LYNN BASA CERAMIC SCULPTURE
Lynn Basa’s roots are in clay, although she is also well known as a painter. Much of her current work is in clay. The clay work as well as the painting is about revealing and concealing. Thus it’s not surprising that she was also drawn to encaustic, a medium that requires fire as a catalyst and lends itself to layering, carving, melting, and other earthy treatments. Her process acts out the personal. She scrapes the faces off of paintings that took days to build up, not only to reveal the memory of what happened beneath but as an action of dissatisfaction with what she had accomplished. Alternately revealing and concealing, she is always searching.
Basa lives in Chicago. Her work is included in numerous public, private, and museum collections such as the Museum of Arts and Design (New York), Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Rhode Island School of Design Museum (Providence), Spencer Museum (Lawrence, Kansas), Tacoma Art Museum, and others. She was included in the seminal exhibit Craft Today: Poetry of the Physical organized by the American Craft Museum before traveling to the Louvre and major museums in Helsinki, Frankfurt, Warsaw, Lausanne, Moscow, Ankara, Prague, Ghent, Goteborg, Berlin and Barcelona. Her work was also part of the Smithsonian Institute’s landmark Threadworks exhibit, which traveled throughout eastern Africa.
She has taught in the Sculpture Department at SAIC, the Hyde Park Arts Center, and Creative Capital. She is the author of the Artist’s Guide to Public Art, now in its second printing. Basa has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MPA in public art policy from the University of Washington, with an undergraduate degree in ceramics and art history from Indiana University. She worked for 12 years as the founding director and curator of the University of Washington Medical Center’s art program where she guided the collection of 1500 original artworks. Prior to that, she was the curator of the Safeco Insurance Company’s permanent collection.
Basa was born in Pittsburgh and raised in Bloomington, Indiana before moving to Seattle to attend grad school. She relocated to Chicago in 2002 for its cultural vitality, opportunities, and community. In 2014 she started Corner, a storefront project space, and in 2017 founded a nonprofit organization called the Milwaukee Avenue Alliance.
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