Tuesday, May 5, 2015

ESSAY Peter Lenzo & Joe Scotchie-Lenzo: Origins 2000–2002


PETER LENZO AND HIS SON’S ASSIST                                    By Wim Roefs

            “I made my dad famous,” Joe Scotchie-Lenzo used to say about the ceramic artist Peter Lenzo.
            “He started saying that right away,” says his dad.
            He still does. “I like to take credit for it,” Scotchie-Lenzo says, grinning.
            Of course, Lenzo already had a considerable reputation, mostly with his cabinet-like altarpieces filled with found objects and personal mementos and slowly, also, for more traditional-looking face jugs steeped in Southern tradition. But Lenzo’s son did steer his dad in the direction he now is known for nationally – highly embellished, at times frightening ceramic figures and faces adorned with found and created objects sticking in and out of bodies and faces that are at times unrecognizable as the face jugs from which they originate. The adornments range from ceramic shards to found or purchased porcelains dolls, animals, pipe heads, trains, shoes, roosters or Virgin Mary statues and snakes, leaves, sticks and other things that Lenzo makes himself.
            The son created the dad’s breakthrough in 2000 at age four, the year after Lenzo had begun to make face jugs. At his father’s side, little Joe had already created face jugs, which Lenzo still likes to hold up, marveling at the untrained skill, looseness and good but asymmetrical features. Then the son started to stick stuff into Lenzo’s jugs.
            “One day, I had a finished face jug on the table in my studio,” Lenzo says. “I had a bowl of teeth, and Joe asked ‘can I put some teeth in the head?’ I said ‘okay’. And off he goes.
            ‘Can I stick one in the eye?’
            ‘In the nose?’
            That piece I kind of looked at as Joe having fun. I put it on the shelf, and it gathered dust for several months. Then I looked at it again and liked it. I put it in the kiln, and it came out so fantastic. So I wanted Joe to do some more, and he was so thrilled.”
            The son went to work, also with brushes and different colored slip that he would mix. “It turned all black,” Lenzo says. “That was one of his specialties, turning them black.” The son wanted to put a snake on the jug but didn’t like the one he had made, so Lenzo made him some snakes. “He wanted leaves and sticks, but real ones can’t work,” Lenzo says, “so I made him some of porcelain and pre-fired them so that they wouldn’t break.”
            The next request was shoes. “I saw some in an antique store,” Lenzo says. “That started me buying stuff from thrift stores and such.” His son’s invention of putting a doll head in the eye especially excited Lenzo, and he would do so many times himself. “Then he wanted to put Pokémon on it, so he just stuck some shards in it and said it was Pokémon. And we named one Pokémon.”
            Lenzo would keep finished clay heads under plastic for when his son was ready to go. Sometimes Joe would do one, other times three or so in a single sitting. He would work with both hands at times. “There was never any hesitation,” Lenzo says. “He just attacked it. He was so focused. Then one day he said he was done. He didn’t want to do it anymore. And he didn’t.”
            The son would continue to tag along with his dad in the studio, the middle school classroom where Lenzo taught or later after school at Southern Pottery, the ceramics gallery and studio that Lenzo owned at the time. Like his sister, Roxanne, he would create his own face jugs at times. Some sold alongside his dad’s for hundreds of dollars to serious collectors.
            “I thought it was crazy when one of my pieces sold for more than $100,” says Scotchie-Lenzo, now 19. Some went for $300 or $400. One ended up in the South Carolina State Museum; a father-and-son co-production is in the Smithsonian. But three years ago, the son stopped altogether.
            “I don’t know why,” Scotchie-Lenzo says. “It wasn’t as much fun as it used to be. I had fun as a kid sticking stuff in faces, but later it became more like work. Doing the whole thing – it took a lot of time.” Increased skill levels also increased expectations, making the process harder. He has less time now, he says, and isn’t around his dad and the studio as much.
            “I never really wanted to become an artist. Both my parents were. My whole youth was spent around artwork, and I’ve seen so much. I love it, but I’ve been around it all my life. I am not put off, but it was hard to see myself do that also. I can do something else that I am not familiar with.”
            “But I like the idea of this exhibition. Seeing these pieces again brings back memories of working in the studio. I like these pieces because they are so random. It makes me want to go back and see what I can do now.”
            “The technique,” as Lenzo calls it, that Scotchie-Lenzo had invented out of the blue as a four year old changed his father’s perspective. “Sticking fired clay into wet clay was not done and is still not done,” Lenzo says. “When it didn’t crack during firing, I was really surprised.”
            The ruthlessness with which Scotchie-Lenzo attacked nice faces that Lenzo had labored over showed an attitude the latter didn’t have then. “I was never able to do that. Those faces were precious. Sometimes I would distort a face or only work around it but not destroy it. What Joe did almost seemed a sign of disrespect for what I had done. It didn’t bother me, but it shocked me at first. A couple of them, you didn’t even know they were a face. But I really like the idea of sticking these things in the heads and became more deliberate about what I would stick in there.”
            Attaching objects to clay faces and figures gave Lenzo a new vehicle for telling stories when he could no longer do so by putting objects in finely crafted wooden alter pieces. In the 1990s, brain damage from a bicycle accident in his youth had caught up with him, and he increasingly suffered from seizures. Working with a table saw and other power tools to create the altars was an accident waiting to happen. As a result, Lenzo had switched to clay exclusively, making Southern-style face jugs.
            “To me it was like telling stories,” Lenzo says about his new direction. “Stories on the outside while the head was empty, which was a good metaphor for what I was going through. All these drugs, the bad reactions to them, my memory getting worse – having those heads empty seemed apt.”
            “It was a transitional time for me,” Lenzo says. “My seizures went from once every six months to every week or ten days. Everything stopped: Teaching, working with power tools, walking by myself. Life got squished. I wasn’t able to achieve much. When I started working with Joe on the face jugs, I started working more in clay.”
            Both father-and-son co-productions and Lenzo’s solo work in the new vein got noted, earning Lenzo representation at SOFA New York and Chicago, solo exhibitions in prominent galleries in Atlanta and Massachusetts and a growing reputation. Lenzo loved making traditional face jugs but worried about abandoning the fine art world from which he came. The new work bridged the gap. “Working with Joe gave me a direction to go in when I didn’t know where to go. I wouldn’t say Joe made me famous, but he made me sane.”

