Today we’d like to introduce you to Karmien Bowman.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Karmien. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I think I have been making art and teaching my whole life. Being a Ceramics Professor at Tarrant County College on the Northeast Campus allows me to use some of my wild ideas and promote art in community. Clay and bronze are the media of choice although the inspirations divine what materials I choose. Ceramic or metal, intimate dishes, functional sculpture, or site specific installations may be serious or whimsical inspirations, but all explore expression and process and place. I drew with crayons when you couldn’t eat them and the red was truly deep bright red. We used to melt crayons on the gas stove to make runny pictures. I started drawing horses and profiles of figures when I was six.
Art was my favorite subject in school and Drama. Acting on stage was liberating and I discovered I was funny too.
I never said I want to be an artist or a teacher, I never even thought about it, only I have always helped people to learn how to do something, how to sew or how to cook or how to figure something out when I was young. My inability in Algebra steered me to Biology, Anthropology, Geology and Art in College at the University of Texas at Austin in 1965. I studied Art History, Sculpture with Charlie Umlauf, and Painting with John Guerren, Ceramics with Victor Babu and Ishmael Soto. I took Metalsmithing with John Lednecky and made jewelry which was my livelihood all through college and forward.
After BFA graduation I spent a year in NYC as a model and set diamonds with a torch in an assembly line where I was the only Caucasian in the factory and they vacuumed us off every day at closing. Then I worked as a Texas gal Friday for an AD agency that was the first Cable Co. anywhere. At the same time, I was the lab tech for the Greenwich Village Pottery. They let me throw pots on a wheel that came upon a lift to the sidewalk and I threw while people walked by and stopped to eat truffles and watch. That is when I lived with two friends on First Avenue.
Our place was a double sublet five floors up over a grocery store that had been Wilhelm Reich’s apartment. It was as if he had just unexpectedly left one day. The black bear rugs were still there, with his books and notebooks of how he could cure cancer. We had to open the huge double hung windows where we hung the Bear rugs out to beat and shake them. There was a lot of dust. The water in the Reich place ran red from the hundred year old lead pipes. I would not drink it or bathe there because the tub and the sink were stained red-orange. Wilhelm had left suddenly. He was tried in court and sentenced to the electric chair for malpractice. We cleaned up his Orgone Accumulator too and took turns to sit on the bench inside the cork and lead lined closet. Our curious friends enjoyed pretending to be cured in there. I made jewelry and Plexiglas paintings.
There was so much light up there and it was convenient to The Factory and modeling jobs. Friends and I frequented Andy Warhol’s studio, The Factory. It was where Vanessa Redgrave put makeup on me and dubbed me beautiful. Andy was making silkscreen prints in the floor and agreed. We had dinner downstairs at Max’s Kansas City and I had chickpeas for the first time. We saw Joe Coercer in concert at the theater across the street on the corner one evening. Andy was there once too, for a panel on the Arts. The audience begin to complain that his assistant was answering all the questions for him. The assistant informed everyone that Andy was paid to appear but not to speak! I went to all the Museums and galleries by subway and bus between jobs.
I had moved to the lower east side, from my sister’s place in the upper Eastside, when she flew to the orient with Ives St. Laurent. It was there that I had started modeling and rising at 10AM to brunch and go to a shoot and have dinner with Salvador Dali and Madam Gala at their home in the Stoneleigh Hotel, I met Carlos Alamani there and he was excited to show me his jewels in process upstairs, Lips Like Rubies and Teeth like Pearls. He was Dali’s jewelry designer. The dinner was on a long table with two tall and multi-bo-bash candelabras down the middle of its length. The models and photographer, Richard Avedon with me on his left, sat on the long side, our backs to the door. It was my sister Meri’s birthday. She sat at Madam Gala’s right and they chatted in somewhat subdued seriousness punctuated with bubbling laughter. More model-friends sat across from us, facing the wall of French doors that were two steps up, opening to the shiny street.
During the dinner some strangers, on honeymoon mistakenly wanted to know about the food and if they could be
seated. Dali toyed with them in Dali-esque, the party was laughing with devilish delight, and they hurried away in evening rain as they realized their intrusion. Madam Gala was interpreting Dali as he did not speak English. After a while Dali took a model upstairs to his studio to pose. When he returned for cake, he presented Meri with his book autographed just for her with drawings.
The stars could not be seen in NewYork, so later that spring I returned to Texas to Dallas and started a Gallery on Yarmouth Street. The art scene in Oak cliff was thriving. The Dallas Times Herald hired Janet Kutner an arts columnist and Janie C Lee started her Gallery. I started making large landscapes in oil on six by ten ft. canvas while casting more jewelry. Jim Roach, Jack Mims, George Green, Ed Blackburn, Mac Whitney, James Surles, Mike McNamara and Bob Wade were all on the new exciting scene.in Oak Cliff. Bank one hosted a group show and Jim Roche’s sculptures were covered in black plastic bags before it opened. The Dallas museum refused my pair of enormous greenware coiled punch bowls after they were reported broken on installation. for an exhibition of local artists. Jim Roache painted and distorted the entire inside of his house with paintings on the walls and the mirrors. I had openings for my Plexiglas paintings and jewelry and later landscapes at Yarmouth GAllery. Various photographers, clothing designers were also shown there inc. Jim Kellough’s paintings.
