LOOK INSIDE: Jim Melchert, Where the Boundaries Are

50 Statements About Myself Jim Melchert 1. Most people could use some good news.

2. If you want to know more about some person’s character, give them some authority and see what they do with it.

3. For a good conversation, it helps to be interested in the person you are listening to.

4. On my list of things not to do is mail a letter that needs another draft.

5. I once heard Ram Dass explain how when we are between lives, we choose the circumstances of the next one that could help us advance spiritually.

6. In my senior year in college, I was in a small group of students to hear Albert Einstein talk about world federalism, which he championed.

7. I suffer from my imagined need to be in touch with global news throughout the day.

8. My teeth are all my own. But the socket in my left shoulder comes from a factory.

9. I haven’t been on a horse in years.

10. I get excited when I discover that someone whom I haven’t seen in years has done wonderful things that I didn’t know about.

11. I like watching people in supermarkets and realizing that we are variations of one another.

12. I love opening the refrigerator and finding something that will do for supper.

13. I’m so clumsy that I wouldn’t hire myself to be a studio assistant.

14. I like to think that my artwork may lead to revealing a truth we have yet to know.

15. When I was teaching, I found more friends among my students than among my colleagues on the faculty.

16. I liked having artwork by friends in my house because it reminds me of them.

17. I’m so in awe of some of my contemporaries, like Rebecca Solnit and Bill Wiley, that I barely know what to say when I run into them.

18. When I was a young artist, I picked up smoking because I was desperate to fit in.

19. I used to hitchhike a lot in my high school and college years. Occasionally, I would be picked up by a lone driver who needed someone to hear what he needed to confess.

20. Feeding your friends is an extension of feeding your family.

21. Time may be the most precious thing we have, but so is experience.

22. I think I’m pretty good at reading people’s eyes.

23. I may well be the most gregarious loner I know.

24. My heart goes out to single parents trying to raise a kid.

25. There are more artists whose work deserves attention and respect than the art industry cares to recognize.

26. Having grown up with dogs, I view cats with suspicion.

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27. An architect in Rome told me that a chair should be designed to make the person sitting in it look good.

28. The coldest I’ve ever been was the afternoon I was swimming off the coast of Maine.

29. I know what it’s like to feel out of place as well as over one’s head.

30. I wish my studio was three times its size and that I had a whole other building as well.

31. A friend of mine who regularly appears on the list of the ten best-dressed men in America once told me I would never look smartly dressed no matter what I wore.

32. I thought differently about steel and glass after I learned they were liquids.

33. If I were offered a drink or a piece of dark chocolate, I’m likely to take the latter.

34. The first time a work of mine was shown at the SFMOMA, I happened to meet the Director of the Museum who, when I spoke about my piece, denied that it was there and walked away.

35. On my three visits to South Korea, I related more easily with the women and young people I met than I did with the men with whom I was working.

36. The ability to improvise is a great resource to have.

37. On my thirtieth birthday, a younger friend asked me how it felt to be over the hill.

38. My 30's, 40's, and 50's, were anything but easy.

39. Chairs interest me, so I look at them as if they were sculptures.

40. I have a sweet memory of once being with a student group in Hyde Park listening to Eleanor Roosevelt talking about the newly formed United Nations. It started raining, and as I had the only umbrella, I got to walk her back to her house and be treated as an equal.

41. Once, in the late '60s, a black teenager stopped me in downtown Berkeley and offered to sing me a song for a quarter. A quiet blues just loud enough for me to hear and remember all these years.

42. The summer before my third year in college I worked with kids at a settlement house in East Harlem, an experience that was sort of magical.

43. I still haven’t learned to use the public library instead of buying books.

44. I like exchanging a word with the cashier in the check-out line.

45. Would that more people in their 50s knew what a great decade awaits them at 60.

46. One summer, I worked in the kitchen at Old Faithful Lodge in Yellowstone Park and even though I hung out with the other students, the people I learned from were the old chefs; solitary, itinerant men with missing fingers.

47. In an effort to thumb his nose at the art industry, Bruce Conner once came to a class I was teaching with a portfolio of lithographs he was willing to sell us for fifteen dollars.

