Kirk Mangus made an early acquaintance with clay. His father, a high school art teacher in Mercer, PA, was interested in ceramics and studied with Toshiko Takeazu at the Cleveland Institute of Arts in night school. In his teens he often accompanied his father to his classes at Penland School of Crafts. After earning his B.F.A. in 1975, Mangus began working at the Clay Studio in Philadelphia, where he was an active and beloved Resident Artist.
His fascination with all things clay stems from his sheer love of the medium. “I want my pots to not be something that sits back but to reach out and grab you,” Mangus said; he saw his work as being about “movement and leaving an object frozen in motion.” Through his work Mangus reflects on the human condition, the cycle of life and death and the acceptance of mortality - the knowledge of the tragedy of existence tempered by the eternal link between everything that has been and everything that is.
Mangus went on to be Professor of Ceramics at Kent State University, he was a prolific artist whose ceramics and drawings have been exhibited and collected worldwide. He received two National Endowment for the Arts grants, four Ohio Arts Council fellowships, a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowship, and a McKnight fellowship . Kirk is remembered with great admiration, and sorrow for his too early loss, by his fellow Resident Artists.
