Location: Alameda, CA
Medium: Ceramic sculpture, painting, mixed media
Website: arthurgonzalez.net
Arthur González was born in 1954 in Sacramento, California. He earned a B.A. (1977) and M.A. in painting (1979) from California State University, Sacramento, before completing his M.F.A. in sculpture at the University of California, Davis (1981), where he studied under figurative ceramics pioneers Robert Arneson and Manuel Neri, as well as painter Wayne Thiebaud. After a residency at the University of Georgia (1981–1982) and nearly a decade in New York—where he participated in the East Village art scene of the early 1980s—González returned to California and settled in Alameda in 1994, where he continues to live and work.
González has been a tenured professor at California College of the Arts (CCA) in Oakland since 1991, where he has taught for more than 35 years. He is one of the most widely exhibited ceramic sculptors of his generation, with over 57 solo exhibitions and nearly 300 group shows spanning four decades. He is an unprecedented four-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship (1982, 1984, 1986, 1990), and has also received the Virginia A. Groot Foundation Award (1992 and 1997), the California Arts Council Fellowship (1994), the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Visual Arts Award (2001), the Peter Voulkos Visiting Artist Fellowship at the Archie Bray Foundation (2017), and a Special Judges Award at the 9th International Ceramics Competition in Mino, Japan (2011).
His work is held in over 30 public collections, including the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, the Oakland Museum of California, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, and the Museum of Modern Ceramic Art in Gifu, Japan. He completed four public commissions, including work for the Metropolitan Transit Authority in New York (1990) and for a police station in San Francisco (1996).
González describes himself as “a sculptor who thinks like a painter” and a “magic realist” working in clay. He constructs figurative ceramic sculptures that incorporate found objects—blown glass, horsehair, natural sponges, rubber, leather, fabric, and mirror—selecting each material for its conceptual resonance. The resulting works are raw in finish, deliberately unpolished, and dark in mood: critics have described them as “somber and foreboding,” probing the psychological space between personal experience and broader social concerns. His primary influences include Robert Rauschenberg, René Magritte, and Gabriel García Márquez, as well as the Sacramento figurative tradition in which he trained.
Throughout his career, González has developed several overlapping bodies of work that blur the line between painting and sculpture. His Question of Balance series features wall-mounted works that integrate flat painted elements—water, shadows, ground—with three-dimensional figurative forms. The Ego Diaries (begun 1984) layers ink drawings directly onto Artforum and Art in America magazine covers, transforming their imagery through a kind of conceptual graffiti. More recently, The Lookout (2024–2025) examined willful ignorance and moral compromise through ceramic figures that cover their eyes, revisiting what González calls “the cadence of stupidity”—the repetition of historical lessons that go unlearned. A nine-part documentary series, Broken Magic (2014–2021), filmed by Bay Area filmmaker Isaac Pingree in González’s Alameda studio, offers an extended look at his process and philosophy.
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