More about Ann Agee

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Get your mind out of the gutter and into some indoor plumbing with Ann Agee


In 1986, Ann Agee was a promising young Philadelphia-born painter whose work had earned her traveling scholarships to Italy and awards from Yale, little did she know that her career would soon go to the crapper. Literally.


From 1991-1992 Agee, who had taught herself to sculpt, took up artist residency with plumbing product manufacturer Kohler. Working in the factory she observed the injustice of the laborer’s creations being attributed to management. This daily occurrence pissed her off and any respect for the man went down the drain. Meanwhile, she was flushed with respect for the workers.


Always striving to give intellectual credit to the utilitarian, her breakout piece was a blue and white tiled bathroom. Lately she is known for her narrative figurines, plates painted to depict living room furniture, faceless clocks, and putting the “fun” in functionality with her ceramic dildos.

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Here is what Wikipedia says about Ann Agee

Ann Agee (born 1959) is an American visual artist whose practice centers on ceramic figurines, objects and installations, hand-painted wallpaper drawings, and sprawling exhibitions that merge installation art, domestic environment and showroom. Her art celebrates everyday objects and experiences, decorative and utilitarian arts, and the dignity of work and craftsmanship, engaging issues involving gender, labor and fine art with a subversive, feminist stance. Agee's work fits within a multi-decade shift in American art in which ceramics and considerations of craft and domestic life rose from relegation to second-class status to recognition as "serious" art. She first received critical attention in the influential and divisive "Bad Girls" exhibition, curated by Marcia Tucker at the New Museum in 1994, where she installed a functional, handmade ceramic bathroom, rendered in the classic blue-and-white style of Delftware. Art in America critic Lilly Wei describes Agee's later work as "the mischievous, wonderfully misbegotten offspring of sculpture, painting, objet d'art, and kitschy souvenir."


Ann Agee, Ann Agee, Lake Michigan Bathroom, glazed vitreous china, 108" x 134" x 36", 1992.

Agee has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from Anonymous Was A Woman, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, among others. Her work has been collected by institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and Philadelphia Museum of Art. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

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