RAIR | 2002

Eddie Dominguez | Nebraska

Eddie Dominguez was born in Tucumcari, New Mexico, in 1957. He attended the Cleveland Institute of Art and earned a BFA in ceramics in 1981. Eddie received his MFA in 1983 from Alfred University. He has taught ceramics and sculpture at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln since 2000. His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries nationally. Dominguez’s work has been collected by The Smithsonian Institution/Renwick Gallery, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Albuquerque Museum of Fine Arts, Arizona State University Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe and The Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe.

Vision is a Household Word

In the mid-Eighties Eddie Dominguez began examining the way household objects function in our culture. Not with "punny" ironies (which would have been so easy considering the ceramic work of that period), but with an open reverence for the ceremonial and symbolic potential for the most humble places, events and things in our lives. He has, over the years, "recontextualized" just about every room in the house. And, in his own way, de-constructed: tacky tourist trinkets, minimalism, the vessel, the landscape, dinnerware, race, craft, main- street and the family home. Eddie's work has eluded the twin pitfalls of becoming overly formalistic or wallowing in ethnicity. Beyond the cliche of small-town-boy-makes-good, however, lay an infectious optimism and joy that baffles both the jaded post-modernist and confounds the categorizers. Undoubtedly there is an uplifting quality to Eddie's work, but there is also an edge...an edge between art and craft, between cute and beautiful, between Anglo and Hispanic, between chic and kitsch and between the mundane and the visionary.

— Stephen Fleming

Roswell Museum and Art Center

Rair exhibition • Eddie Dominguez "reflections and intimations" Jully 19 - September 8, 2002