                                                                           Wim Roefs is the owner of if ART Gallery

                                                                                                                            May 2015


       Peter Lenzo & Joe Scotchie-Lenzo        

            Columbia, S.C., resident Peter Lenzo (b. 1955) is a widely recognized ceramic sculptor with a national profile. The New York City native, who grew up in Detroit, was selected for the 1995 and 1998 South Carolina Triennial exhibitions at the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia; the 2011 exhibition Triennial Revisited and the 701 CCA South Carolina Biennial 2011 and 2013, all at 701 Center for Contemporary Art in Columbia; and Thresholds, a 2003 exhibition of Southeastern art dealing with religion and spirituality that traveled extensively throughout the Southeast.  
            Lenzo’s work is in several museum collections, including at the South Carolina State Museum, the Mint Museum in Charlotte, N.C., and the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. His solo exhibitions include those at the Spartanburg (S.C.) Museum of Art, the European Ceramic Work Center in Den Bosch, The Netherlands, Great American Gallery in Atlanta and Ferrin Contemporary gallery in Massachusetts.
            Lenzo and his work have been featured in numerous books, exhibition catalogues and articles about ceramic sculpture and Southern art. They include the Threshold catalogue, 500 Figures In Clay (2005), Robert Hunter’s Ceramics in America (2006) and Poetic Expressions of Mortality: Figurative Ceramics From the Porter–Price Collection (2006). He holds an MFA from Wayne State University in Detroit and used to teach at the University of South Carolina, Columbia.
            Joe Scotchie-Lenzo (b. 1996) is Peter Lenzo’s son. He has been making and selling ceramic sculptures off and on since he was four years old, although he hasn’t produced any in three years. One co-production with his dad is in the collection of the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery. One of his individual works is in the South Carolina State Museum collection. Scotchie-Lenzo is a native and resident of Columbia, where he is a business major with an interest in retail and clothing at the University of South Carolina.

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