Bellevue, Washington
Organized by the American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona, California, “Wit and Wisdom: Patti Warashina” later traveled to the Bellevue Arts Museum, where BAM curator Stefano Catalani expanded its offerings with loans from local collections. The result was a revelatory retrospective that covered the period between 1960 and 2012 and featured works in clay, plastic, and bronze, in addition to prints. A professor at the University of Washington from 1970 to 1995, Warashina has exhibited her work nationally and internationally; her sculptures are included in dozens of museum and public art collections. Her work grows out of West Coast Surrealism and the Funk art of the 1960s, but it goes much further. Like Viola Frey, Robert Arneson, and Stephen de Staebler, Warashina eventually embraced large-scale, assembled-in-sections clay sculpture. Before that, she concentrated on a variety of series that fused autobiographical elements into satires about sex roles and stereotypes, environmental carnage, and deeper relations between men and women…see the entire review in the print version of June’s Sculpture magazine.
