Press
3 Knockout Art Shows to See in Los Angeles Right Now
By Holland Cotter
New York Times, Critic's Pick, August 16, 2018: PDF / Website
Adding to a Los Angeles museum winning streak, “Striking Iron” at the Fowler Museum is the most beautiful sculpture show in recent memory. The Fowler is a smallish museum of global cultural history on the University of California, Los Angeles campus. Under the direction of Marla C. Berns, it’s one of the most consistently interesting art spaces in town. “Striking Iron” is a characteristic product: unfamiliar material, passionately researched, utterly gorgeous.
Assembled by a team of five curators — Allen F. Roberts, William J. Dewey, Henry J. Drewal, and Ms. Berns, and led by the artist Tom Joyce, a sculptor and former blacksmith — the show opens with an expansive picture of iron as an essential cosmic matter: It’s in the earth’s soil, in the human blood stream and courses through sub-Saharan African history.
Tom Joyce: The Art of Iron
By Kevin Conru
Tribal Art, Summer Issue, 2018: PDF (English edition) / PDF (French edition)
Kevin Conru: After all these years, you've obviously come across other traditions of working metal around the world. From what I see in your collection, Africa plays a large role. Why Africa?
Tom Joyce: Almost from the moment I began working with iron, I was curious to find out if and where in the world blacksmiths were still considered indispensable inside the communities in which they worked. In Africa I learned that they were absolutely essential to the health of contemporary life-not only providing the tools and implements used on a daily basis but also by forging an impressive display of musical instruments, ritual objects, body adornment, and offering other services only blacksmiths could provide. The fact that African blacksmiths are often simultaneously revered and feared for their skills was also intriguing. The more I understood, the more affinity I felt for the working philosophy I encountered when forging methodology and design ideas were shared among African peers.
Forging Ahead with Sculptor Tom Joyce
By Nick Scott
Hole & Corner, November 27, 2017: PDF / Website
For Tom Joyce, iron isn't simply the raw material with which he creates his work: it is also the stuff of life. 'Iron comes from out in the universe, it's at the Earth's core and within its mantle, it's in our bodies and coursing through our veins,' he enthuses. His relationship to this most fundamental of elements is explored in his largest solo exhibition to date: Everything At Hand, featuring vast pieces weighing up to 21 tons made from cast iron and forged steel, as well as metal-themed multimedia installations. Described by the Wall Street Journal as 'a love letter to abstract shape, paying homage to forebears dating back to Brancusi', the show acts as a retrospective of his entire career to date.
Review - Tom Joyce: Everything at Hand
By Diane Armitage
THE magazine, December 1, 2017: PDF / Website
Joyce's large sculptures possess gravitas in spades; indeed the very idea of gravity walks hand-in-hand with a viewer looking at all the work, yet, curiously enough, the artist has made his primeval processes seem effortless. The sheer physical effort involved in producing this work, now done in collaboration with others, is hidden in the end results, in physical relationships established between a form and its placement-a sculpture in a bed of gravel next to a tree, for example, or a dark and brooding work seamlessly positioned into a corner of the gallery as if it had actually been born there, as in Lignifact I.
Letter From America, A country at odds with itself
By Glenn Adamson
Crafts, September/October 2017
We hear a lot these days about the plight of American manufacturing, but not much about its remaining glories. By forging an intimate bond with industry, Joyce has succeeded where politicians and pundits have failed. He shows us the factory as something other than a bombsite of globalism, as a place where extraordinary feats still happen every day. At a time when the country is so at odds with itself, this union of seeming opposites - craft and industry, individual and institution, creativity and capital - couldn't be more pertinent. In every sense of the phrase, Joyce gets us to the heart of the matter.
Exhibition showcases artist Tom Joyce's explorations of iron
By Kathaleen Roberts
Albuquerque Journal North, September 10, 2017: PDF / Website
Iron streams through Tom Joyce's blood like molten fire. His sculptures swell from the molecular to the colossal. The most common element on Earth, iron moves through the cosmos, our veins, our machinery and even our memory. Open at the Center for Contemporary Arts, "Tom Joyce: Everything at Hand" showcases that amalgam through forged and cast iron sculpture, photography, video, charred drawings and installations born of flame. The exhibition of 37 pieces runs through Dec. 31. It stretches through CCA's Tank Garage and winds through its new outdoor sculpture garden.
