Every year in mid-April the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, working in conjunction with Angelo State University and the Old Chicken Farm Art Center, sponsors not only a world class ceramic exhibit but also numerous events centered upon art and ceramics. This year’s festivities take place April 16 - 20 and encompass exhibit openings, workshops, a symposium, great art and a mesquite festival, not to mention dining, dancing and plenty of good times.

At the Art Museum 3 separate ceramic exhibits will open on Friday night, April 17 from 6 to 9 pm. The exhibits will run through June 28, 2009. The exhibits include Different Directions: Coming Together in Clay; Sparks: The Ceramic Art of Peter Callas; and the 2008 International Orton Cone Box Show. Different Directions is an invitational exhibit featuring the work of Joe Bova of Santa Fe, NM, Sunyong Chung of Austin and Billy Ray Mangham from San Marcos. The Cone Box Show is an exhibition for small work while in Sparks the clay sculptures of renowned artist Peter Callas will be on display.

Peter Callas is one of America’s foremost expressionist sculptors working in clay. He utilizes the anagama kiln to produce large scale forms in the tradition of abstract expressionism. He is credited with bringing the first anagama and the technique of prolonged wood firing for aesthetic affects to America in 1976. About this time he also began working collaboratively with the preeminent American clay artist Peter Voulkos. For many years he fired Voulkos’s work in his New Jersey kiln and traveled extensively worldwide with Voulkos as his assistant. Today Peter Callas is considered to be one of America’s foremost authorities on the wood fire anagama kiln tradition.
Callas has developed his own unique style and made his mark on the woodfiring scene with pots as well as sculpture. The beauty of wood-fired ceramics lies in subtlety, abstraction, asymmetry, and imperfection. Pieces that are fired in this way have an ancient look about them, as if they had been sitting on the bottom of the sea for thousands of years. “The process of wood firing ceramics, for over three decades, has been the creative touchstone that changed the course of my life,” said Callas in a written statement. Peter Callas has had numerous one-man shows and museum exhibitions worldwide.
He has exhibited extensively in Korea, Japan and Norway and his works are in museum collections in those countries as well as in Hungary, Brazil and numerous American museums.

Pictured above
Peter Callas in his studio
Belvidere, New Jersey

Pictured left
Hannibal, 2001
woodfired stoneware