WILD THINGS: Chris Gustin

WILD THINGS
Chris Gustin
September 13 - October 12, 2025

Chris Gustin: Wild Things — Monumental Late-Career Masterworks at Lucy Lacoste Gallery Through October 12

Concord, MA — At 73, visionary ceramic sculptor Chris Gustin is reflecting on legacy, time, and mastery. Wild Things, his monumental new exhibition at Lucy Lacoste Gallery, presents late-career masterworks from his celebrated Cloud and Spirit and new Sprite series. The show, on view through October 12, 2025, captures Gustin at the height of his power— and underscores his place in the American ceramic canon.

Gustin’s work is represented in over 35 major institutions including LACMA, the Metropolitan New York, MFA Houston and the Victoria and Albert. The urgency is clear: these are museumquality works that both honor the past and define the future of abstract ceramics.

Monumental Forms, Transcendent Surfaces

Working improvisationally from oval foundations, Gustin builds closed-form sculptures that tower over four feet tall. Their anthropomorphic, cloudlike, and otherworldly forms evoke humility, generosity, and sensuality. Spirit Series #2503— a tall, tender work whose curves modulate gently downward — embodies the breath-like stillness Gustin describes as “enclosing and shaping air, as if the form itself were holding its breath.”

Each surface is transformed in the kiln, as wood ash melts and drips across the clay. The results are elemental: glazes that recall rainstorms over landscapes, with golds deepening, greens glowing, and copper glinting as they ooze across curves. Spirit Series #2420 glows with bronzed peaks and a dramatic drip of dark ash — a gift from what Gustin calls “the kiln gods.”

A Career of Influence

Born in California to parents who ran pottery factories in Los Angeles, Gustin studied with postwar ceramic pioneer John Mason at UC Irvine before completing his BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute and MFA at Alfred University — the nation’s premier ceramics program. His early recognition included support from the National Endowment for the Arts, and his teaching career at Parsons School of Design, Boston University, and UMass Dartmouth shaped generations of ceramicists.

For more than 40 years, Massachusetts has been Gustin’s chosen home. Today, his work is housed in numerous esteemed cultural institutions and corporate collections — yet Wild Things stands as one of his most personal and powerful exhibitions to date.

“At this point in my life, each piece is a reflection on the time that remains — and what I want to leave behind,” says Gustin.

CATALOGUE ESSAY

‘Wild Things’ An exhibition of the work of Chris Gustin - Judith S. Schwartz, Ph.D., Professor Emerita, Curator, Critic, and Writer

Few match Gustin's spirituality and technical skill handling large-scale forms. Slowly, year by year, he has evolved a technique and achieved a level of skill that is unmatched. His monumental forms are sensuous, robust and infused with life as he seems to breathe air into the spaces holding the walls of his "forms" and then, magically, covers these ‘forms’ with glazes that are equally life-affirming. He is a master of the glazed surface, with nuances of color and texture that visually excite. His work takes the viewer into a world of imagination and awareness of color and form that has seldom has been seen with such a high level of integration.

Gustin was born into a family ceramic business; ceramic art has always been a big part of his life. He began college-level teaching in the 70's and has nurtured countless students in a variety of higher education settings. Later, he switched to the full-time studio environment to perfect his art.

His skill set is unequalled, his manner as a mentor to many is quiet, and his vision vast. The sharing of his Anagama kiln, and the weeklong firings are legendary, and artists come to be part of the experience. Moreover, his dedication to nurturing artists became the backdrop for his co-founding of the Watershed residency - an invaluable retreat for artists who need to the find time and space to work in clay.

His latest show title focuses on Spirits and Clouds that he identifies as “Wild Things.” What might at first seem intangible or fleeting is reframed as vital, unpredictable, and alive. To extend wildness into the immaterial and atmospheric is to question the limits we place on what counts as nature — suggesting that the unseen, like the visible, possesses its own agency and force.

Naming clouds and spirits as wild is both playful and reverent. It calls to mind myth-making traditions that animate the natural world while also echoing childhood imaginings where the wild is everywhere, unbounded. This also recalls the book Where the Wild Things Are — a childlike, playful reimagining of what’s feared or untamed, hinting at imagination as a form of liberation. Spirits and clouds can also be metaphors for the psyche — fleeting moods, shifting thoughts, or hidden forces within the self.

Gustin works within the traditions of the Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists that have used amorphous forms to explore meaning, often drawing from psychology, biology, and the spiritual world. At its core, Gustin’s personal expressions create a pathway for the viewer to encounter similar experiences, emotions, memories, and perspectives where one can bring personal interpretations, feelings, and histories into his forms. In this exchange, “Wild Things” becomes a conversation that makes private truths a communal experience.

He creates visual worlds that don’t just mirror reality but expand it - spaces that invite us to reimagine the familiar. Wild Things sparks curiosity, reshapes perception, and encourages us to see connections between our shared experiences. These imagined worlds are not escapism but rather a way of deepening awareness, nudging us to question and rediscover the significance of what surrounds us daily.

Chris Gustin - Artist Statement

Chris Gustin - CV

September 13 – October 12, 2025

Press Release

MoCA NY: Chris Gustin's Clay World of Clouds and Sprites

By Judith S. Schwartz

September 15, 2025