Aviva Alter
Email: avivastitch@gmail.com
Website: http://www.4fdesign.net/
I was born in Chicago in 1954. My college education was at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1973-1977, and San Francisco Art Institute, 1976. In 1977, I began studying ceramics with studio potter Bruce Cash at Lill Street Studios (now Lillstreet Art Center), and went on to do a year of apprenticeship at Big Hart Pottery.
In 1979, I moved back to Chicago to become a studio potter and worked in partnership with my husband, Alan Lerner, making pottery until 1991. During those years, I exhibited in group and solo ceramic exhibitions, making ceramic objects and sculpture, as well as making a wholesale line of decorative ceramic in my studio business.
In 1991 joined the staff of Lillstreet Art Center as an administrative staff and in 2000 became the Director of Lillstreet Art Center. At the same time that I worked at Lillstreet Art Center, I began embroidering and making a series of small thickly stitched self-portraits. In 2003, I began taking classes with fiber artist Rebecca Renquist, and I found an endless way to work and express myself in a mobile and unlimited way. In 2003, I began to exhibit again using fiber and thread as my main medium. The bodies of work I am working on are currently text based and question oriented.
In 2006, I came to the Crochet the Reef project in Chicago. This combined my love of organic form and use of color that connect me back to my days of working with clay. I also have an even stronger awareness of the environment and the way we, as humans, have began to destroy the world we live in by not taking into consideration the consequences of our actions.
Please check out this site for more on the Crochet the Reef project:
http://www.theiff.org/reef/cambria.html
Interview
Avia Alter’s ArtStyle Blog interview by Darrell Roberts was published in March, 2008.
Artist's Statement
My work is about posing questions and statements that define human nature and experience, questions that have no certain answer. Each of us navigates through life both physically and mentally looking for meaning on our journey and towards our eventual end.
The materials I use are familiar to me in that they have been worn by or fashioned after people I know or have known. These people are those I have strong attachments with through love and hate and this is what ties us together. I use a lot of military garments and blankets when I work (life has always seemed a bit of a battle to me). I use both hand and machine stitching -- the hand ties me to my work and the machine brings speed and extra strength to the material when I need that.
By using military gear I have found a correlation to the bigger conflicts that affect not only my small place in the work but the battles that rage between nations and religions, and the false belief that there is a single answer.
