When Cary Esser was a young ceramics student at the Kansas City Art Institute in the 1970s, becoming a teacher was never in her plans.
“It seemed like something that would be so far in the future that I never even considered it,” Esser said. “I really wanted to do other things.”
Thirty years later, the senior professor is retiring. Her time at the school includes 28 years as chair of KCAI’s ceramics department.
During her tenure, she helped build the stellar reputation KCAI's ceramics program now has, a legacy that dates back to the 1960s. KCAI is still ranked as one of the nation’s top undergraduate schools for ceramics, according to analytics website College Factual.
Esser also modernized the department’s studio space and created a hands-on program that helps students execute their ideas.
“It's really just an everyday thing,” Esser said modestly. “You just do the best you can every single day.”
Esser’s path back to Kansas City started when a friend who was a ceramics professor at the University of North Carolina asked her to fill in for him while he was on sabbatical. Esser was working as an artist in Chapel Hill, where she grew up.
“I ended up having a great time, and I really enjoyed it,” she said. “So, after that I sought out other opportunities for teaching.”
Former students say she had a knack for it
Among hundreds of well-wishers, colleagues, and artists who gathered in the ceramics department in May to celebrate her achievements was Los Angeles filmmaker, sculptor and performance artist Andy Bright.
“I came from a little bitty, tiny town called Boonville, so I had no concept of what it really meant to be an artist,” Bright said. “She was extraordinarily influential in helping me decipher what it meant for me to look at materials and to let materials do what they needed to do for me.”
Bright graduated from KCAI in 2003 and has collaborated with actress Isabella Rossellini for the past 15 years on the Green Porno and Seduce Me projects, a series of short films about the reproductive habits of animals.
“Cary just gave me sort of an open road with these wonderful bumpers to keep me a little bit in my lane,” Bright said. “She also allowed me to open up so fully, in a way that gave me the confidence to become the artist that I am now.”
Outside of the classroom, Esser is known for her ceramic work, influenced by the decorative, historic terra cotta facades and building ornamentation in midtown and the Country Club Plaza.
“Esser observed the urban environment and took particular note of the impressive ceramic architectural ornament on Art Deco structures such as the Union Carbide building,” wrote Ceramics Monthly magazine in a 2015 feature. “The result of this observation was a shift in her focus from pots to tiles, forms that, for Esser, were closely related through a shared connection to containment and to human needs.”
Esser often led student trips across the city to study the architectural features that captured her interest.
In 2009, her work with students and colleagues was featured in the PBS television series “Craft in America,” and examples of her work can be found in collections at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art in Sedalia.
“Ceramics is a medium that's really felt through the skin,” Esser told KCUR in 2016. “It very much has to do with an intimate and tactile experience with the material. Not everybody who works with clay necessarily touches it in that kind of way, but a lot of people are drawn and seduced by the material.”
"Focused and immersive"
A national search committee chose Esser to become the first female chair of KCAI’s ceramics program in 1996.
Over the course of her leadership, she reshaped the department, working with faculty to expand course offerings to include digital design and fabrication, and kiln-formed glass.
A little over a decade ago, Esser oversaw a $750,000 renovation of studio facilities, overhauling safety practices, spearheading upgrades to clay, glaze, plaster, and kiln rooms. The changes included improved protective features and ventilation systems for handling raw materials and kiln firing.
Esser’s husband, the longtime gallerist and Kansas City arts scene fixture Mo Dickens, chronicled the department’s end-of-semester shows and graduations over the years on his Facebook page.
“There's so much creativity packed into this one building,” he said at Esser’s retirement celebration, gesturing to student work that still hung on the walls.
“When you walk through this department, it's a filthy, creative, chaotic mess during the semester,” Dickens laughed. “And then at the end of every semester, I’d walk in and there's this beautiful artwork everywhere.”
She also pushed to bring more professional development into the school’s curriculum and established a required internship for ceramics majors. Esser said the legacy of her time in the department lies in the foundation students receive in the undergraduate program.
“It’s a focused and immersive program,” she explained. “That kind of in-depth rigor really allows students to not only develop their ideas, but to learn how to harness their ideas through material and method.”
The results are the broad range of work her students create, from functional, utilitarian objects like teapots and cups to abstract sculptural forms.
“Their work shows the kind of painting skills that they have, their knowledge of color, their knowledge of surface in terms of the glazes that can be everything from glossy to matte,” Esser said.
Former student Jason Lips, who worked closely with Esser during his junior and senior years at KCAI, is now chair of the visual arts department at Pembroke Hill School.
“It was the first time that I and the other students were really asked: ‘Who are you? What do you care about?’” Lips said. “To really listen to us and find ways to get interested in what we were interested in.”
Colleagues said that Esser’s steady presence in the department will be missed. But Associate Professor of Ceramics Casey Whittier said, though she is sad to see Esser leave, she is excited to see what comes next.
“The only thing that can sort of quell my sadness around the idea of not walking in and working with her every day is the idea of her in her studio living out the dreams that she has really made possible for so many other artists,” Whittier said.
In recognition of Esser’s distinguished career, she was given the honorary title of professor emeritus. And as a special parting gift from the department, Whittier presented her with a handmade honor cord to be worn with graduation regalia. It was strung with ceramic beads, created by her students, spelling out “KCAI Ceramic Queen.”
“Oh, that’s so beautiful,” she said, as she slipped the cord around her neck to cheers from the crowd.
