Artist Interview:  Gerrie Young- Artist, Mother, Teacher 

I am excited to announce our decision to revisit WomanKraft artist interviews in the Castle Voice.  Looking for a little inspiration to help me generate some interesting questions I prompted Chat-GPT and it did not disappoint. Fingers crossed, here goes.

     It’s my distinct honor to have the chance to sit down and talk with Gerrie Young the day after National Women’s day.  This esteemed board member has been involved with WomanKraft since 1993 when she and her children came to help renovate the Castle before WomanKraft could even move into the building!  Nikki, also a board member, and Jason were just 16 and 13 when Gerrie felt the pull to get them involved in the community.  

     You might know Gerrie as a ceramic artist but she is so much more.  Her immeasurable involvement in our community reaches well beyond her role at WomanKraft.  Gerrie currently has work in two shows at other galleries, teaches at Parks and Rec., serves on the board of WomanKraft and works with the Drawing Studio where she serves on that board and practices the art of printmaking. Go Gerrie! Gerrie’s perspective about how and why she creates art is refreshing: 

     “Originally, I started making my large pots because I wanted blind people to feel them… I wanted them to feel that there were faces/people in the clay… I want them to see that the faces weren’t exactly angular, that there was little bit of me in those faces and all the people I know from home which is Philadelphia, and people that I’ve met [in my life] and also my art school background was also in those pots… that [they were] mostly sculptural pots instead of a utility pot.”    While many people spend a lifetime trying to find their purpose in life, Gerrie knew from the age of 9 that she wanted to be an artist.   Though art classes weren’t always available to her in her teens, Gerrie explains, “all I could think about was when I go to college I will be an artist because this is where my head was.”   From her very first college art class in her first week she felt that she had finally realized her dream, found her place, “and I remain in that field until present day”. 

 After graduating from Little Flower Catholic High School in Philadelphia, Gerri attended Temple University and earned a degree in Art Education.  Later in life she added a masters in Art Education degree from Prescott College because she wanted to be a “well rounded” teacher. “I’m not limited to ceramics even though I am a potter.  I do all areas because I teach all areas. I teach drawing and watercolor but I do most of my drawing through printmaking.”

Another AI prompted question told me to ask: Ceramics have a long history across many cultures.  How do your own cultural roots influence the way that you work?  Gerrie: “I feel like I come from lots of cultures and so I’m not really stuck in my own culture and I’m not stuck in the cultures where I have been… because my husband was in the Air Force and I would live all over the place.  So it seems like every place I go I kind of mold myself to the activities of the culture that’s there and it has accumulated… there ‘s certain things I like about each culture that I’m in and I just kind of gravitate towards those things… when I go to different countries or cities I think you pick up things,” she continues, “ things that I buy, clothes that we buy it all comes from the cultures that we were in at the present and… when I go home to Philadelphia with my family, I go back to the culture that I was in… I start wearing big earrings, and speak the language [of that area] and wear the clothing that we wore,” she warmly reflected.

I wanted to dig deeper into her methods so I asked:  Have you ever intentionally broken or altered one of your pieces to transform its meaning?   Gerrie: “ I actually did that recently.  I made a piece and it was supposedly a portrait and I thought it was one portrait but then when it was hanging in the show… I noticed that the picture had two people in it.  One was a profile {and one was] a straightforward portrait and it just floored me because all these years I had not even thought of that.  I hadn’t known that it was two people and now it’s like, I got to change the name of this piece now  … and I was trying to think back because it was made a while ago. What was I thinking then? Why did it split now? That’s the magic of the arts.” 

     As a mom of two and wife of an Air Force officer, Gerrie remained true to her inner artist while balancing the duties of family life:  “I think my experience is of being more worldly, more cultural. It kind of came from my husband being in the Air Force because I had to fend for myself, even though we were married (and we’ll be married for 50 years) and having two children [in tow]. But, I had to pick up the fort and I had to hold up while he was traveling all over the place.”   When it comes down to it, Gerrie stays true to her life’s purpose even in the face of adversity and the pressures which surround married women and mothers.  She tells me,  “I also had to be myself and I always felt like I had to fight for the little piece that belongs to me, myself which was the artistic part of me and… I was not going to give up that part of me that I know I was born with.” 

Finally, I asked her: If your ceramic work could speak, what would it say about the world today and the place of women of color within it?   “Well, it probably would say that Gerrie Young was here… I have put my stamp on the world.  This is me and either accept me or not!”

Make sure to check out Gerri’s three workshops at WomanKraft this trimester: Drawing Trees, Drawing with Black and White and Parts R Parts!