Exhibit: Echoes and Fragments by Rene Powell
By Peter Selz, August 09, 2010, Berkeley Daily Planet
A small group of innovators in the 1950s in California–Peter Voulkos, John Mason, Paul Soldner, Kenneth Price, Robert Arneson and Stephen de Staebler–began using clay no longer for its utilitarian function, but as a medium to create abstract or figurative sculpture. Called the Clay Revolution. it did not extend to ceramic tiles, which remained in the purely decorative realm. Rene Powell has done pioneering work in a narrative use of clay tiles in a show currently on view at the Doug Adams Gallery in the Bade Museum on the campus of the Graduate Theological Union. Called ECHOES AND FRAGMENTS, they deal with the Holocaust as personal experience.
Powell’s tiles tell the stories of her father, who was rescued from Germany in a British childrens’ transport during the War, while her grandparents were last seen in the Jewish ghetto of Lodz, Poland. Searching for more documents in Washington’s Holocaust Museum, Rene learned that they were killed. Where, we don’t know. Read more: