Clayton Pond: A Retrospective
Clayton Pond, The Kitchen Sink, 1966. Oil on cardboard and Masonite, 44 x 34 x 1 1/4 inches framed. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Nicholas Ostness.
Clayton Pond’s paintings, screenprints, and sculptural constructions vibrate with saturated color. They bring buoyancy to the ordinary—painstakingly rendered details of domestic environments, mechanisms from machinery, and streetside columns are all imbued with curiosity and humor. Pond works in series, enlarging certain details from his paintings, pulling them into smaller paintings, or reshaping an existing image into a screenprint; this repetition reinforces a visual language across sixty years of artmaking.
The works ask us: what may be gained by careful attention to our surroundings? How can we reintroduce curiosity into our everyday maneuverings through our landscape?
Clayton Pond: A Retrospective concludes UB Art Galleries’ series of exhibitions celebrating the museum’s 25th Anniversary. Through Pond’s long relationship with Martha Jackson and her gallery, his work is woven into the very fabric of this institution’s founding story.
Born in 1941 in Bayside, New York, and raised in the Long Island sailing community of Port Washington, Pond demonstrated an early interest in drawing, designing houses, cars, and boats, and building models. This fascination with structure and design would later inform his sustained attention to architecture, mechanical systems, and the built environment.
Pond earned his BFA from Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1964 and his MFA from Pratt Institute in 1966. His graduate studies at Pratt were formative: there he developed his distinctive drawing style, cultivated a keen interest in bright, intense color relationships, and taught himself the serigraph process. Beginning in 1966, Pond lived and worked in SoHo’s industrial loft buildings, where the interiors of his studio spaces and the cast-iron façades of the neighborhood became central subjects in his work. Columns, architectural fragments, and utilitarian objects recur throughout his paintings and constructions—rendered with precision and activated through color and compositional invention.
Pond began exhibiting widely, and shortly after graduating from Pratt, he joined the Martha Jackson Gallery—one of the most prominent galleries in New York at the time—which held his first solo exhibition in 1968. The gallery remained his primary representative for much of his New York career, later transitioning to the David Anderson Gallery. Since relocating to Atlanta, Georgia in 1995, he continues to produce drawings, collages, paintings, and painted relief sculptures. UB Art Galleries stewards the Martha Jackson Gallery Archives as well as a significant collection of art by the artists she represented. Presenting Clayton Pond: A Retrospective here foregrounds the gallery’s legacy and underscores an ongoing commitment to artists connected to this pivotal chapter in postwar American art.