Ted Vogel, Associate Professor of Art, taught ceramics at Lewis & Clark College since 1994. He retired in May 2019 and later passed away in July 2019. He received his MFA in Ceramic Sculpture from the University of Colorado, Boulder and a BFA in Ceramics from the University of South Dakota.
In addition to his teaching at Lewis & Clark College, Ted taught workshops nationally, including Penland School for Arts and Crafts, Anderson Ranch Center for the Arts, the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts, the Mendocino Art Center and has served as a visiting artist at numerous colleges, universities and art centers. Ted was the recipient of a residencies at the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts in Helena, Montana, the Watershed Ceramic Center in Maine and in 2006, was a resident artist at the Zentrum fur Keramics in Berlin and a visiting artist at the College of Art & Design in Dublin, Ireland. Prior to coming to the Archie Bray Foundation, Ted served as Gallery Director and Ceramics Program Coordinator at the Arvada Center for the Arts & Humanities in Colorado.
In 1996, he was invited to participate in a yearlong glass residency at the internationally recognized Bullseye Glass in Portland, Oregon. Following that tenure Ted has often incorporated glass, clay, cast iron and digital imagery into his art-making vocabulary. His work is exhibited widely and is held in numerous public and private collections and is published in numerous books and ceramics publications. He has served on the Board of Directors of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts for several years and was a on-site co-coordinator of the 2006 NCECA Conference in Portland, Oregon. This international conference hosted over 4900 educators, scholars and artists in attendance.
Ted Vogel was one of the founding developers of accessCeramics.org a growing collection of images of contemporary ceramics by recognized artists. Arts educators, students, artists, scholars, curators and the general public use this on-line project worldwide. Currently this site has grown to over 375 national and international artists.
accessCeramics.org is organized by the Watzek Library and the Art Department of Lewis & Clark College. The website has received a “NITLE Instructional Innovation Fund Grant” in 2008, and most currently is the recipient of an “National Endowment for the Art 2009 Grant Award: Access to Artistic Excellence”
Artist Statement
I have always been a collector of objects, and a maker of spare parts. In my work these parts are made of clay, kiln-cast glass, digital images, and other mixed-media elements. My interest in working with clay, glass, cast iron, and other materials is in what each material gives to the work, such as light, transparency, depth, color, strength, fragility.
Each part is formed and fired using a variety of techniques and then finished in a range of surfaces and colors that embrace my ideas of symbolism and metaphor.
Reflecting the traditions of ceramic and glass figurines and the kitsch ceramic of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, my work explores ideas of storytelling and allegory and references our inseparable relationship to the natural world, the body, humanness, and our complex and precarious interactions with humankind.
These stories are derived from sources of mythology of our vast history and family tales that are passed down from generation to generation, and from the so-called “true stories” of our time, often created by ironic public myth.
Academic Credentials
MFA 1984 University of Colorado
BFA 1980 University of South Dakota