Studio Visit: Tom Joyce
By Lauren Tresp
THE Magazine, August 1, 2017: PDF / Website
The lifeblood of Tom Joyce's work is iron, from the molecular to the colossal. Iron, by mass, is the most common element on Earth, and it plays a role in the cosmos, our blood, industry, weaponry, perhaps even our memory. Joyce is quick to point out the material's associative dexterity, whether historical, political, biological, environmental. His extensive and diverse work, not only in sculpture but in photography, printmaking, and new media, points to his ongoing exploration of the possibilities-technical and metaphoric-that can be wrought from this medium.
If he had a hammer: Artist Tom Joyce
By Paul Weideman
Santa Fe New Mexican, Pasatiempo July 28, 2017: PDF / Website
Tom Joyce is known for coaxing a handmade quality out of his dense works in forged and cast iron, and for working with the byproducts of large-scale manufacturing - in fact, when he harvests iron during a factory operation, he speaks of it as the "offspring" of the "parent" material and use. "The primary reason I use this material is its historical relevance. It's seeking out specific material that has had a former life that somehow can be addressed in the new work."
Tom Joyce exhibit debuts new explorations
By Megan Bennett
"I wanted there to be something inherent in the way iron is moving like water... I wanted it to feel like it was trying to get out of the mold," Joyce said. "It was hot enough to break down the sand mold and the iron starts moving, which is something that occurs at the center of the Earth. This molten magma between our thin skin of Earth that we stand on wants to get out." –Tom Joyce
Iron Man: Tom Joyce
By Nadine Botha
Tom Joyce has been fascinated by iron since he was a teenager. The MacArthur Award-winning artist, who lives and works in Belgium and the United States, is renowned for his exceptional work that bridges art and science. Now, at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he is presenting his largest solo exhibition to date. Running until December 31, Everything At Hand shows the tremendous variety of his work and fascination with iron – from gargantuan 45,000 pound sculptures to photography of microscopic processes.
Tom Joyce Fires Up Santa Fe
By Marion Maneker
Art Market Monitor, July 17, 2017
Stretching from CCA's Tank Garage to its new outdoor sculpture garden, the exhibition features new works by Joyce influenced by his many years of working with industrially forged remnants and byproducts of large scale manufacturing. In addition to forged and cast iron sculpture, the show highlights iron-inspired photography, video, charred drawings and mixed media installations, including experimental bodies of work in materials newly utilized by Joyce.
Iron will, sculptor Tom Joyce
By Christina Procter
"When you heat iron to a certain point, it moves like water," says Tom Joyce, whose 45-year career could be seen to span several lifetimes–each a current of multidisciplinary investigation into the core substance that lures him. When he speaks of iron, a kind of amazement overcomes the soft-spoken and bright-eyed artist, who will set you at ease as quickly as he'll surprise you with the quiet brilliance that earned him a MacArthur Fellowship. Joyce works with iron, and that is to say he grapples daily with an element that defines us. Iron oxygenates our bloodstream, he marvels, and has a 4.5-billion-year-old connection with the planet's earliest days, having formed much of Earth's core and provided the gravitational pull that would one day keep humans tethered to the planet.
TOP TEN 2015: Santa Fe/Albuquerque
By Jon Carver
Art ltd., November-December, 2015
Aftershock ranked in top 10 Santa Fe/Albuquerque exhibitions for 2015. “Local genius blacksmith reinvents the wheel in fissured steel.”
New Tom Joyce Sculpture Will Commemorate Both History and Future
By Rebecca Elliot
Beyond the Wall of The Mint Museum, Fall/Winter Issue, 2015
Thicket, a seven-and-a-half-foot square block composed of stainless steel rods passing through cast iron hammer heads, is a fitting tribute to the community impact of the Mint and Levine Center for the Arts (which is also home to the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American Arts + Culture, and Knight Theater). The abstracted hammers are a metaphor rooted in Tom Joyce's practice as a blacksmith that began 45 years ago with an apprenticeship at age 14.