I migrated up to Denton County in 1973 setting up a new Yarmouth Studio and gallery and built my first cantenary arch down draft salt kiln out of scavenged firebrick and sought out some advice about my home made burners from Texas Woman’s University Ceramics Professor John Brough Miller. The Ceramics Lab was in the basement of the Fine Arts Building on the southwest side of campus. There was a lot of activity down there in a summer class.
I showed Miller by burner and asked his opinion on how it would fire, and he pulled out this file drawer and after a second of thumbing through files, he set a piece of paper on his desk and rotated it right side up to me. He said tapping the paper,” Sign right there and I will tell you”. After I signed and twirled it back towards him, he said” you are a new grad student, Everyone this is Twiggy. I was there only a few weeks and he assigned me to rebuild the Beehive kiln, the gal who was there before me had blown up. He told me to choose a helper, Susy Siegle, and teach her everything I knew. Then he told me I was his graduate assistant. Susy and I pulled thousands of pots that summer in a tandem dance with tongs and fire, three times a week in 110 F, and shorts and flipflops.
John Miller never looked at my burners. I had started using them before I took my Masters, 1975, in Ceramics and Metals with a minor in Sculpture. I had been awarded the Voertman Award for painting and the Texas Sculpture Association Regional award in sculpture. I took an Artist in Schools Residency with the City of Tyler in Art from the Texas Commission on the Arts in 1976 and received another award from them in 1978 for the City of Dallas in Clay
Then I worked for CETA City ARts as Director of a pottery production studio for youth rehabilitation at the same time I had begun teaching Ceramics at the new Brookhaven College. After almost ten years I applied for the position at Tarrant County College, because friend told me there was a position there that described me perfectly. And I have been there for over thirty years. I have always enjoyed teaching art and working with people. Clay is my favorite expressive media. It is not an illusion or easy. Teaching has allowed me to serve my community and make art.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
When I was about three, I was holding on to the door jam in the 49 Chrysler as my mother brushed my hair, when one of my sister’s shut the door on my left hand. My mother was fearful anyway, that I was left handed, and might be sinister, a devil child and seized the opportunity to keep the hand tied up. I had only been talking a little while, and was not able to use a spoon or do other basic things and eventually developed a stutter. Almost on my next birthday, I remember mouthing the nameplate on the desk in a Doctor’s office. My Mother was complaining that I had talked normally, and then I wasn’t. He looked down at me over his glasses, and said, “Mam, I think if you would let me untie her left hand, she would stop stuttering.” Looking back, this was the beginning of an unnamed learning disability that was identified when I took Art Education classes at Texas Woman’s University and University of North Texas for a Teaching Certificate. I had difficulty learning to read as a child or keep numbers in order until in high school when I figured out how to memorize anything I was supposed to learn.
I was not expected to attend college. My friends encouraged me. I wanted to follow them to the University of Texas in Austin. Having no money, I applied for a scholarship. Sears and Roebuck awarded me a scholarship for perseverance. I announced I would not be going to college because it wasn’t enough. They gave me a job at their store in Austin and I had a bicycle to get everywhere. That is how I got to college. I stayed there working as a gift wrap girl and took returns, 30 hours a week and taking 18 hrs a semester and taking four classes in the summer. I made paintings, worked at Sears and the Law Library, carved stone and created jewelry and enameled objects. I also kicked a Randal with both feet and made big casseroles. Oh and a friend taught me how to read.
We’d love to hear more about Yarmouth Studio.
Yarmouth Studio is the name of my personal business. It is a private production studio open to the public on occasion or by appointment. I specialize in original design and can also make multiples for an occasion. I also make presentations and host workshops by arrangement for adults and children. I do some repairs and reproduction. Stoneware and porcelain dishes are produced here as well as functional sculpture. All dishes and mugs are unique. I also sculpt here. People ask me to design trophies, prototypes, produce commemorative objects of celebration or sculpt a portrait or create an interactive sculpture. I am interested in and have created site specific sculpture for public projects. Sometimes I self-produce an idea for production and exhibition. I like to be contracted to make large scale sculpture and enjoy working with architects, engineers or visionary designers of public parks or projects. I work well from inspiration.
Any shoutouts? Who else deserves credit in this story – who has played a meaningful role?
Thanks to good friends who gave me self worth enough to reach for college. My parents deserve a lot of credit, my mother’s way of always engaging our emotions, and though money was scarce, they instilled a work ethic in their children, some humility and humanity are here, as well… I had a friend when I was casting bronze at Texas Woman’s Univ, who helped me pour bronze, and endure throughout my studies there. At UT there was a lawyer friend too that looked out for me and kept me from being naive about some people who might have gotten me into some trouble.
JB Miller who toughened me and I found my voice and my courage as TA there at TWU. I want to thank my family too who allow me to flourish and support my trials and conquests in my own creative endeavors. Long hours at the college or on sabbatical or conference or assist my computer and software skill development. My greatest achievements have been because of these and others who have lent emotional or financial support or they were directly involved in furthering a project or idea with me and sometimes with great difficulty.
Contact Info:
- Address: 6524 Orchard Dr. Flower Mound, Texas 75022
- Website: karmienbowman.com
- Phone: 1817-266-0780
- Email: karmien@Gmail.com
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