Tony Marsh
Tony Marsh earned his BFA in Ceramic Art at California State University Long Beach in 1978. After graduating he spent three years in Mashiko, Japan at the workshop of Tatsuzo Shimaoka. Marsh completed his MFA at Alfred University in 1988. He teaches in the Ceramic Arts Program at California State University Long Beach where he was the Program Chair for over 20 years. He is currently the first Director of the Center for Contemporary Ceramics at CSULB. Marsh has taught, lectured, and exhibited extensively throughout the USA, Asia, and Europe. Tony is a 2018 United States Artist Fellow. You will find his ceramic art in many private and permanent museum collections around the world, including among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mad Museum of Art in NY, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Everson Museum, Syracuse, the Oakland Museum of Art, Gardiner Museum of Art, Toronto, and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.
In his most current work “Crucible” the ceramic cylinder is the one constant and it is the building up of the surface that is dynamic. Minerals are applied in repeated layers and fused in the fire. Curiosity, chan- ce and material phenomenology play out in the creation of the work. There are both real and imagined allusions to the physical sciences, earth formation, geographic phenomenon, force, pyroclastic work, time, and landscape that appear in the work. Marsh may send a work back to the kiln five or more times applying different mineral concoctions between firings. There is no note-taking or record of the sequence of events in this process that might lead to a particular end result, in that way each piece is unique.