48. I’m still in touch with students I had in Japan during my first four years out of college.

49. At a restaurant, I order food that I can’t cook myself.

50. I like words that begin with R.E., such as reimagine, reaffirm, reconnect, and re-envision.

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For whom is art history told?

GRIFF WILLIAMS The history of art is rife with tales of the artist as a heroic virtuoso—an outsider of singular divine talent whose work towers above that of their peers and who stands before us to be adored. This notion of the artist as a virtuoso serves the commercial aspect of the arts but little else. It certainly doesn’t get us any closer to understanding what creativity is or what is required to pursue a lifetime of artistic practice. And we rarely hear the stories of those who pursue goals that aren’t commercially driven. This is that story. The book you are reading is the first monograph ever published about the profoundly impactful career of Jim Melchert (1930–2023), a career that was largely unconcerned with the commercial marketplace, and for that reason, you know less about him. The modern history of art is largely the story of white men who achieved financial success in the galleries of New York. But what of the tens of thousands of artists around the globe who lead extraordinary lives of curiosity, creativity, and generosity for whom no story is written?

Jim Melchert was a revered figure in the San Francisco Bay Area, as much for his personal generosity as for his profound impact on the arts. He was a first-generation conceptual artist and an essential part of a group that created a seismic shift in the ceramic field, one that elevated ceramics from a utilitarian craft to a sculptural art form. His poetics are rooted in a moment when, in the late 1950s, Peter Voulkos challenged the canon of ceramics as Jackson Pollock had in painting. Melchert said, “We were bent on throwing out the canon we knew and replacing it with a new one. The old one that had defined ceramic art couldn't accommodate the aesthetic terrain he had come upon.” A collection of artists—mostly from California, including Melchert, Voulkos, Ken Price, Ron Nagle, Viola Frey, John Mason, and Robert Arneson—changed the course of ceramics and ushered in the explosion of the ceramic sculpture we see today with artists like Sterling Ruby, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Ruby Neri, Nicole Cherubini, and Arlene Shechet.

But by the late 1960s, Melchert had already tired of ceramics limitations. He began making Conceptual art with clay—probably the only artist at the time who did so. In and of itself, that’s a great artistic accomplishment, and it identified him as one who was uneasy with the

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arbitrary boundaries that define disciplines. While he was held in wide esteem for his role in the advancement of ceramics, Melchert grew restless with clay and its limitations. He began to create elegant, conceptually driven work in film, photography, and performance. His experimentation with ideas and materials confused some of his colleagues in the ceramic field. Betty Woodman once called his willingness to break the rules “perverse.”

“She may have been right,” Melchert said, “but foolish as it may seem, crossing boundaries can lead somewhere worth finding.” His work in the 1970s was a vital part of what became known as the Bay Area Conceptual movement. It included artists and friends like Bruce Nauman, Terry Fox, David Ireland, Tom Marioni, Howard Fried, Paul Kos, AntFarm, and Bonnie Ora Sherk. These and others helped establish San Francisco as a key location for Conceptual art aided by curators like Constance Lewallen and Suzanne Lacy and galleries like Reese Palley, which was devoted to showing the ephemeral, conceptual, and largely unsalable mediums. Conceptual artists rebelled against the status quo. In opposition to the art market, they aimed to redefine what artists do, what art is, and who and what art is for. This moment was a particularly open-ended period in American art and produced a breathtaking array of activities that expanded the boundaries of meaningful creativity.

Melchert was a collegial organizer, and the communal aspects of performance suited him well at the time. Being in Berkeley, California, in the 1960s cemented in him a belief in the power of the collective and the responsibility of being of service. He was raised in a Protestant German farming community in Ohio. His father was the minister of the Evangelical and Reformed Church, and his mother was the church organist, so his belief in a service-oriented community was instilled in him at an early age. He was a conscientious objector during the Korean War and was granted alternative service teaching English in Sendai, Japan, where he met and married his wife, Mary Ann. He was a product of a place and time in America when artists and musicians rebelled against the status quo. Social unrest, war, and declining faith in government led artists to band together and focus on more communal and cooperative ways of working. He bristled at the notion of American individualism and bootstrapping, recognizing that humans are naturally dependent on one another. The grocer needs the farmer, who needs the truck driver, who needs the schoolteacher, who needs the students. These relationships of interdependence were thrilling to Melchert. “I don’t know why, but I find it very necessary to get to know people, and I think very often, as part of getting to know them, I would empathize with them so closely that it would affect my work.”

