Short Biographical Statement

Short Biography

Claire Campbell Park is an internationally recognized artist, lecturer and teacher.

Exhibits of  her artwork include: “Made in California 1900-2000: Art, Image and Identity” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “The Twelfth International Biennial of Miniature Textiles” in Szombathely, Hungary and “The International Textile Competition” in Kyoto, Japan. An image of her work tied for second in an international competition sponsored by Telos Fine Art Publishing, England, with jurors from Australia, Japan and the Netherlands. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Szombathely Kunsthalle, Hungary, and the Tucson Museum of Art, as well as numerous private collections.

Lecture venues include: the Louvre and Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris; Seian College of Art and the World Textile Conference, Kyoto; Apeejay College of Fine Arts, Jalandhar, India; the Center for Middle East Studies, University of Arizona; the New Jersey Center for the Visual Arts, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the East/West Center, and the Textile Society of America conference. In September of 2006 she was an artist in residence at the University of South Australia, South Australian School of Art and also lectured at the University of Tasmania, School of Visual and Performing Arts.

Claire researched Moroccan Textiles for a year in London, Paris and Morocco, and served as an exhibit consultant for the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C. She has published articles in the Textile Museum exhibition catalog From the Far West: Carpets and Textiles of Morocco, FIBERARTS magazine, TEXTILE/ART - a French art journal, as well as seven entries in North American Women Artists of the Twentieth Century; a Biographical Dictionary.

Claire received an M.F.A. from U.C.L.A. in 1978 and has since been Head of the Color and Fiber areas at Pima Community College in Tucson. Pima Community College is the nation's eighth largest community college with 75,000 students. Teaching at Pima Community College has given her the opportunity to work with thousands of students from extremely varied geographical, cultural, economic, vocational and educational backgrounds and has led to a creative philosophy that is both inspiring and accessible to a broad audience. Claire has published, Creating with Reverence: Art, Diversity, Culture and Soul (with SOTOL BOOKS) which inspires us to form a dynamic creative foundation and expand our cultural perspectives, through reflections on artists who are committed to life-giving values. Claire also leads seminars and workshops on Creating with Reverence, as well as Creating with Color.

Claire lives on the Sonoran desert with her husband and daughter.

Lectures

Creating with Reverence: Art, Diversity, Culture and Soul

Creating with Reverence inspires us to expand our cultural perspectives and form a dynamic creative foundation, through reflections on artists who are committed to life-giving values including; Maria Martinez, a Pueblo potter, the woodworkers of Kyoto, Japan, painters from Australia who honor their Aboriginal ancestry, the weavers of Chiapas, Mexico, DIY and leading contemporary artists. Audiences are invited to refine insights on the relation of creativity to a continuity of generations, concepts of time, the significance of beauty, craftsmanship, our daily lives and spiritual well-being.     

Appropriation, Transformation and Contemporary Fiber Art: An Artist’s Perspective

Although founded on European assumptions of fine art, fiber art is equally grounded in textile traditions from around the globe. Issues of appropriation in relation to fiber art have evolved since fiber’s critical formative years in the 1960s and 70s. At this time there was an explosion of awareness of diverse cultures. This was reflected in the curriculum of California colleges and universities and invigorated the parturition of fiber art. The desire to mainstream into the fine art establishment gave rise to a trend in the 1980s and 90s, that continues to the present, for some fiber artists to distance themselves from these textile traditions which are based on community values, heritage, and faith. It is this artist’s contention that the most appropriate of appropriations is a renewed appreciation of the cultural values evident in global textile traditions, once again reinvigorating our understanding of fine art.

The Color Connection: Painting and Fiber  an examination of the connection between color theory, fiber and painting since M.E. Chevreul.

Resplendent Diversity: Textiles of Morocco  explores the diverse textiles of Morocco; Berber, Rural Arab, and Urban Arab in their cultural context. 

For a complete resume or further information on lectures and related workshops and seminars, please contact me at clairepark@mac.com.