January 16 – April 4, 2021
Art League Gallery
Reception: April 2 | 5:00 – 8:00 p.m.
Experience Michiana visits the show
Click HERE to watch as Experience Michiana’s Host, Courtney Jorgensen, visits with Gundega to talk about her work. The segment begins 10 minutes into the episode.
Gundega Penikis’s elegant ceramic pots and vessels have a lightness to them. In contrast to their material, they seem almost to float upward. Perhaps this is from how technically well crafted they are. Or perhaps from drips of glaze that are frozen forever in time. But whatever the reason, her ceramics transcend their earthy materiality and become things of exceptional beauty.
Gundega arrived in South Bend in 1970, and within the year enrolled in a ceramics class at the then Art Center. “I discovered that working with clay was interesting, challenging and discouraging, but never boring.”
Before her recent retirement, Gundega nurtured area clay students for 40 years, teaching in the SBMA studios, Saint Mary’s College and Indiana University South Bend. This exhibition features a loose survey of her work, and will also feature images of work provided by past students, highlighting how both in her personal work and her teaching, Gundega has vastly improved the quality of our cultural life.