Melchert’s role as an educator was central to his insatiable desire for learning and his belief in public service. He taught at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1961 to 1965, establishing its first ceramics program and enlisting Ron Nagle to teach beside him. Nagle and Melchert turned the ceramic department at the San Francisco Art Institute into a low-fire facility and influenced a generation of ceramists to use color in their work. These artists were tapping into materials and processes that had been other­w ise dismissed by academic artists.

From 1965 to 1992, he was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. There, he made changes to the established curriculum that suited his growing conceptual tendencies; he renamed “Beginning Sculpture” to “Introduction to Visual Thinking.” He was a listener, not a lecturer. At the time of Melchert’s passing, Conceptual artist Anne Walsh wrote, “UC Berkeley’s Art department was forever changed by the conceptual practices Melchert introduced through his courses, particularly Introduction to Visual Thinking, but also by his expansive network of colleagues and admirers. He had lived a long and full life as an educator, mentor, administrator, artist, and lively thinker. Melchert leaves several important lega-

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cies and many former students and mentees behind, including artists working across disciplines as varied as ceramics to poetry, music, and architecture. His curiosity was boundless, and his personal grace and modesty were rare for such an accomplished creator.”

Melchert’s work as an artist and his tenure as a professor at UC Berkeley was interrupted twice. The first time was due to his appointment as Director of the Visual Arts program for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) from 1977 to 1981. The second was when he became the Director of the American Academy of Rome from 1984 to 1988. As an arts administrator, he called upon many of the lessons he learned as an artist, always searching to discover something he hadn’t understood or experienced. During his term in Rome, scores of remarkable artists were in residence, including Ana Mendieta, Alex Katz, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Judy Pfaff, and Clark Coolidge. As a practicing visual artist, his appointments to these important administrative roles were unprecedented. Until his appointment at the NEA, federal government monies were awarded by panels of government bureaucrats.

Melchert instituted important changes that gave new authority to artists themselves.

The interruptions in Melchert’s studio practice while at the NEA and American Academy in Rome didn’t help the commercial trajectory of his art career. Melchert himself acknowledges this, noting in Maria Porges’s essay the challenges of “getting back a seat on the bus” when one steps away from the inflexible boundaries defining an artist. Melchert’s career in the art world was unorthodox; he followed opportunity without planning, but not without purpose.

Central to that purpose was learning and being of service to others.

In an article for KQED, Patricia Maloney wrote, “In sum, Melchert’s practice as an artist is inextricable from the agency that he created for other artists. We can envision a trajectory in which a widespread acknowledgment of Melchert’s contributions to contemporary art not only gives him his due but shatters the dominant framework about whom art history is told.

His inclusion in the canon would enable an altered narrative that makes visible the collective, cooperative work necessary for art’s production. That would be a different story, hardly linear, yet far more harmonious and beautiful.”

We love to exalt our heroes, but our heroes don’t spring from a petri dish; they are formed in the community. For every major success story you can call to mind, dozens of people toiled behind the scenes to bring it to public view: mentors, teachers, curators, writers, editors, assistants, benefactors, friends, and supportive families. Melchert’s life choices make evident the importance of this interconnectivity. That in itself is a radical change in the narrative of what constitutes an American success story.

We’ve been asked to believe that artistic agency is one that is gifted through the divination of talent and that talent is rewarded through a meritocracy. It’s just another form of the American bootstrap mythology, which would have us believe that our success emanates from our individual efforts alone. Melchert instead saw himself as a thread in a vast woven network of artists, writers, musicians, and global citizens. As the acclaimed San Francisco author Rebecca Solnit wrote, “Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the ten trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.”

