Teresa Tolliver: Sitting on the Edge of Reality
November 2 - December 7, 2024
parrasch heijnen is pleased to present Teresa Tolliver: Sitting on the Edge of Reality, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery following her powerful and prominent inclusion in the Hammer Museum’s biennial Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living in which the artist presented a wall installation of a dozen sculptures from her ongoing “Wild Things” series, begun in the 1980s. The works in Teresa Tolliver: Sitting On The Edge Of Reality date from 1994-2024 and are an exploration of her practice in a variety of media and series.
Teresa Tolliver (b. 1945, Los Angeles, CA) has worked across a variety of mediums, from ceramics to painting to sculpture, throughout her more than four-decade-long career, exhibiting with Brockman Gallery, Los Angeles, early in her practice. Through assemblage, Tolliver draws on histories of the Black diaspora in Los Angeles, particularly South-Central L.A., where the artist was born and where she still lives.
Tolliver creates hand-built ceramics and utilizes found objects that emerge from her everyday life, as well as craft materials, mass-produced items, and elements she picks up at swap meets. She gathers these objects to construct deeply personal figurative sculptures and wall works that range in scale from hand-held and doll-like, to life-size freestanding figures evocative of the Watts Towers not far from her home, and a locus in her artistic life. As Tolliver contends with identity, place, and history both personal and cultural, she refers to the faces in her figurative work as self-portraiture where she embodies and reconceptualizes her mood, state of being, and biography at the time of creation.
“Tolliver’s object-based work and her work as an educator—she has taught for more than two decades in museums, schools, and nonprofit settings—exemplify her commitment to this ethos of world-building,” curator Essence Harden wrote in an essay about the artist’s participation in the Made in L.A. biennial. “Tolliver’s expressive mastery is exhibited in her overall works, her pedagogy, and her ability to morph the mundane into an expansive visual iconography.”
Tolliver received her BFA from California State University, Northridge (Los Angeles, CA) in 1971. She apprenticed with ceramicist Michael Frimkess from 1983-1984. Tolliver has been an arts educator for more than thirty-five years at institutions throughout Los Angeles including the California African American Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She was the 2023 Paula and Edwin Sidman Fellow in the Arts at the University of Michigan.
Tolliver’s work has been exhibited at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, CA), Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living; the Institute for the Humanities Gallery at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI); the California African American Museum (Los Angeles, CA); Watts Towers Art Center (Los Angeles, CA); and the Skirball Cultural Center (Los Angeles, CA), among other institutions and galleries. She is a recipient of awards and grants from the California Arts Council (1988, 1991, 1993), the National Endowment for the Arts (1988), and the cities of Los Angeles (2017, 2006, 2005, 2002, 2001, 1992, 1989) and Pasadena (1997). Teresa Tolliver is represented by parrasch heijnen, Los Angeles.
(Image above)
TERESA TOLLIVER: Untitled (Wild Thing), 2003-2005, mixed media, 18-3/4 x 20 x 7-3/4 inches.
