A Local Artist Figures Front and Center at a New Exhibition at the Palos Verdes Art Center
Radical optimism.
Personages, Elkhart Lake, 2024
For San Pedro-based sculptor Ann Weber, one of the most powerful qualities of being a woman is having the strength and resilience to pivot and reinvent oneself. Relying on her Midwest values and taking inspiration from strong women role models along the way, the artist has done just that. In the process, Ann has crafted a fulfilling career and expansive body of work that continues to evolve, as she does.
Born in Jackson, Michigan, and raised in Indiana, Ann attributes her practical approach to life and art-making to her Midwestern background. “We are very resourceful,” she explains. “We can make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”
But it was a series of defining moments that set her on the path to becoming an artist, beginning with her summer of ’69 art awakening when the Butler University undergraduate visited Philadelphia and saw French sculptor Auguste Rodin’s monumental masterworks. “Those never left me,” she recalls.
A summer job with an interior designer in her hometown of Evansville ignited her entrepreneurial spirit. “She was the only woman I’d ever known who had her own business, her own spending money,” Ann says. She was briefly determined to follow that career path, but there was no such course of study at Butler. So she transferred to Purdue University.
Ultimately the coursework didn’t appeal, but she found something else that did. She started taking pottery classes.
“I fell in love twice,” she says. “I fell in love with the medium of clay. I decided I wanted to make functional pottery. I also fell in love with the guy sitting next to me on the potter’s wheel, and that’s what he wanted to do. That was a Eureka moment.”
Thus began her life as a production potter that ultimately took her to Manhattan, where the artist sold wholesale pottery, had her picture taken by legendary photographer Bill Cunningham and was featured in The New York Times.
“But there was another drumbeat in the background,” the artist reflects. “It was the end of the hippie movement, the decline in crafts, an emphasis on Pottery Barn, and a lot of the potters were getting burnout.”
O Buddy, O Pal, 2024
Ann was encouraged to go to graduate school on the West Coast, where a growing number of artists were using clay as a medium. She moved to the Bay area to study with Viola Frey at California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts)—who proved to be a valuable mentor.
At the age of 35, with no formal art training, Ann found herself in introductory art classes with 18-year-olds. Viola intuitively knew she needed to bridge that gap and suggested that Ann explore the abstract work of Joan Miró and Wassily Kandinsky. Drawn to the shapes in the paintings, she resolved to throw them on the potter’s wheel.
“That was another Eureka moment,” Ann recalls, “because that took me from functional to abstraction.”
Viola told her students that they were beginning artists for the first 10 years. That gave Ann license to experiment with a variety of materials. Inspired by architect Frank Gehry’s cardboard furniture, she decided to turn the corrugated cardboard packing boxes in her Oakland studio into sculpture. Using a plier stapler to assemble cut strips of cardboard, she began building monochromatic, anthropomorphic forms that harkened back to Rodin’s sculptures.
“That was 1991,” she shares. “I’ve found infinite possibilities since then.”
In 2015, at the age of 65, she pivoted once again and made the move down the coast. She settled in San Pedro, where she maintains a studio at Angels Gate Cultural Center. Ann believes it takes a modicum of luck and a lot of hard work to make your way in the art world—no matter your gender.
“It’s an easy thing to hang not being as successful as you want to be on the fact that you’re a woman, but I don’t think it makes any difference,” she points out. “There are plenty of disenfranchised men who have never been as successful as they wanted to be. It’s just a fact in this business.”
Ann Weber: Let the Sunshine In, her current exhibition at the Palos Verdes Art Center, reflects yet another evolution for Ann. The show includes new standing and wall sculptures in bold color choices, created from strips of colored cardboard boxes imprinted with logos and text. The work serves as a symbol of the artist’s resilient joie de vivre and radical optimism in the face of our turbulent times.
As she says, “No matter how bad things are, there is always beauty, joy and wonder.”
Ann Weber: Let the Sunshine In is on view at the Palos Verdes Art Center through November 16.