Jim Melchert’s career brightened a path that showed us how one could live a life in the arts, both as an artist and one who used their agency to assist others along the way. He wrote, “I don’t regret the times I was overly generous, yet I feel pain in recalling the times I wasn’t generous enough.”

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above: Untitled, 1962, glazed stoneware, 36" x 14" opposite: Slow Boat, 1962, clay, wood, lead, 42"x 20"x 8", Kaneko Museum collection

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above: Red & Yellow Ghostjar, 1964, glazed stoneware, 12" high opposite: Racing Ghostjar, 1964, glazed stoneware, 12"x 13" x 14"

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top: a Bomb, 1970, glazed and fired clay, 58" x 42" x 50" bottom: Mary Ann Melchert sitting on Rugged a, 1970, black carpet opposite: Jim Melchert with pattern for Classic a, 1970, Berkeley studio

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above and opposite: Changes performance, 1970, Amsterdam, photographs by Mieke H. Hille

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LOCATION PROJECT #4

above and opposite: Location Project #4, 1970, Powerhouse Gallery, UC Berkeley, 81 slides projected on floor, 72" x 108", participants: Robert Amstrong, Carl Dern, Jim Pomeroy

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American Academy of Rome, 1985

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AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ROME/ DRAWINGS FROM ITALY 1985-1988 Jim Melchert returned to Berkeley, California, from Washington, D.C. in 1981, just before the start of the fall semester at UC Berkeley. He resumed his role as chair of the art practice department for several years before being unanimously chosen to be the new director of the American Academy in Rome.

Despite its long and splendid history, at the time of Melchert's appointment, the American Academy was in dire financial straits. He set about converting some of the villas to the State Department and converting others into venues for concerts, lectures, and social events. He wanted to revitalize the connection between living artists and musicians who lived in Rome.

The American Academy needed a lively interchange with artists and scholars in the city of Rome. “A better bridge to the city, a two-way bridge. Scholars would come to the American Academy because the classical library was well-known and it was terrific. It was the artists' half of the program that needed to be strengthened.” During Melchert’s tenure, many wellknown artists, drawn from his vast network, passed through the American Academy's gates as Residents, including Ana Mendieta, Alex Katz, Vito Acconci, Judy Pfaff, Frank Gillette, Beverly Pepper, and Bruce Nauman. He also fostered an international exchange, introducing young Roman and Italian artists to Rome Prize Fellows and often to each other.

Melchert's friends, artist Sol LeWitt and his wife, Carol, lived and worked in Spoleto, Italy, for part of the year. Melchert asked Sol if he'd install a wall drawing in any of the historic buildings at the American Academy. “A walk across the grounds led us to the Villa, where he spotted the wall between the dining room and stairs. It was a far wider expanse than I was expecting, but proportions mattered to him, and these he liked. His practice was to design the work but have it executed by two trained assistants. The mural would be up for a year.

Since it was quite a gift we were getting, I offered his assistant a place to stay until the project was done. The finished mural gave the entrance to the dining room a dramatic presence that it hadn't had before. When Sol saw how we treasured it, he let it be kept until the wall itself had to be removed during the renovation of the building.”

At Melchert's insistence, an art studio came with his job. The building had a high ceiling with a clerestory that let natural light stream down. Isamu Noguchi had once used this studio. Melchert said, “My time as director was so taken up with daily issues that I seldom had more than an hour or two, if any, for art making. Saturdays made up for what I missed during the week. The best way to use such scattered hours was to draw. I was getting

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above: Newspaper clipping used for Budapest drawing opposite: Budapest, 1985, black Conté on paper, 15.5" x 21.7"

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above and opposite: Coming to Light (detail), 1994, 168" x 2700", hand-glazed ceramic tile, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, photograph by Richard Barnes

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previous page: Feathers of a Phoenix (Blue) (detail) above: Feathers of a Phoenix (Blue), 2003-4, broken and fired porcelain tile with glaze, 70" x 82" opposite: Feathers of a Phoenix (Blue) installed at Gallery 16, San Francisco following spread: Feathers of a Phoenix (Blue) (detail)

