The Conference
This National Conference on Contemporary Cast Iron Art and Practices is a biennial convergence of students, educators, academics, and professionals dedicated to exploring and advancing cast iron as an art medium. Support from this conference helps the Metal Arts Program at Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark preserve the history and knowledge integral to working with cast iron processes. In turn, Sloss Metal Arts provides opportunities that propagate and expand technical, aesthetic, and conceptual issues pertinent to our discipline. Collectively, this National Conference and Sloss Metal Arts create a magnetic field that helps hold our community together.
Keynote Speaker
Allen Peterson
Allen Peterson earned a B.F.A. in Studio Art from Birmingham-Southern College and an M.F.A. in Sculpture from the University of Minnesota. He was an Artist In Residence at Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark from 1998-2001, and Foundry Coordinator there in 2000-2001. Peterson’s work explores ideas of community in many different ways, both literally and metaphorically. He has exhibited his work both outdoors and in galleries, across the United States and abroad. He is nationally known for his sculptures in welded steel and cast iron, but also for his performance art events that involve casting and molten iron. He has received awards including an Art of Giving public art award in 2016, sponsored by Americans For The Arts, for his library sculpture Northwest Atlanta Globe.
Exhibitions Juror
Allison Baker
Allison Baker is an Associate Professor in the Herron School of Art at Indiana University Indianapolis. Allison is a first-generation college student that earned her MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Her forthcoming body of work and monumental public sculptures memorialize the complexities of late-stage capitalism, illuminating the aspirations and struggles of the American working class and working poor. Allison seeks to build monuments that challenge dominant narratives, humanize the ripple effects of poverty, and create work that the American working class and working poor can see as a reflection of their own experiences in gallery and museum spaces where their existence is seldom represented holistically.
Allison has exhibited widely nationally and internationally including the CICA Museum, Spartanburg Art Museum, Hashimoto Contemporary, and Franconia Sculpture Park where her largest public sculpture is currently exhibited.
Skimming the Surface
"There are two sorts of curiosity – the momentary and the permanent. The momentary is concerned with the odd appearance on the surface of things. The permanent is attracted by the amazing and consecutive life that flows on beneath the surface of things."
-Robert Wilson Lynd
In the foundry, the act of skimming removes impurities from the surface of our melt, revealing the beauty beneath. This simple action shows us how much more lies below.
During the conference, our time is brief; we only skim the surface of iron casting. Yet, we are made aware of the infinite possibilities that iron provides on an artistic, cultural, and personal level. What we do after skimming the surface is crucial. We hope your experience at the conference will inspire you to further explore what lies beneath.
Through workshops, performances, panels, presentations, and other learning opportunities, we hope that the conference provides you with the creative energy and desire to explore art and iron on a much deeper level.
Sloss Metal Arts
Sloss Furnaces is a 32-acre blast furnace plant where iron was made from 1882 to 1971, when the plant was closed due to obsolescence. Reopened in 1983 as a museum and national historic landmark, Sloss sponsors an active arts program that focuses on metal sculpture. This metal arts program is rooted in Birmingham’s historic ties to the iron and steel industry. For its first hundred years Birmingham was a foundry town, the South’s foremost industrial center and the world’s largest producer of cast iron pipe. No form of art is more suited for creation in Birmingham than cast iron art. Nowhere in Birmingham is it more appropriate than Sloss, where iron was made for ninety years.
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Since initiating the metal arts program in 1985, Sloss has offered workshops, exhibitions, and conferences on all aspects of metal working—forging, fabricating and casting—but focuses primarily on the use of cast iron as a sculpture medium. Sloss hosted the First and Second International Conferences on Contemporary Cast Iron Art in 1988 and 1994, respectively, and has organized the biennial National Conference on Cast Iron Art since 1997.
For further information about Sloss Metal Arts, visit SlossMetalArts.com.
