Saupe Ted

Ted Saupe is a ceramic artist living in Athens Georgia. He is teaching art at the University of Georgia, where he has been since 1992. Before that, he taught at the University of Tennessee for 10 years. Ted received his BFA from the California College of the Arts in 1972, under Viola Frey and his MFA in 1979 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he studied under Don Reitz and Bruce Breckenridge. A pivotal point in his career occurred during the summer of 1990 when he worked as a consultant on an archaeological research project on the island of Crete in Greece. Since then almost all his work refers to a deep and rich narrative tradition found in Minoan pottery. Ted's work owes a debt to the history of ceramics from which he draws inspiration and tremendous insight. His work is in several public and private collections including the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco, California. He has received grants from the NEA and the South East Center for Contemporary Art. Ted is currently spending most of his studio time making hand-built porcelain cups (tea bowls) on which he treats the surface with autobiographical imagery drawn from life, music and poetry. They are a kind of three-dimensional graffiti and cave paintings drawn on the surface of the cave rather than the inside.

Used to refer to a time rather than an aesthetic, Contemporary art generally describes pieces created after 1970 or being made by living artists anywhere in the world. This immediacy means it encompasses art responding to the present moment through diverse subjects, media and themes. Contemporary painting, sculpture, photography, performance, digital art, video and more frequently includes work that is attempting to reshape current ideas about what art can be, from Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s use of candy to memorialize a lover he lost to AIDS-related complications to Jenny Holzer’s ongoing “Truisms,” a Conceptual series that sees provocative messages printed on billboards, T-shirts, benches and other public places that exist outside of formal exhibitions and the conventional “white cube” of galleries.

Contemporary art has been pushing the boundaries of creative expression for years. Its disruption of the traditional concepts of art are often aiming to engage viewers in complex questions about identity, society and culture. In the latter part of the 20th century, contemporary movements included Land art, in which artists like Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer create large-scale, site-specific sculptures, installations and other works in soil and bodies of water; Sound art, with artists such as Christian Marclay and Susan Philipsz centering art on sonic experiences; and New Media art, in which mass media and digital culture inform the work of artists such as Nam June Paik and Rafaël Rozendaal.

The first decades of the 21st century have seen the growth of Contemporary African art, the revival of figurative painting, the emergence of street art and the rise of NFTs, unique digital artworks that are powered by blockchain technology.

Major Contemporary artists practicing now include Ai Weiwei, Cecily Brown, David Hockney, Yayoi Kusama, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami and Kara Walker.

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