Raymon Elozua

Raymon Elozua (born 1947, Bad Cannstatt, West Germany) is an American sculptor known for work addressing themes of labor, industrial decline, and social critique. Artworks by the artist are held in various permanent collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery. His career has been the subject of two retrospectives: Constructing Elozua: A Retrospective organized by the Mint Museum in 2003, and Raymon Elozua: Structure & Dissonance organized by the Everson Museum of Art in 2022.

Early life and education Raymon Elozua was born in 1947 in Bad Cannstatt, West Germany, on a U.S. Army base. He is the son of Giselle Baubonne, a French war bride from Arc-les-Gray, and Raymond E. Keeslar, a Cuban-American United States Army veteran of Spanish descent whose birth name was Lázaro Raimundo y Elozua del Castillo. After his family relocated to the United States, Elozua grew up in South Chicago, where his father worked as an administrator for U.S. Steel and was later laid off from the job during the 1959 recession. As a child, Elozua regularly visited the Art Institute of Chicago, the Field Museum of Natural History, and the Museum of Science and Industry with his mother.

Career

Artistic work Elozua began working in ceramics in 1974 after visiting the American Craft Council fair at the Dutchess County Fairgrounds in Rhinebeck, New York. He purchased a kiln, potter’s wheel, and several hundred pounds of clay and began experimenting with pottery techniques. He soon became a production potter and participated in the Rhinebeck craft fair for three years before turning to sculpture. Elozua gained critical attention following his first solo exhibition, Souvenir, at OK Harris Gallery in 1979, where he presented highly detailed miniature table-top landscapes made from clay. The subjects of these artworks were industrial enviorments, including railroad trestles, mine shafts, bridges, water towers, all in a state of decay and abandonment. Writing about Elozua's work for the Soho Weekly News, art critic Ellen Lubell described his approach as exhibiting the “crazed attention to detail of a maniacal hobby-model builder.”

In 1984, when writing for the The Village Voice, art critic and curator Lucy R. Lippard noted a shift toward more overtly political subject matter in Elozua's work. That year, he developed Honorable Discharge, a series of large ceramic reliefs depicting blue-collar World War II G.I.s who fought in battles that were near defeats: Anzio, Tarawa and Kassrine Pass. Reviewing the series in Arts, Suzanne Ramljak wrote that the artist's work "addressed the plight of disemployed steelworkers and, by extension, the plight of our postindustrial economy.” Examples from this collaboration would be feature at the American Craft Museum (now the Museum of Arts and Design) in Confrontational Clay, a group exhibition curated by Judith S. Schwartz which explored socially-critical ceramic art. The sculptures were constructed from welded rebar and wire armatures covered with terra-cotta clay. Writing in 1994 for American Ceramics, Peter von Ziegesar observed that the “postindustrial narratives” of Elozua’s earlier work “were no longer evident.”

In 2013, Elozua hired glass artist Lorin Silverman, then a technician at the Corning Museum of Glass. Silverman produced blown glass elements into steel armatures which Elozua then incorporated into his steel and ceramic sculptures. Writer Thyrza Nichols Goodeve has obeserved that the introduction of glass into his assemblages introduced themes of "hope, play, and resiience" into his work.

His career has been the subject of two retrospectives: Constructing Elozua: A Retrospective organized by the Mint Museum in 2003; and Raymon Elozua: Structure & Dissonance organized by the Everson Museum of Art in 2022. Together, they began assembling a contemporary ceramic collection; Elozua served as curatorial consultant. The collection focused on contemporary clay art that expanded the conceptual and formal boundaries of the medium. In 1995, the collection was donated to the Mint Museum of Craft + Design (now the Mint Museum of Art) in Charlotte, North Carolina. Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Mint Museum; Museum of Arts & Design; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Yale University Art Gallery.