Episode 8 of 9.
Arthur Gonzalez is an internationally exhibiting artist with over fifty one-person shows in the last forty years, including eight in Manhattan, New York, and a four-time National Endowment for the Arts fellow. His sculptures and paintings are in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Ceramic Art in Gifu, Japan, the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, the Oakland Museum of California and the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. He is a tenured Professor at the California College of the Arts.
This series is the work of Bay Area filmmaker Isaac Pingree, a producer and director of both feature films and short form content. Over the past fifteen years, Isaac’s eclectic output has played in festivals across the country from San Francisco’s Another Hole in the Head Film Festival to New York City’s Wildlife Conservation Film Festival, and his features have been distributed internationally. Isaac’s most recent feature length documentary is about the late singer/songwriter Bob Frank, distributed by Light In the Attic Records, it has been praised in the Nashville Scene, Spin Magazine, Goldmine Magazine, Mojo Magazine, Aquarium Drunkard, and Ugly Things.
The collaboration for this series began in 2014 when Arthur invited Isaac to his Alameda art studio to show Isaac the early stages of an attempt to reconstruct a sculpture that had smashed into hundreds of pieces. The production began that day and the intermittent filming continued over the next 7 years, as Isaac followed Arthur to exhibits, classrooms, and all around his studio. The series delves into the process and philosophy that sustains and undergirds Arthur’s immense body of work. While Arthur’s work has been described as “dark, somber and foreboding,” the documentary’s tone alternates between meditative and instructional, and we hope the series is an accessible and inspiring look into the day-to-day work of a singular ceramic artist.