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Myrton Purkiss moved from Canada to the United States at age twelve, and eventually attended the University of Southern California to study under master ceramist Glen Lukens, who influenced generations of ceramic students with his groundbreaking experimentation in materials and techniques. Purkiss completed his formal education at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles before being drafted into military service, where he used his design skills working as a cartographer, building scale models of the European landscape. He took advantage of this time abroad, studying ceramics and decorative arts across England and France. Read More

Born into a family that valued fine art—her mother made many visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art while pregnant in the hopes that she would give birth to an artist—Elsie Driggs began her art education early, taking several painting classes as a child and teenager. She enrolled in the Art Students League in New York City in 1918, where she studied under modernists John Sloan, George Luks, Robert Henri, and Maurice Sterne for several years. This experience, as well as a period of study in Italy, informed her artistic style, which she continued to develop and refine over the course of a seventy-year career. Read More

In the late summer of 1971, the Everson Museum of Art erected a life-size elephant-shaped playground slide on the grounds just east of the Museum. Designed by Irwin Sirota, founder of the Punch and Judy Theater/Studio in Syracuse, and artist Ivan Powell, the sixteen-foot structure was built as part of an initiative instituted by then-Museum director Jim Harithas to make the Everson a more accessible place for the community. Harithas also intended the slide to address the need for creative recreation facilities for the children of Syracuse. Read More

Over the course of her thirty-year career, Ellamarie Woolley created innovative work that significantly advanced the field of enamel arts. Woolley, along with her husband Jackson, first encountered the art of enameling through a demonstration at Scripps College in Claremont, California in 1947. Fascinated by the process, the couple began working collaboratively, beginning with bowls, plates, ashtrays, and boxes. In the 1950s, they started making largescale enameled murals which were often installed on public buildings throughout California. The couple’s creative interests diverged in the mid-1960s, and Ellamarie began constructing hard-edge, abstract wall pieces. Read More

The ashes of family members are literally an integral component of artist TR Ericsson’s work—he mixes the ashes with different mediums when screen-printing. As part of his current exhibition I Was Born To Bring You Into This World at the Everson, the artist worked with local ceramist and Syracuse University professor Margie Hughto and her ceramics student Kwan Jeong to design, throw, glaze, and fire several vessels inspired by the urns that house the funerary ashes of his mother, grandmother, and grandfather. Ericsson never felt satisfied with the original urns as the final containers for his loved ones’ ashes, so designing these vessels was an opportunity to reimagine a more appropriate resting place. Read More