Artist Profile: Nicholas Kripal

In our emails earlier this week, University of Arkansas ceramics professor Jeannie Hulen mentioned a series of symposiums which helped bring her program into national recognition. The next such symposium is 31 January through 2 February of 2008. An invitational exhibit during the event included a list of artists which I perused this afternoon. One of the artists is Nicholas Kripal.

Before today I knew nothing of Kripal. Learning more about him hasn’t proved all that easy either; his name appears on quite a few websites, but none of them are his own. A number of places listed of his degrees and exhibitions, the Pew Arts website contained a brief bio — although from what I can tell this write-up is about seven years old.

Kripal is “Professor, Chair of Crafts Department, Head of Ceramics Area” at Temple. He earned a BFA at the Univeristy of Nebraska at Kearney in the 1975 — the same school my brother and sister recently attended — and an MFA from Southern Illinois in 1979.

Two things drew me into this man’s work: First of all, he’s a ceramic artist who’s work will be exhibited in my very own MSA (aka “metropolitan statistical area) in less than two months; secondly, his works seems to often deal with or draw from Christian imagery including cathedrals and labyrinths.

The above example is on the faculty page of the Temple website. While I know nothing of Kripal’s personal faith, his subject matter — what I’ve seen of it today via Google anyway — comes across as overtly Christian. They also often appear architectural in their own right, irrespective of what their inspiration may have been. He is mentioned, apparently, in a catalog titled Faith: The impact of Judeo-Christian religion on art at the millenium.

I hope I can make it to part of the symposium this winter, which is focusing on how “artists who work primarily with clay, a material stigmatized by technique and process, go beyond this stereotype to express concepts.”