Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Environmental installation, ceramics, sculpture, video
Website: johnroloff.com
John Roloff was born and has lived and worked in Oakland, California for most of his career. He studied geology and art simultaneously at UC Davis in the late 1960s — during the formative years of plate tectonics theory under Professor Eldridge Moores, and under artists Bob Arneson and William T. Wiley — receiving a BA in Art in 1970. He completed an MA in Art from California State University Humboldt in 1973. He is Professor Emeritus of Sculpture and Ceramics at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he taught from 1973 to 2017, serving as Department Chair from 2003 to 2013.
His awards include three National Endowment for the Arts visual arts fellowships (1977, 1980, 1986), a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1983), a California Arts Council grant (1990), and a Bernard Osher Fellowship at the Exploratorium, San Francisco (2008–09). His work is held in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the de Young Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the Chazen Museum of Art, and numerous other museum and university collections. His papers are archived at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
For fifty years, Roloff’s work has been fundamentally about ecology in an expanded frame. Grounding his practice in geological and earth-sciences research, he works from geochemical and metabolic perspectives to explore the interrelated cycles of natural and industrial materials across deep time. His early signature works were outdoor kiln and furnace projects — ship-shaped earthworks fired in the landscape — that merged ceramic process with site-specific performance. Over subsequent decades his practice evolved toward large-scale environmental installations, public commissions, and gallery works that investigate plate tectonics, sea-level rise, ecological metabolism, and what he calls “sentient terrains.” The ship remains a central image: a metaphor for transformative and psychological processes navigating geologic and contemporary time alike. His work embraces an integration of ecology, geology, ontology, self-organizing systems, and ceramics as protagonist.
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