"In the 21st Century everyone can be labeled for commercial sale
except for keepers of free minds and free souls."
2007, 21 x 190 x 90cm 

Anthony Stellaccio was born in Muncie, Indiana, United States of America on April 14, 1978 to Cherie Kay and Joseph Louis Stellaccio. With the exception of his first three years in the Mid-West and extended stays in Europe during his late father’s naval assignments, he was raised on a military base in Annapolis, Maryland until 1987. From that time he was raised by his mother and educated in civilian public schools.

In 1996 Stellaccio began studying ceramics at Anne Arundel Community College in Maryland with Professor Sharon Edwards-Russell and two years later enrolled at the Maryland Institute College of Art. There Stellaccio studied under Ron Lang and Doug Baldwin and was first introduced to ceramic artists and art from the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

Before finishing his studies Stellaccio began to study and work abroad as a ceramic artist and traveled extensively. He completed his first residency at the Vilnius Academy of Fine Art in Lithuania in 2001. Residencies at the International Ceramics Studio in Hungary, the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park in Japan, Joshua Tree National Park in California, and the Petersen Tegl brickworks in Denmark followed. In addition to his residencies Stellaccio has participated in symposia throughout Europe.

In 2004 Stellaccio was awarded a Fulbright grant to study ceramic art in a post-communist Lithuania already in the first stages of its membership in the European Union. Since that time he has worked primarily in Lithuania researching the nation’s twentieth-century ceramics. During his research, Stellaccio has collaborated with the Vilnius Potters’ Guild and the Craftsmen’s Guild in Lithuania. From 2006 until 2008 Stellaccio held the title of consultant with the Lithuanian Art Museum. Stellaccio has lectured extensively on the topic of Lithuanian. He is the author of numerous articles on Lithuanian ceramics and, in collaboration with filmmaker Cy Kuckenbaker, has completed the first in a series of documentary films on Lithuanian pottery traditions. Since 2007 Stellaccio has been a member of the American Ceramic Circle and the International Academy of Ceramics. In 2010, Stellaccio served as a curatorial research specialist at the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of African Art. In addition to his scholarly work, Stellaccio maintains a career as a ceramic artist and is a fine cook of Italian food.

"In my artwork, I have always dealt with tensions, harmonies, and metaphorical dichotomies that I express through visual and processual contrasts. Thus, alterations between different forms of casting and mark making, the relationships between the organic and the inorganic, and cadenced shifts between modulation and improvisation have always been at the core of my vocabulary as an artist.
           
However, as I no longer limit myself to the use of a single material, contrasts and dualities have found new dimension in my recent work. Particularly, combinations of ceramics and Formica have allowed for greater disparity in process and starker visual contrasts than I was able to achieve working solely with clay. Becoming a multi-media artist has also granted a greater perspective on the nature and use of materials, not merely as a means of achieving a visual result, but as distinct elements with an intrinsic value that shape the content of sculpture.

Working with two materials that imply domesticity, domestication, domestic spaces, and domestic articles, I have looked to these most familiar environments and icons as a source of inspiration for form and surface. The result of late has been work that is as much part of a broad commentary as it is personal reflection on the macro and micro – the private and social - environments in which I live. Honest reflection into these spaces of my life has resulted in work that aims to be both critical and nostalgic – a seemingly irreconcilable paradox that breeds strangeness and duplicity."

View the biographical film "Handle of the Axe"

View the film "Tosininkyste"