MORE THAN A PRETTY POT
Ceramic artist Kim Dickey
a study in contrasts

Written by JENNY DEAM
Photography by KIRA HORVATH

Great artists often talk of epiphanies early in their careers, moments of absolute clarity when their talent suddenly becomes a life imperative.

Kim Dickey’s moment came in the sixth grade.

A slight, pale preteen, growing up in suburban New York City, she was assigned in art class to create a ceramic Greek amphora. As small but astonishingly skilled hands turned the lump of clay into a two-handled vase, something remarkable happened. “It was like I fell in love,” she says two decades later. Even
strangers saw it. “People actually remarked that I looked different. I had a glow about me. They asked if I had been in Florida.”

Four years later the lightning bolt returned, this time when she was a sophomore in high school. She took an art class and was again assigned a ceramic project. “I lost all sense of time and place,” she remembers; “I just wanted to do more and more. I was good at academics, but I knew I had to be an artist. This was the adventure I wanted to go on.”

Today, at 44, Dickey is still mapping that adventure. She is a successful, highly celebrated ceramic artist who, despite staggering odds, has worked steadily for two decades after bursting onto the New York scene directly from graduate school. In almost unheard of speed — a matter of weeks — she went from being a student to having her work shown at one of the world’s most prestigious ceramics galleries.

Her innovative, accessible style, often deceptive in its simplicity, has won acclaim not only in the cloistered art world but also among casual patrons whose knowledge of ceramics is limited to throwing a pot in summer camp or buying a pretty vase at a street fair.

“She’s a gift to our community,” says Robin Rule, owner of Rule Gallery, where Dickey’s elegant ceramic botanicals pay homage to the formal gardens of Europe and are currently part of an Eco-Centric exhibit. Dickey also has a permanent installation in Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art’s café, which is a depiction of garden topiary called “Museum as Theatre as Garden.”

Rule has represented Dickey’s work since first learning that the nationally renowned artist was in her backyard. Back in 2000, when the National Council on Education for Ceramic Arts was to have its annual conference in Denver, individual galleries were encouraged to show ceramics displays. Rule admits to being out of her element. She started making calls trying to figure out whom to show. By coincidence, the University of Colorado had just hired Dickey as an associate art professor to run its ceramics department.

Dickey’s technique is considered conceptual and rooted in modernism. She likes to work with the familiar but insists her concepts are too layered in meaning to be described as merely representational. While Dickey shies from the label of whimsical, there is clearly a sense of humor present. She likes to poke fun at what she calls the self-seriousness of minimalism. One of her earliest, and some say most controversial, works was a series of female urinals called “Lady J’s.”

When Rule first received Dickey’s portfolio, she was stunned. “I’ve hit the mother lode,” Rule remembers. “Thank God CU was sophisticated to hire someone so amazing and hip.”

Still, Dickey tends to demur at the superlatives that have been heaped upon her from an early age. She is passionate yet patient as she explains to the ill informed the significance of ceramics and its sometimes-misunderstood place in the hierarchy of the art world.

Her office in Boulder is tucked into the back of a giant industrial warehouse, where student work commingles with her own. A fierce-looking kiln greets visitors at the door. Crayon drawings by her children, ages 3 and 5, are displayed proudly amid the art books on her bookshelf. In Capri pants and wrinkled shirt, her hair tossed casually off her face, she looks instantly like Any Mom — a role she takes as seriously as that of Important Artist. She is married to art historian Kirk Ambrose, a fellow assistant professor at CU. Like so many working mothers, she struggles, berates herself and ultimately revels as she tosses skyward the balls of mother, wife, teacher, all the while adding artist in constant state of creativity to the mix.

She tries to prioritize the demands. Weekends are sacred. So are date nights. She tends to work on her art after she has tucked her children into bed. “You learn to be very efficient,” she says. Sleep often takes a minor role. But she can’t imagine another life. “I have spent so much time in art that (working) is the way I meditate, it’s the way I process my world,” she explains.

Growing up in the middle of five children in Westchester County, N.Y., she craved her mother’s company. Theirs is a special and lifelong bond that continues today. Her earliest memories are of scooting along the ground as her mother worked her magic on lavish backyard gardens. Page Dickey is an accomplished author of gardening books. She also is a painter and artist who encouraged her daughter that if art was her destiny, she should follow her dreams.

There is little doubt that Dickey’s ceramic creations depicting plant life spring from her childhood memories of weeding and planting with her mother.

After high school the Kim Dickey trajectory was swift. She earned an undergraduate degree in ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design and a Master of Fine Arts from New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. She remembers a professor once warning students that only 1 percent of them would actually work in their discipline and only half of those would actually make a living at it. Instead of discouraging Dickey, it invigorated her. “I don’t think anyone should tell you what is possible. It’s your job to push those definitions,” she comments.

During a student exhibition in 1988 her work caught the attention of Garth Clark, owner of the prestigious Garth Clark Gallery in New York, who has shown some of the most influential ceramic artists of the 20th century. He invited her to showcase her work with him. She was the youngest artist he had ever represented. Her pieces were bought by collectors while she was still in school. “It was one of those dream-come-true moments,” she says. But there was another side to instant success: “It was tremendous pressure very fast.”

At the time she didn’t have a studio or a kiln. While her work sold quickly, she made only a few thousand dollars. She had to figure out how to pay the bills and also continue creating work that was suddenly in demand. She cobbled together teaching jobs and borrowed artists’ kilns. Her ascent continued, and her résumé gained heft. At age 26 she was named director of Greenwich House Pottery, which for 100 years has been an artistic outpost. Then she taught at Hunter College in New York before becoming a fulltime artist in 1996, at age 32. In the early 1990s she had applied for a teaching position at CU, but the position was never filled. In 1999, when the search was resurrected, she reapplied and was hired.

One of her truest joys is not only creating her own work but also seeing a spark in one of her students.

“As an artist I want to be a role model in believing in what you do and working hard at it,” she says. It is a message she hopes to send not only to her students but also her own children. “That’s what we should all be doing in life: Finding moments of great joy.”