The Passing of Ken Shores
July 31, 2014
The PNCA Community is saddened by the loss of Ken Shores, who passed away yesterday.
An accomplished artist and inveterate collector, Ken was the director of Museum of Contemporary Craft between 1964-68 and a beloved friend and mentor to students, colleagues and many others in the arts community. He established the ceramics program at Lewis and Clark College, helping to build a collection there and continued to make and encourage gifts to many other collections around Oregon, including important pieces to the Museum.
In 2008, Museum of Contemporary Craft presented the well received Generations: Ken Shores, a retrospective of his life and work, followed in 2010 by the MoCC/PNCA publication by Namita Wiggers, Clay Has the Last Word, which chronicled Shore’s contributions to ceramics and craft in general and also revealed his life-long passion for the alchemic process of making. In it he was quoted saying,
“Clay, I think, is such a magical material…it’s a material that is so responsive, and has so much life in it. I don’t know of any other material that has that quality.”
One might easily have said the same thing about Ken Shores. He will be missed.