RETIRED ADJUNCT LECTURERS IN ART

Donna Polseno and Richard “Rick” Hensley played a crucial role in expanding the breadth and scope of the art department at Hollins to provide creative opportunities for students and strengthen the university’s outreach to artists of all skill levels throughout the country.

Before coming to Hollins in the early 2000s, the married artists were already internationally renowned for their work — Polseno for her hand-built vessels and figurative sculpture, and Hensley for his porcelain pottery. After graduating from the Kansas City Art Institute and then earning their graduate degrees at the Rhode Island School of Design, they settled in Floyd, Virginia, and started their own pottery studio. Separately and together, they were subsequently featured in many prestigious exhibitions; notably, both were in the “Young Americans” juried exhibition at the American Craft Museum early in their careers. In addition, their work has been widely published in ceramic books and magazines.

“I strive to make pottery that carries with it a sense of energy and life that can only be enhanced when used for the presentation of food and flowers,” Polseno once noted in an artist statement. Of her sculpture, she said, “My work has been centered for years around the metaphor of women as the spiritual containers of life. My interest is in portraying the essence of a woman; her capacity symbolically and in the flesh, to give life, to nurture, and exhibit vulnerability, beauty, and strength.”

Polseno and Hensley also taught classes and sessions and served as visiting artists in programs across the United States and around the world. The venues ranged from Alfred University and the Rochester Institute of Technology to the La Meridiana International School of Ceramics in Certaldo, Italy, Turkey’s International Ceramics Symposium, and the Jingdezhen Ceramics Institute in China.

When Polseno and Hensley started team teaching at Hollins in 2004, they created the first in-depth ceramics program for the university, concurrent with the opening of the Richard Wetherill Visual Arts Center and the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum.

In its catalogue for the exhibition Duo: Donna Polseno & Richard Hensley, which was on display this fall, the Wilson Museum stated, “Over the years, Polseno and Hensley’s ceramics program and the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum have grown up like siblings in the Visual Arts Center.” During the past 17 years, their work has been featured in several museum exhibitions, including Donna Polseno: A Mid-Career Survey (2006), which showcased Polseno’s sculptural work. “The two have dedicated their lives to creating, promoting, and experimenting with the possibilities of clay, and fostering generations of new artists in the field,” the museum noted.

Polseno developed and founded the Women Working With Clay Symposium in 2011 to honor the accomplishments of women ceramic artists and create an environment that promotes ideas, images, artwork, and discussions. The symposium celebrated its 10th anniversary this summer with a virtual program featuring over 40 ceramic artists focusing on topics such as mentorship, social justice, and apprenticeships.

Visiting Lecturer of Art Josh Manning paid tribute to the pair in an essay that describes Polseno and Hensley as “architects. Over the years, they have been known as potters, sculptors, ceramists, professors, or artists… as all of which Donna and Rick have rightly been addressed, and yet somehow they are all of these things at once. I settled on this word, architect, not because they are practitioners of architecture but because they physically and conceptually helped to build the scaffolding that I and many of my peers find ourselves standing upon.”

Manning concluded, “Rick and Donna are knowing participants within the continuum of humanity that is ceramic art and they are helping to carry this conversation forward.”

Polseno and Hensley are founding members of the nationally known 16 Hands Studio Tour, which since 1998 has highlighted the artistry of craftsmen in the Floyd area every May and November. They continue to work in their studio, teach workshops, and exhibit their work, and spend part of each year at their small house in Liguria, Italy.