Jack Fischer Gallery presents Mud+Bone+Bloom by Ward Schumaker.

“After spending years hand-cutting stencils for my work, especially 5 years of creating about 350 anti-trump broadsides, my fingers needed a break from grasping an X-Acto knife.

Clay was messy and gloomy and wet and dirty and substantial: you got to make something 3-dimensional! I found that clay (like paint, actually) soon started talking to me, giving me directions over what to do, where to add, subtract, and multiply; whether to color or not; and should there be a recognizable subject matter or not.
 
The clay kept taking me back to being a kid, all alone with my dog Lady, tramping along the shores of the Missouri River near our garden (which was big enough to supply all our vegetables). Lady and I spent our time gathering rocks, branches, leaves, and flowering plants that appealed to us, kicking over dead and rotting carcasses (rabbits, skunks, and once a dog) , wiping away spider webs we’d inadvertently walked through: that kind of thing. 
 
And the objects I began making echoed what we found back then, while not being representations of any particular, actual things. Everything on our walks was fecund: fucking, inseminating, fertilizing, and borning. And of course the opposite: rotting, aging, dying.
 
It was a great if solitudinous existence.” —Ward Schumaker

Schumaker’s tender manipulations are apparent in a material well known for its multiplicities. From fine china to Ward’s gravely voice unmistakably exhibited in this work. The work of a statesman in the art world.

Jack Fischer Gallery