Larry Buller
Larry Buller
Larry Buller is a ceramic artist and educator based in Lincoln, Nebraska. He received an M.F.A. in Ceramics from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln after a career as an art educator, bringing years of teaching experience to a studio practice that has gained national recognition.
Working primarily in earthenware clay, Buller creates domestically scaled objects that draw upon historical decorative ceramics, devotional objects, museum collections, and vintage artifacts. Through sumptuous ornament, humor, and meticulous craftsmanship, his work examines how objects acquire meaning through memory, ritual, authority, and desire. Rather than reproducing historic ceramics, he reimagines them, creating works that feel both familiar and uncannily new while viewing decorative traditions through a contemporary queer lens.
Buller has been recognized as a Ceramics Monthly Emerging Artist and was awarded the prestigious McKnight Ceramic Fellowship through Northern Clay Center. He has participated in residencies at Northern Clay Center, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Red Lodge Clay Center, the Center for Ceramics in Berlin, and Taller-Gingill Pottery in Barcelona. His work has been exhibited nationally, including at the American Museum of Ceramic Art, NCECA National Juried Exhibitions, and Making in Between: Queer/LGBTQ+ Identities in Clay.
In addition to maintaining an active studio practice, Buller continues to teach, sharing his enthusiasm for ceramics, material culture, and the enduring power of objects to carry meaning across time.
My art at first glance suggests the domestic, ornamental nature of many ceramic objects, but upon closer look one discovers a showy, transgressive content that is conceptualized around issues of gay sexuality, the phallus and sexual fetish objects or toys. These highly decorative pieces resonate with my varied experiences as a gay man. Clay presents one endless possibilities for form and surface decoration and is therefore the perfect medium for my subversive intentions. I revel in blending the rich historical language of ceramics art with the low-brow, overly decorative and often kitsch nature of craft which can often be had for the cheap at flea markets. I invite the viewer to take delight in the excessive and glitzy nature of my work as they discover a more sinister objective. I use decals, gold luster, fake fur, glitter and plastic gem stones to "queer up" the surface quality of my work and in doing so also question the nature of what is considered to be in "good taste" for the domestic setting. In a larger sense, I feel that my work acts as a metaphor for my life as an out gay man who does not often "fit in" to the conventional role society defines for men. My intention is not to shock the viewer but rather to create a dialog around topics generally not openly discussed in "polite" society around issues of masculinity, sexual expression between men and the roll of fetish objects in the gay community.
