Jim Chaney has been glazing bowls at Kutztown since 1977. He started as a ceramics instructor and today is professor of Art Education and Crafts, though his focus continues to be teaching students how to turn clay into a beautiful work of art.

Every year his ceramics classes get fired up for the annual Souper Bowl fundraiser for Opportunity House in Reading, Pa., by making bowls.  Held at the Body Zone and Complex in Reading, on May 2, ticket holders will get to select their favorite bowl and bid on others in the silent auction.

“It’s amazing,” said Chaney. “Though other schools donate bowls, our student’s pieces fly off the shelf. Everyone wants a KU bowl!”

Chaney found out early that people really enjoyed the simple pieces of functional art that came off his potter’s wheel. Graduating with an MFA from Kent State, Ohio, in 1975, he set out to teach the world how to make a better bowl.

“What hooked me was my first craft fair,” he said. “I set up a table of my ceramics and made $1,000.”

Located on the ground floor of the Sharadin Art Building, Chaney’s ceramics shop is full of activity as students are busy mixing clay, throwing bowls, sculpting vases, dipping bisque pieces in glaze, or marveling at the beauty of their creation when it emerges from the kiln. About two thirds of the students enrolled are art education majors, and many go on to careers as artists and teachers.

Always cheerful, even when he has to get up at 5:30 a.m. to start the kiln for a day full of firing, Chaney said his outlook on life may have something to do with his undergraduate degree in philosophy.

“That, and I like to cook. Though I can’t compete with my wife,” he said.

Somehow it seems appropriate that Jim Chaney not  only teaches the recipe of clay, glaze and heat that transforms a basic bowl into a work of art, but also enjoys cooking  soups to fill them  – just as he fills his ceramics classes with nearly 40 years of personal and professional experience. 

“Absence is Presence: Matthew Daub’s Kempton” -- Nationally renowned watercolor artist and professor of Fine Arts, Matthew Daub will deliver an illustrated Chambliss Faculty Research Awards lecture on Monday, April 18, at 4:30 p.m. in the McFarland Student Union’s Alumni Auditorium. Admission is free, and the public is invited to attend this fascinating presentation.

The title of the lecture, “Absence is Presence: Matthew Daub’s Kempton,” is taken from an essay by Carl Little on Daub’s work.

Daub has been a professor of Fine Arts at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania since 1987. His watercolor paintings and drawings have been widely exhibited for over three decades, with more than 20 one-person exhibitions at galleries and museums throughout the United States including the Reading Public Museum in Pennsylvania, and the Evansville Museum in Indiana. Daub’s works have been included in numerous invitational exhibitions at prestigious institutions such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, and in 2010, the 185th Invitational Exhibition of American Art at the National Academy of Design in New York City. For more information, please visit http://www.kutztown.edu/admin/urelations/mediarelations/1104/daub-chambliss.shtml