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previous page: Score and Performance (red) (detail), 2013, broken and fired porcelain tile, 24" x 24" above: Score and Performance (blue), 2014, broken and fired porcelain tile, 18" x 18" opposite: Score and Performance (orange), 2014, broken and fired porcelain tile, 24" x 24"

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above: Channel Twenty, 2015, broken and glazed porcelain tile, 11.5" x 11.5" opposite: Channel Twenty-Two, 2015, broken and glazed porcelain tile, 11.5" x 11.5"

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previous page: Mirror Box 4 (detail) above: Mirror Box 4, 2020, broken and glazed porcelain tile with, mirror, glass, wooden box and lid, 6.5" x 8" x 8"

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Sequoia Miller is the Chief Curator and Deputy Director of the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art in Toronto. He holds a PhD in the History of Art from Yale University; an MA in Design History from the Bard Graduate Center; and a BA in Cultural Studies from Brandeis University. Recent curatorial projects include Magdalene Odundo: A Dialogue with Objects and Shary Boyle: Outside the Palace of Me. Publications include Magdalene Odundo: A Dialogue with Objects (2024), Ceramic Art (2023); and The Ceramic Presence in Modern Art (2015). Prior to his academic and curatorial work, Sequoia was a full-time ceramist who exhibited and led workshops across the United States.

Maria Porges is a writer and artist. Since the early ‘90s, her reviews, articles and interviews have appeared in many publications, including Artforum, Art in America, Sculpture, the New York Times Book Review, Hyperallergic.com and a host of other now-defunct art magazines. She has also authored more than 150 exhibition essays and book contributions.

The recipient of a SECA award from SFMOMA, her studio practice focuses on sculpture and works on paper; over 25 solo shows of her work have included exhibitions at galleries, museums and alternative spaces across the country. Porges received a BA from Yale University and an MFA from the University of Chicago and has twice been in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. She is currently a full professor at California College of the Arts.

Renny Pritikin was co-director of New Langton Arts in San Francisco from 1979 to 1986 and executive director from 1986 until 1992. He was chief curator at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts from 1992 to 2004. He was director of the Nelson Gallery and Fine Arts Collection at UC Davis from 2004 until 2012. He was chief curator of The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco from 2014 until 2018. Career highlights include a lecture series in Japanese museums as a guest of the State Department in 1995. In 2003 he received a Fulbright Fellowship to lecture in museums throughout New Zealand. Pritikin is the author of five published books of poetry, most recently Westerns and Dramas, published by the Prelinger Library, where he was poet in residence (2020). He is a regular contributor to the art review site Squarecylinder and has been the United States correspondent for the Portuguese art magazine Umbigo since 2020. His memoir, At Fourth and Mission: A Life Among Artists, was published in October 2023; Hyperallergic said it “positions him staunchly in Bay Area art history.”

Griff Williams is an American painter, publisher and gallerist. In 1993 he founded Gallery 16 in San Francisco. The exhibition and publishing program has worked with hundreds of artists including Lynn Hershman Leeson, William Kentridge, Deborah Oropallo, Jim Isermann, bell hooks, Rex Ray, Margaret Kilgallen, Mark Grotjahn, Paul Sietsema, Arturo Herrera, Michelle Grabner, Ari Marcopoulos. Williams designed and published dozens of acclaimed books with the Gallery 16 Editions imprint, including The Gay Seventies: Hal Fischer (2019), Bill: Bill Berkson and Colter Jacobsen (2008), Rex Ray, the life, work, and legacy of iconic San Francisco fine artist (2020). Williams' paintings have been exhibited in galleries and museums including San Diego Museum of Art, Crocker Art Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, Missoula Museum of Art..

Tanya Zimbardo is a San Francisco-based curator and the assistant curator of media arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Her research on Bay Area Conceptual art and performance has informed such guest curatorial projects as Bonnie Ora Sherk: Life Frames since 1970 (Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture), Organic Logic (The 500 Capp Street Foundation), Equilibrium: A Paul Kos Survey (di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art), Public Works: Artists’ Interventions 1970s—Now (Mills College Art Museum), Scores for a Room: David Haxton and Jim Melchert (Worth Ryder Art Gallery, UC Berkeley).

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