The first time the artist Eve Biddle exhibited her work alongside her mother’s, she was a bit nervous. It was 2018, 20 years after she lost her mom, Mary Ann Unger, to breast cancer. Unger used materials like bronze, marble, and steel to make her mammoth sculptures. “Mom’s work has a loud voice,” says Biddle, whose own work crosses disciplines and is often smaller in scale.
Guermonprez left Black Mountain in the 1950s for California, where she taught at both the California College of the Arts, where Sekimachi was one of her students, and at Pond Farm, the experimental crafts workshop led by Wildenhain, maker of the previously mentioned stoneware crock. “I grew up with a lot of this work, at least being aware of it,” Schwartz says.