ART BIO
Oleksandra Krasutska is a Ukrainian-American ceramic sculptor based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In her current series, Formal Ware, she deconstructs pottery form and the meaning of its decoration. She updates traditional decorative ornament with contemporary themes, incorporating pop culture, political threads, and news fragments. She relies on a process similar to automatic drawing to draw out the meaning. The surface becomes graffiti-like painting narrating a complex, multi-threaded story. Like a Razzle Dazzle camouflage, it distorts the vessel's visual profile and obscures its function. Oleksandra arrives at a lighthearted absurd conclusion: this ware is not a ware.
Born in Soviet Ukraine and raised in Kyiv through the 1990s, Krasutska began art training in drawing and painting at age six, at the Fine Art Studio for children and adults led by Mykola Prokopovich Semenenko. These studies grounded her early practice in Ukrainian academic art training. She immigrated to the United States in 1996, where she earned a BFA in Ceramics and Graphic Design from the University of Minnesota Duluth (2003) and undertook graduate studies in Ceramics at Indiana State University (2007), where she was the last student to study under Richard "Dick" Hay, an influential American ceramic artist, sculptor, educator, and a founding president of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts, before his retirement. She is represented by David Barnett Gallery in Milwaukee.
Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Indiana State University Permanent Art Collection, the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, and the Tweed Museum of Art at the University of Minnesota Duluth, as well as in multiple private collections. It includes a permanent, seven-foot-tall mosaic public sculpture, Elusive sElf, at Rose-Hulman. She has exhibited nationally in juried exhibitions — including Beyond the Brickyard, the 9th Annual Juried Exhibition at the Archie Bray Foundation juried by Kristen Morgin — and in exhibitions judged by well-known contemporary ceramic artists Patti Warashina, Sam Chung and Adrian Arleo, and by artist and folklorist Anthony Stellaccio, a two-time US Fulbright grantee and international coordinator for Artaxis.org whose research focuses on Eastern European folk pottery traditions.
Krasutska identifies as Ukrainian-American — a term she uses deliberately to hold not two, but three distinct inheritances. Born into a russified Soviet identity that suppressed Ukrainian language, history, and culture, she has undertaken the ongoing work of reclaiming that erased inheritance as an adult, alongside a separate, American life and art education built since 1996. Oleksandra documents this path of shifting identities in her artwork.
EXHIBITIONS
> NATIONAL: Beyond The Brickyard: 9th Annual Juried Exhibition | Archie Bray Foundation, Helena, MT | juror: Kristen Morgin
> NATIONAL: Southern Miss Ceramics National | University of Southern Mississippi Museum of Art & Department of Art & Design, Hattiesburg, Mississippi | juror: Anthony Stellaccio
> NATIONAL: 4th Annual Dirty South Cup Call & Competition | River Oaks Square Arts Center, Alexandria, Louisiana | juror: Sam Chung | Merit Award
> NATIONAL: Axis Gallery 13th National Juried Exhibition | Axis Gallery, Verge Center for the Arts, Sacramento, California | juror: Lucía Sanromán, curator, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Director of Visual Art
> REGIONAL: Nefelibata - "Cloud Walker" | Indiana University Kokomo Union Street Gallery, Kokomo, Indiana | juror: Kristen Morgin
2018
> INTERNATIONAL: UnWedged | Northwest Pottery, Seattle, Washington | juror: Patti Warashina
> Skutt Peep Show / 2017 NCECA, Portland, Oregon | juror: David Gamble | First Place
> NATIONAL: Nature: Surface, Form, Content exhibition | The Clay Studio of Missoula, Missoula, MN | juror: Adrian Arleo
2017
> 72nd Annual Wabash Valley Exhibition, 5 states show | Sheldon Swope Art Museum, Terre Haute-IN | juror: Dr.Manuela Well-Off-Man | Arts Illiana Award of Recognition, ISU Permanent Art Collection Purchase Award
2016
> ONE-PERSON: “On Russian Soul” | McKendree University Gallery of Art, McKendree University, Lebanon-IL
2015
AWARDS/GRANTS/SCHOLARSHIPS
Merit Award | 4th Annual Cup Call & Competition 2018 | River Oaks Square, Alexandria, Louisiana | 2018
2018
Summer Residency Scholarship Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, Newcastle, ME | 2017
First Place | Skutt Peep Show, 2017 NCECA, Portland, Oregon | 2017
2017
Indiana State University Permanent Art Collection Purchase Award | 72nd Annual Wabash Valley Exhibition | Sheldon Swope Art Museum, Terre Haute, IN | 2016
Award of Recognition | 72nd Annual Wabash Valley Exhibition | Sheldon Swope Art Museum, Terre Haute, IN | 2016
Award of Recognition | 72nd Annual Wabash Valley Exhibition | Sheldon Swope Art Museum, Terre Haute, IN | 2016
2016
ARTIST RESIDENCIES
2017 : Summer Residency, Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, Newcastle, ME
2007-8 : Artist in Residence-Gallery Assistant|Halcyon Contemporary Art Gallery/Swope Museum of Art, Terre Haute-IN
2005 : Artist in Residence, Painting Studio Supervisor| Touchstone Center for Crafts, Uniontown-P
PUBLICATIONS
“Fired Up: Sasha Krasutskaya keeps the Torner Center Pottery Classes Fun for Informative for Novices and Experts Alike” by Steve Kash, Terre Haute Living, 2015
“Halcyon Contemporary Art Gallery Offers Up an Exhibit Capable of Attracting All Kinds of Adventuresome People” by Steve Kash, Terre Haute Tribune Star, 2009
“Ink: a Journal of Literary and Visual Arts”, volume 8, 2010
“Indiana State University: Clay Alumni Exhibition”, NCECA Exhibition Catalog, 2004
EDUCATION
(2007) : Indiana State University, MFA, Ceramics(60 hours toward completion), Terre Haute-IN | ceramic professor: Dick Hay
2003 : University of Minnesota, Duluth, BFA, ceramics & graphic design, Duluth-MN | ceramic professors: James Klueg, Thomas Kerrigan
1994: Trade School Close Design Certificate, Kyiv-Ukraine
1993 : Trade School Seamstress Certificate, Kyiv-Ukraine
1982-90 : Drawing & Painting School of Nikolai Osipenko, Kyiv-Ukraine
COLLECTIONS
Indiana State University Permanent Art Collection
- Formal Wares: Vase #1, 2016, painted earthenware
- Figurine in Red, 2006, stoneware
- Story Unheard, 2005, stoneware
- Formal Wares: Vase #1, 2016, painted earthenware
- Figurine in Red, 2006, stoneware
- Story Unheard, 2005, stoneware
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology Permanent Art Collection
- Elusive sElf, 2005, sculpture, mosaics
- The Contour of Darkness, 2005, drawing on plywood
- Elusive sElf, 2005, sculpture, mosaics
- The Contour of Darkness, 2005, drawing on plywood
Tweed Museum of Art, University of Minnesota | Duluth, MN
- Vase [Untitled], 2003, earthenware
PUBLIC ART
“Elusive sElf”, mosaic sculpture, size: 7’, Permanent Art Collection|Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology | Terre Haute-IN