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Corning Community College will be displaying ceramic and sculpture artwork by Bohn Buechner Whitaker beginning Friday, August 7 through Friday, September 4, 2009, in the Atrium Gallery on the second floor of the Administration Building at the Spencer Hill Campus, Corning, NY. A reception will be held on Friday, August 7 from 4 - 6 p.m. in the Atrium Gallery. The gallery is open during regular College hours on Monday-Friday 8:30 a.m. - 5 p.m. All shows are free and open to the public.

Whitaker comes from a family that loves stories, and grew up surrounded by raucous tales told over the dinner table, some impressive, some zany, some stretching the bounds of believability. She believes that stories are wonderful things. It is through narrative that the complexity of life is distilled into bite-sized morsels, allowing others to share and delight in the experience of one.

Her clay story begins when, as a child, Whitaker took her first ceramic class at the Brooklyn Museum. Soon, she was saving babysitting money for a kick wheel and had set up a primitive studio in the basement. Moving to Boston to attend college, Whitaker found that cooperatives were all the rage and joined Mudflat Studios. Gradually, she moved into becoming a full-time potter, making functional items based on animal themes, fairy tales, and stories of her own. She joined a smaller group, Feet of Clay Cooperative in Brookline, MA. Next came marriage and then children, a redirecting of her work into teaching which gradually lead her to return to college for a degree in art education and then to her current position as middle school art teacher in Newton, MA.

Summers are Whitaker's time to return to her own work and she often takes classes at the Harvard Ceramic Studio or return to rent space at Feet of Clay. Potters are wonderfully warm and generous people and most of what she has learned has been from teachers and friends from the different studios in which she has worked. Throughout all these years, clay has been her storytelling medium, and whether it is a character from an existing fairy tale, an evocative expression on an anonymous face, or a creature twining around a jar, she envisions each piece as one tangible bit of a larger, more complex existence.

For more information about the Atrium Gallery or upcoming events, please contact David Higgins at (607) 962-9297.