Born 1944, Endicott, NY
1971 M.F.A. Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI
1966 B.S. State University of New York, Buffalo, NY
International Academy of Ceramics; elected member; Geneva , Switzerland
2001 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award
1981 Syracuse University Research Grant
1978 National Endowment for the Arts Grant
(in conjunction with the Everson Museum)
Margie Hughto is an internationally recognized mixed-media artist who has examined ceramics in a non-traditional contemporary format. Peter Doroshenko, executive Director of Dallas Contemporary called Hughto, "a unique and paradoxical artist. Her works are alternatively monumental and intimate in scale, mute and garish in color, objectively descriptive and purely abstract in subject matter.”
Hughto holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo and an MFA in ceramics from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. She joined the faculty of Syracuse University in 1971 where she is currently a professor of ceramics at the University's College of Visual and Performing Arts. From 1971 to 1981, Hughto worked at the Everson Museum of Art as a part-time teacher/consultant/lecturer and Curator of Ceramics. She curated several exhibitions including New Works in Clay I, II, III, Nine West Coast Clay Sculptors, and the landmark A Century of Ceramics in the United States: 1878-1978. The Century Show was accompanied by a catalog published by E.P. Dutton which has been a major reference material for museums curators, collectors, educators and artists. She is an elected member of the International Academy of Ceramics and has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in 2001.
Her work has been included in numerous solo as well as group exhibitions since the 1970s. For over thirty years she has also become involved in commissioned site-specific projects and has completed several major architectural public artworks across the country ranging from a monumental ceramic painting located in a subway station in Buffalo, NY to the ceramic tile murals for the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) of NYC. The panoramic Trade, Treasure, and Travel, a series of 12 large scale ceramic murals spanning 198-feet originally designed for the Cortlandt Street MTA subway station, was installed two levels beneath the World Trade Center in 1998. Three years later, it unexpectedly survived the September 11 terrorist attacks unharmed. With the 10-year anniversary remembered this past September, Hughto’s work has been celebrated once again as a symbol of the city’s undiminished resilience. In addition, in January 2012, visitors to Syracuse’s new Public Transportation Common Center just a few blocks from the Everson Museum will get the first views of a major public artwork created by Hughto specifically for this location.
Her most recent show at the Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY titled Margie Hughto: A Fired Landscape (October 1-January 12, 2012) has presented her first site-specific museum installation, a “clay painting” spanning an impressive fifty feet of gallery wall space. Inspired by the artist’s spectacular backyard gardens and natural landscape just steps from her studio, The Fired Landscape installation consists of Setting Sun, a brilliantly colored ceramic wall relief displayed continuously on five angled walls. The visitor encounter is reminiscent of what one experiences when surrounded by the natural environment.
Hughto’s work is included in major museum, corporate and private collections including (selected) the Museum of Arts & Design, New York, NY; the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the Cincinnati Museum, OH; the Cranbrook Academy, Bloomfield Hills, MI; the Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY; the Gardiner Museum, Toronto, Canada; the Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; the Renwick Gallery, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian, Washington, DC; LongHouse Reserve, East Hampton, NY; the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, AT&T Co., Atlanta, GA; Bank of America, New York, NY; Dresdner Bank, New York, NY; General Electric, New York, NY; I.B.M., Atlanta, GA / Mayo Clinic, Jacksonville, FL and the Rockefeller Foundation, New York, NY.