Monica Bock is a sculptor, installation artist, and professor of art at the University of Connecticut, where she renewed the metalworking and foundry curriculum, then established the ceramic art program she now heads. An artist-member of Soho20 Gallery in New York City from 2004 to 2016, she has also exhibited nationally in venues that include Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, and Mobius in Boston, and internationally in Japan, Italy, and the UK. She has received numerous grants and awards, including an Arts Midwest/NEA Regional Visual Arts Fellowship, and a Siena Art Institute Studio-Casa Residency Award.
After receiving her BA in Art and Art History from Oberlin College, she spent two years in Tokyo on post- baccalaureate fellowship from the Oberlin Shansi Association, and a third year studying ceramics at Saga Art University in Kyoto. She completed her BFA and MFA in Ceramics and Sculpture, as well as course work and research for the MA in Art History Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she became an Adjunct Assistant Professor before accepting her position at the University of Connecticut in 1996.
Objects evolve to combine and recombine in my thematic exhibitions and site-specific installations. Pursuing personal and rhetorical associations often triggered or resolved by text, I expose lines of thought through material transformation of familiar forms. Altered castings and sculpted interpretations of organic bodies and found objects become meaningful things arranged across walls and floors. I have used ephemeral substances such as salt and soap, as well as apparently durable materials such as porcelain and iron. I’ve cast kitchen chairs, lunch bags, children’s teeth, and lately dead birds. Noticing dynamics of kinship, community, power, and vulnerability, I engage narrative objects in particular places as points of entry into difficult questions about home.