UB Art Galleries closes 25th anniversary celebration with Pond retrospective

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 60 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?

A retrospective of Pond’s work will be on view April 10 through July 31 in the UB Anderson Gallery. Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday. The exhibition will open with a reception from 5-8 p.m. April 10 in the gallery, 1 Martha Jackson Place, Buffalo, adjacent to the South Campus.

The retrospective is the final exhibition in the UB Art Galleries’ series celebrating the museum’s 25th anniversary, which explored the breadth of the galleries’ collection.

“Clayton Pond’s vast and varied body of work highlights an artist who is constantly observing — with humor and cynicism, but mostly with delight,” says Anna Wager, curator of exhibitions for the UB Art Galleries. “He is inveterately curious, and his capacity for attention is so evident in the work — it invites us to look at our own surroundings with the same care.”

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: While 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 in 1995, he continues to produce drawings, collages, paintings and painted relief sculptures. The 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 at the UB Anderson Gallery foregrounds the gallery’s legacy and underscores an ongoing commitment to artists connected to this pivotal chapter in postwar American art.

“Clayton Pond is not only an important figure in postwar American art, he is part of our own history,” notes Robert Scalise, director of the UB Art Galleries. “His early career was shaped by the Martha Jackson Gallery, whose archives and legacy live here at UB.

“To present a retrospective of his work is to fulfill our core purpose: bringing meaningful, lasting art into the lives of our students and community, and honoring the collection that made this institution possible.”