The designs of Bennett Bean Studio are the result of a collaboration between two artists — Bennett Bean and Elizabeth Rand — whose contrasting points of view create a singular body of work where maturity balances youth, experience is enhanced with fresh perspective, and process is enriched by joining an additive versus subtractive attitude.

Over the last 40 years our namesake and founder, Bennett Bean, has built a reputation as a sculptor and painter working primarily in ceramics. Best known for his pit-fired white earthenware vessels, Bennett has developed many innovative post-firing techniques for decorating his pieces. His gold leaf interiors have become a signature style.

In 1997, Bennett began his adventure in making rugs. He describes this experience by saying, “Making these rugs has been a little like falling in love; it starts with a chance event and then begins to take over your life. Each year you learn more and relationship becomes richer.” While the rugs began as only one of a number of projects in studio, they came into their own in 2003 with the recognition of the “Red Zed” rug in the Metropolitan Home’s Design 100.

Elizabeth Rand joined the studio in late 2004; her fresh perspective and technical expertise clarified the Studio’s direction and expanded the scope and complexity of the Studio’s rugs. She and Bennett continued to build on the Studio’s earlier successes; their creative frission results in unique, artist-designed objects, which now includes a line of metal furniture.

BENNETT BEAN is a quintessential American polymath. Formally trained in fine art, he is best known as a ceramic artist but works in a range of media including stone, precious metals, paper, parchment and painting. Bennett has been making things, prolifically, since 1960, full time in studio for that last 25 years. His work is represented by numerous galleries as well as in major museum collections nationwide including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the White House Art Collection.
www.bennettbean.com

?ELIZABETH V. RAND is a Philadelphia based artist and designer. She received her B.F.A from Kansas City Art Institute in Fiber and Textiles and has participated in several artist residencies around the country. Having traveled extensively across the United States as well as abroad, she incorporates the textures, patterns and processes of the places encountered into her design and artwork. Her aesthetic choices reflect her inclination to pare designs and ideas down to their truest and most succinct form.
www.evrcreative.com

Bennett Bean Artist Statement:
To understand an object I want to connect with it, to live with it, to have it around me. I’ll buy one if I can afford it but some things don’t exist anywhere but in my head. Those I have to make. In making I learn what’s there. The things I make influence what I buy and the things I buy influence what I make. From this process objects accumulate. Then comes the problem of “putting a thing in the world.” How do you present a pot, a painting, a piece of sculpture? You need some place to put it. So I work on the house. I don’t make any distinctions between making things, cooking, gardening, and building houses. Elements from the garden appear in paintings and the surface obsession of the pots appears in the house as consciousness of each decision about material and finish. Each cross-pollinates. Curiosity about how to express identity results in having my DNA done. That image then surfaces in collages and then again in rugs. The paintings and the pots have both contributed their imagery to the rugs. It’s a dance where ideas are applied in different ways depending on the medium.

Source:
Website of Gravers Lane Gallery, Accessed 11/2015

Bennett Bean grew up in Iowa City and attended Grinnell College in Grinnell Iowa before transferring to the State University of Iowa in Iowa City where he studied art, receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts from that institution in 1963. After a brief period of study at the University of Washington, he transferred to Claremont College Graduate School in Claremont, California where he studied ceramics under Paul Soldner. Bean was awarded the Master of Fine Arts from Claremont in 1966.

After graduation he took a job as instructor of ceramics at Wagner College in New York City, where he remained until 1979. During the mid-1960s Bean made minimalist sculpture from Plexiglas and cast acrylic resin that attracted the attention of the Whitney Museum of American Art. The museum purchased one of Bean's sculptures and included him in the Whitney Biennial of 1968.

Despite this early success, by 1970 Bean decided to return to ceramics as his primary medium. He moved to rural New Jersey, where he still resides, and set up his studio and kiln. His current body of work dates to the latter years of the 1970s, when he began to augment fired-on glazes with painted decoration applied after firing to the clay surface. His signature use of gold leaf inside his vessel-sculptures began in 1983.

Bean exhibits throughout the United States and in Canada. The numerous museums that have collected his work include the Detroit Institute of Arts, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Whitney Museum of American Art.

Sources:
Website of The Littleton Collection