Alum Ron Nagle's Dark, Funny Oeuvre Gets Major Art Show

NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO/KQED ARTS -- He had received a degree in ceramics from San Francisco State, but knew there was more than the program offered. “My mother had a ceramic club in the basement,” he says. “So all of those hobbyist techniques I eventually incorporated into my own work.” Nagle’s distinctive work still uses the molds that he saw in his mom’s basement, and a bright palette like the paints he and his father used on model planes and cars. Much like those models, the scale of Nagle’s work his scale is also small, as if they’re tiny, nonfunctional containers for bigger ideas. “[They’re] kind of like bonsai, but with a kind of distinctive weirdness about it,” says Roberta Smith, a chief art critic at the New York Times. “There’s all kinds of building. There’s different kinds of crafts and there’s different kinds of allusions to the body and its functions.”