renowned ceramic artist and professor at the School of Art, Architecture, and Design at Indiana University, Bloomington. The exhibit will open to the public on Friday, January 11, but the reception will take place on Friday, January 18th from 5:00 to 7:00 pm. Boger’s work is interested in the balancing act of the human animal caught between impulse and control, individual versus group, and the “fragile, vulnerable veneer” of our shared cultural behavior. Her work exists at the confluence of high and low art, of traditional figurative sculpture and domestic decorative figurines. Her works are caught between irreverent display and self-conscious concealment, shifting between vulnerable and suggestive states of being.

Through combining the idealized aesthetic of classical sculpture with the scale of table top decorative figurines, her work has been described as embodying a fine balance between high and low art. Though she references non-ceramic elements such as public statuary and contemporary inflatable beach toys, Boger stated that her material "stays true to the language of ceramic figurines...the material of clay itself is inseparable from the ideas of fragility and artifice."

Boger received her MFA from Ohio University in the year 2000 and began her teaching career at Indiana University Bloomington the following year. She was the recipient of the prestigious Evelyn Shapiro Fellowship award and named as an emerging artist by the National Council on the Education for the Ceramic Arts. Boger has taught multiple workshops around the country and has held residencies at Montana’s Archie Bray Foundation, and the International Ceramic Research Center in Denmark. In 2009 she was invited to exhibit in the Renwick Craft Invitational at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC that garnered her recognition within the fine art ceramic world.

A catalog will be produced and distributed by the Grunwald Gallery that includes 7 full color plates of the works on view and includes an essay from Stephanie Lanter, and statements from John Burgoon, Tim Mather and Malcom Mobutu-Smith.

The Grunwald Gallery would like to thank the School of Art, Architecture + Design, the Indiana University Bloomington Ceramics Department, and John Burgoon.