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In December of 1925, the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts (today the Everson Museum) opened Arts and Crafts Show by Local Artists, an exhibition arranged by ceramists Adelaide Alsop Robineau and Carleton Atherton. In an article titled “Syracuse Art Masterpieces Put on Exhibit” published in the Syracuse Herald on December 6, 1925, journalist Robert W. Friedel described the exhibition as “the first show of the work of local craftsmen ever held in this city.” While the Museum had previously exhibited work by local artists, it often focused on painting and sculpture rather than work that, in the 1920s, many viewed as outside the realm of fine arts. Read More

Eric Serritella is a ceramist based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. After sixteen years of working in marketing, he began exploring clay and quickly fell in love with the medium. Serritella opened his first studio, Muddy Paws Pottery, in 2001 in Newfield, New York, where he made and sold utilitarian mugs and bowls. A turning point Serritella’s career came after he took several classes with internationally known ceramist Ah Leon at Cornell University. In 2004, Leon invited Serritella to participate in a five-month long artist residency in Taiwan, where he studied with Leon and other ceramic masters. Serritella returned home and began a new series of wheel thrown work inspired by Eastern aesthetics and philosophy. Read More

Frederick Usher DeVoll (1873-1941) was born in Providence, Rhode Island. He graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1896 at the age of twenty-three and left Providence for New York City, where he studied with some of the most important American artists of his time, including William Merritt Chase [LINK], Charles Hawthorne, and Robert Henri. Chase and Hawthorne were accomplished portrait painters, both influenced by Impressionism. Henri was also influenced by Impressionism, but in the 1890s and early 1900s, when DeVoll likely was his student, Henri began exploring a new style that eventually became known as the Ashcan School. Read More

Arthur Van Wagenen Eltinge (1872-1931) was born in Kingston, New York. He showed an early interest in music and began teaching music and playing the organ in his local church at age fourteen. He enrolled at Syracuse University in 1890 to study piano and organ and received his bachelor’s degree in music in 1894. Upon graduating, Eltinge began teaching music at the University and giving private lessons to students living in the Syracuse area. He left his teaching position at Syracuse University after eight years to focus on private lessons and composing his own music. Eltinge became known as a skilled “teacher of teachers,” specializing in how to train music teachers to become better teachers themselves. Read More

From January 18 through 23, 1972, cellist Charlotte Moorman and artist Nam June Paik performed Concerto for TV Cello and Videotape and TV Bed at the Everson Museum of Art. For Concerto, Moorman played the video cello, an instrument designed by Paik and constructed out of television monitors, and for TV Bed she played a traditional cello while lying atop an installation of monitors resembling a bed. Paik was on hand to explain his Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer, the first machine designed to purposefully distort video feeds across multiple television screens. Read More