JR was born and raised on the near north side of Chicago, played baseball in Lincoln Park during the riots of the 1968 Democratic convention, and sat in Irish saloons drinking ginger ale and listening to my father and his friend's talk of the old left, Joe McCarthy, the Spanish Civil War, and long haired Hippie radicals.
His father took his family back home to Kentucky soon after where they lived in a rambling farmhouse set in a cow pasture and surrounded by tobacco fields. He went to the consolidated county high school, began an underground newspaper called "The Horny Dog" and was decidedly out of place. Summers were spent scrambling for cash by working the farm, a dollar an hour, grubbing thistles, topping tobacco, and chasing cattle. They raised a garden, canned, and foraged for greens ala Euell Gibbons. His mother, a farm girl at heart, turned her hand to all things domestic.
He attended Berea College, a unique school that does not charge tuition, but rather mandates that all students, work for the College to offset costs. It was here that he became a potter, working in the Ceramic Apprenticeship Program during both the academic year and through the summers. He left Berea and worked as a production potter in studios in Florida, Ohio, and California before acquiring a wife and child and moving back to old Kentucky. During these years he operated a small studio and traveled the craft show circuit, and was an Artist-in-Residence for the Kentucky Department of the Humanities conducting classes and workshops in public schools across the state.
The arrival of their second child and the return of his wife to Graduate School necessitated my leaving clay for a time. He worked in kitchens, factories, on horse farms, and construction sites, eventually landing in Social Services. Through the nineties he worked with developmentally disabled adults on a myriad of vocational training sites, and later worked with economically disadvantaged folks transition from Welfare to Work. This experience has left him with profound questions about who is considered and who is dismissed, and who gets to decide.
JR returned to graduate school a few years ago, following clay to an M.F.A. not just to make fine functional work, but to find a way to reinvigorate the time honored ceramic tradition of the narrative pot. He is creating porcelain pieces that talk about our run-up to war, our demonizing of the 'other', and our reliance of gloss, gold and surface to market darker motives. These works are being shown in shows in Texas, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Massachusetts.