Carrie Ohm

Carrie Ohm is a mother, a ceramic and mixed media artist, a college art instructor, and Ironman triathlete. She teaches beginning through advanced Ceramics and other 2D and 3D studio art classes at Chaffey College, Saddleback College, and Golden West College in Southern California. She formerly taught Ceramics at the Palo Alto Art Center and CSMA in the bay area and was a long-time university lecturer at Governors State University, just outside Chicago in Illinois. She was born and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Later she lived in Chicago, IL for more than 15 years, before relocating to California.

Carrie Ohm received her BFA in painting and ceramics from the University of Toledo in Ohio and her MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000. She has been a visiting artist and guest lecturer many times in Michigan and Illinois. Currently she lives in Irvine, CA near Los Angeles with her artist/actor husband, their 2 amazing sons, and dog and cat.

My interest in wonder and spectacle stems from expectation, memory, grandeur and the notion of relative scales. My lifelong love of the pool and the convergence of the aquatic and the extravagance of the Hollywood spectacular that holds respect and admiration for Busby Berkely films and in particular those starring Esther Williams. It is while watching these films that my perception of the constructed self and of the projected grandeur of memory is self-evident. It is as if the grandeur of memory makes the filmic spectacle of the Busby Berkely extravaganzas attainable and tangible. But I am not interested in attaining the goal, rather I focus on the mythology of the attainability that the rift between the perceived real and memory allow.

 My work begins with objects. Sometimes it centers around objects. When stories start to integrate with and develop through these objects the work becomes exciting. The stories vary from piece-to-piece. Objects have manifested themselves into many pieces whose subjects range from relative scales of success and failure, to journeys and travel, to my own secret insecure inner hero, to memory, to desires, to perception, and to spectacle. 

Publications

2021: Ceramics Monthly, “Exposure”, page 15, Issue June, July, August, 2021,

2012:   Composite Arts Magazine, “Because Yes”, page 77, “Function, Issue #9”, Fall 2012 compositearts.com/function

2010:    Hartigan, Phillip, ”On ceramics and performance: Interview with Carrie Ohm”, Praeterita, http://philiphartiganpraeterita.blogspot.com/2010/04/on-ceramics-and-performance-interview.html

2007:   Waxman, Lori, “Review: Carrie Ohm,” 60 wrd/min art critic vol. 2, ed. Ron Song (Chicago: Mess Hall, May 2007)

2004: Philbin, Gail, “Eclectic collection inhabits four new UICA exhibits”, The Grand Rapids Press, 26 October, page F4