Invited to the Phillips Academy campus to serve as Addison’s Edward E. Elson artists-in-residence in 1997, California artists Richard Shaw and Robert Hudson spent a total of four months over a year’s time creating work in the art department’s ceramics studio. Their residency was an eye-opening example for students of the diligence that artists must exercise in making work. It was also a shining example of the inventiveness and bizarre humor of these two artists. Using kitschy elements made from cast off molds from a defunct industrial manufacturer in nearby Lawrence in combination and even contradiction to more mundane natural and vessel forms, they created what critic Donald Kuspit called “startling, radically expressive, uncanny poetry.” Kuspit went on to describe their work, “there is a conspicuous, generic cubist as well as surrealist dimension to them, and even, in their painterly character and energetic color, an expressionistic dimension. Planes are ingeniously manipulated to ambiguous spatial effect, colors and lines surge autonomously, and objects are magically—and precariously— integrated into absurd compositions.”

Richard Shaw’s ceramic sculpture 100LP is one of a prodigious number of works produced during the two artists’ residency.