Bobby Scroggins is a multi-discipline artist, writer, and musician. He has served as professor of ceramics and sculpture at The University of Kentucky since 1990. At a very young age he developed a strong interest in the visual arts and began to develop very special skills as a sculptor and painter. His involvement in these two fields resulted in several commissions and sales in numerous mid-western galleries while still in his teens. Scroggins studied sculpture and ceramics at The Kansas City Art Institute where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1976.
While only nineteen years of age he was commissioned to create The Leon M. Jordan Monument in Kansas City. This was the first public monument to be erected to an African American leader in the state of Missouri. It was also the first public monument to have been built and installed by an African American artist in the state of Missouri. He received a Master of Fine Arts Degree in the field of sculpture from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville in 1980 where he was a University and Ford Foundation Fellow.
Early in his professional career, he conducted workshops as artist-in residence with The Missouri Arts Council and Young Audiences Inc. Since then, his works have received numerous awards such as first place purchase award in The Atlanta Life Insurance Company’s National Art Competition. Scroggins’ ceramic vessels and mixed media sculptures have been featured in exhibitions throughout the United States and in parts of Europe and China. He has also served as Director-at-Large for The National Council on Education for The Ceramic Arts and taught sculpture and ceramics in the Visual art division of the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts from 1999-2018. He was also a founding faculty member at The Northwest Academy of Arts at Ulster University in Northern Ireland. His “Mediaramic” sculptures have been featured in books such as Contemporary Ceramics and The Craft and Art of Clay, both by Susan Peterson. In 2012 he was invited to be the visiting artist at The Sanbao International Ceramic Art Institute in Jingdezhen, Peoples Republic of China where he had a solo exhibition featuring his ceramic “Fertility Vessels”. While in China he was also a featured visiting artist at Shanghai University. His ceramic vessels are now in the permanent collections of both institutions.
In 2013 he was commissioned to create two heroic scale bronze busts of Generals Benjamin O. Davis and Noel Parrish of U.S. Army Air Corps Tuskegee Airmen fame. The sculptures are now on permanent display at The Aviation Museum of Kentucky. In 2022 he was a featured artist at the WorldStoke woodfire conference in Sacramento, California. His Fertility Vessels and Mediaramic sculptures are featured in the recently published book titled Contemporary Black American Ceramic Artists By Dean and Clark He continues to exhibit, his works in galleries and museums throughout the United States and regularly conducts ceramic sculpture workshop at major art centers nationally.
Throughout human history people have commemorated the mystical interconnection between the spiritual existence of all living things and that which we call, “Fertility”. I believe fertility to be a metaphysical condition that allows life to become tangible, re-produce itself, and evolve into its highest plane. That pinnacle of existence only occurs when life leaves its physical cocoon and returns to its spiritual state.
We as members of a modern mechanized society tend to define the phenomenon of fertility according to our limited senses, references, and past experiences. Those limitations have often made us oblivious to the force that created and sustains our infinitely fecund universe.
From a metaphysical standpoint I would conclude that fertility is the original and continuous manifestation of Divine thought. Its nature is so vast that even our most sophisticated findings fail to grasp its boundless presence. It is simultaneously cyclical, linear, and tangential; and it transcends our understanding of time, space, and matter.
This body of work continues to move in and out of my life. Since 1990 I have created well over one hundred of these sculptural vessels. They have informed my teaching as wall as the other areas of research. They mark a point of departure from using clay as a sculptural process material. With these pieces clay became the primary product material and presented a whole different set of technical problems in which to solve. From a conceptual perspective, they allude to the physical as well as the metaphysical aspects of the condition of fecundity.