Ann Agee

Ann Agee (born 1959) is an American visual artist whose practice centers on ceramic figurines, objects and installations, hand-painted wallpaper drawings, and sprawling exhibitions that merge installation art, domestic environment and showroom. Her art celebrates everyday objects and experiences, decorative and utilitarian arts, and the dignity of work and craftsmanship, engaging issues involving gender, labor and fine art with a subversive, feminist stance. Agee's work fits within a multi-decade shift in American art in which ceramics and considerations of craft and domestic life rose from relegation to second-class status to recognition as "serious" art. She first received critical attention in the influential and divisive "Bad Girls" exhibition, curated by Marcia Tucker at the New Museum in 1994, where she installed a functional, handmade ceramic bathroom, rendered in the classic blue-and-white style of Delftware. Art in America critic Lilly Wei describes Agee's later work as "the mischievous, wonderfully misbegotten offspring of sculpture, painting, objet d'art, and kitschy souvenir." Her work has been collected by institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and Philadelphia Museum of Art. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Early life and career Agee was born in Philadelphia in 1959. Agee studied at the Cooper Union School of Art (BFA, 1981) and Yale School of Art (MFA, 1986) and earned prizes for painting at both. In the 2000s, she was selected for major group exhibitions at LACMA ("Color and Fire: Defining moments in studio ceramics 1950 to 2000"), the Katonah Art Museum ("Conversations in Clay," 2008), Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia and Walker Art Museum ("Dirt on Delight," 2009), and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts ("The Female Gaze," 2013). She has had solo exhibitions at P.P.O.W. Gallery (New York), Locks Gallery (Philadelphia), and Lux Art (California), among others.

Ann Agee, Woman with Camera and Pink Skirt, glazed porcelain, 6.75" height, 1996. Collection of the Rhode Island School of Design Museum.

Work Agee's art disrupts distinctions between art and craft, the decorative and the utilitarian.

Agee engages these traditions and materials with an irreverent, feminist stance that incorporates her personal experience, particularly around work and gender issues, such as the juggling of artist, mother, homemaker and producer roles, the division of labor, and the conceptualizing of craft skill in relation to art. Its hand-made fixtures and back-wall mosaic tiles feature ornate patterns, diagrams and images delicately rendered in the blue-and-white style of Delftware. The imagery offers what Metropolis calls, "a Rabelaisian tour" of the flows of the water supply through cities, factories and home, connecting the body, public and private functions, and the architectural and anatomical.

After her move to New York in 1993, Agee turned to smaller-scale work. Her Arena Gallery solo show (1995) paid tribute to everyday life, work and anonymous craftsmanship through ornate platters featuring factory workers and tile murals depicting placid suburban and factory scenes, framed by lush, decorative motifs. The home-industry concept places Agee in the roles of worker, shop boss, owner and shopkeeper, opening a conversation touching on class, the dignity of labor and craft, feminism, capitalism and modern family life.

Wallpapers and later installations Agee's later exhibitions and installations offer diverse displays of ceramic figurines, domestic objects and pieces of furniture, set against hand-painted and stenciled, large-scale "wallpaper drawings" on Thai mulberry paper.

"Domestic Translations" (P.P.O.W., 2015) represented perhaps her most wide-ranging installation, offering vibrant interiors and abstract wallpaper drawings, porcelain penis perfume bottles doubling as necklaces, an updated, porcelain Lake Michigan Bathroom (III), abstract stoneware sculptural towers of intersecting planes cut through with cylinders and cups, and appropriations through the lens of travel. Chazen Museum of Art, Henry Art Gallery, Kohler Arts Center, Museum of Sex, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and Rhode Island School of Design Museum.