Denise Pelletier

Material culture, historical references and the shape-shifting potential of clay converge in the work of Denise Pelletier. Tracing the body as both flesh and social construct, her clay and mixed-media objects and installations make use of reconfigured artifacts as bodily stand-ins, revealing hidden narratives on the sublime, the abject and the mortal body.

Pelletier’s work has been shown extensively in the US and abroad, including in Italy, France, Sweden, Germany, Taiwan, Canada and New York, and her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston; the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; the John Michael Kohler Arts Center; the ASU Art Museum; and the Alfred Ceramic Art Museum. She has held residencies in the Netherlands, France, Israel, New York, Maine and the Kohler Arts/Industry Program in Wisconsin.

In 2021, she began a new series of ceramic sculptures based on PET scans of her body’s interior while in residence at the EKWC International Artist in Residence and Research Centre for Ceramics in the Netherlands. trans.configurations (Palazzo Mora, 2024), a site-specific installation developed from this work, creates a dialogue with the interior space of a 16th-century Venetian palace in the Venice Art Biennale exhibition Personal Structures: Beyond Boundaries, on view through November 2024.

Pelletier earned an MFA in Ceramics from Alfred University in 1994. In addition to teaching at RISD, she teaches at Connecticut College, where she is the Roman and Tatiana Weller Professor of Art. In addition to heading the ceramics area for the past 19 years, she is a fellow in the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology, and she regularly team-teaches courses with the college’s Art History Department and Architectural Studies Program. Since 2015, she has worked with Professor Joseph Alchermes to coordinate and teach in the Architectural Conservation Institute, a month-long intensive summer study/field program in Italy and Greece sponsored by the internationally renowned Centro di Conservazione Archeologica di Roma (CCA).

A seasoned interdisciplinary educator, Pelletier received the John S. King Faculty Teaching Award in 2013, Connecticut College’s highest award for excellence in teaching. In 2008 she joined selected educators from Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design, Smith College and Wellesley College as a fellow in the Teagle Foundation Collegium on Student Learning to work on a three-year project to develop independent learning models and assessment criteria for their respective disciplines. Pelletier taught in RISD’s Ceramics department full-time as an assistant professor from 2003–05, where she worked with former department heads Larry Bush and Jacquie Rice to update the curriculum to include mixed media and installation strategies. She maintains a close connection to the Providence arts community, living and working in her studio in East Greenwich, RI.