Tom Joyce: "Aftershock" at James Kelly Contemporary
By Jon Carver
art ltd. magazine, November-December, 2015
Joyce received a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation in 2003. The rest of this (perfectly packed) show exhibits that same bright light. The motif of circularity–formally, metaphorically, and through the recycling of materials (so fundamental to the life of metals)–ripples through the various media on display. A video projection onto cast cement, and light box images of cross-section scans of the smaller ironworks on display add intriguing elements of light and color to the play of sculptural volumes and scale that keep coming full circle. Large panels of MDF composition board, beautifully burnt and branded by rings of hot metal, derived as framed drawings done during forging, and abstractly rendering macro-cosmic constellations or close-up clusters of micro-bacterial life, recall ever so slightly Charles Ross's Year of Solar Burns. Both artists share the same spiritual fascination with interfacing earth and astronomy. After all, iron on earth, Joyce's signature material, is elemental stuff for both stardust and steel.
Tom Joyce at James Kelly Contemporary
Aftershock, Press Release, August 1, 2015
In essence, the pieces in the show have arrived not only after years of observation and tangible experience, but also through imagining what hurling bodies of iron in space, super frozen in extreme celestial environments experience when they impact our atmosphere. In an instant they are super-heated from friction and begin to shed billions of years of skin as they shatter into oblivion or are reformed by the penetrating and irreversible displacement of its once solid mass. Some of the works expose an erosive power that humans have not enough years in a lifetime to watch occur naturally. Other forms interpret the rejected iron "offspring" of manufactured objects forged in industry that exert both positive and negative effects on the planet.
Man of steel: sculptor Tom Joyce
By Michael Abatemarco
Santa Fe New Mexican, Pasatiempo August 7, 2015
In addition to sculpture, Joyce presents a series of photographic works in Aftershock: CT scans of molds made for his Core series, small sculptures of intersecting, cylindrical forms. The scans depict the negative spaces inside the molds showing a layered reverse image of the sculpture positive, also on view, made from them. "In looking at the CT scans, I'm able to see all the layers at once as a kind of transparency - the CT scans are illuminated from the back like X-rays, but with more information. Microscopic slices of the object are collapsed into a transparent view and you're able to see the positive, inside out - the hollow space that would later be filled with iron."
Tom Joyce: Aftershock
By Susan Wider
Perhaps the most breathtaking works in the show are Aureole I and Aureole II. They are displayed indoors and it's hard to imagine how they got there. Weighing in at around six thousand pounds each, these ... stainless steel circles are over six feet [in diameter], and are forged from industrial remnants heated to near-destruction. The resulting surfaces resemble charred campfire logs; the kind that you know will disintegrate if you pick them up. No danger of that here, but there is an irresistible temptation to count their growth rings.
Tom Joyce: Interview
By Lowery Stokes Sims
MAD Views, Fall/Winter, 2015, page 11
"The suite of sculptures, Two to One, that you created for the Museum of Art and Design (MAD), has been installed and has been received well by the public. It has taken a number of years to arrive at this point. Tell us how the commission came about and how you approached its resolution." –Lowery Stokes Sims
"Former chief curator, David McFadden, during a visit to my Santa Fe studio in 2007, saw a pair of sculptures titled, Two to One, and suggested commissioning a cluster of them for the new location of MAD that would open in 2008. We discussed placing seven sculptures in a meandering pattern on the sidewalk beneath the shade of newly planted trees on the Broadway side of the Museum. Because the sculptures appear soft and clay-like to touch, we felt they would be inviting to pedestrians while en route." –Tom Joyce
Tom Joyce: Layered Strength
By Gussie Fauntleroy
Santa Fean Magazine, December/January, 2015
The wondrous thing about iron, notes Tom Joyce, is that it almost never gets thrown away. Each time iron is forged and reused, something of the material's previous life is literally folded inside the new. It's what Joyce calls the "ferrous DNA" of iron, and it adds layers of often hidden-meaning to his art.
The Governor's Awards for Excellence in the Arts
Governor Bill Richardson, State of New Mexico
The Governors Award Reception, Sept 2009
Since 1974, the state's artists, filmmakers, musicians and arts contributors have been recognized through the Governor's Awards for Excellence in the Arts. Past recipients of the award include Judy Chicago, Eddie Dominguez, Laura Gilpin, Agnes Martin, Ali MacGraw, Patrick Oliphant, Eliot Porter, and Georgia O'Keeffe. This year, Governor Bill Richardson honors 6 tributees, including "Tom Joyce, internationally recognized as both artist and scholar, and locally recognized as an unselfish mentor and community unifier".
Tom Joyce Forging His Own Destiny
By Santa Fe New Mexican
Santa Fe New Mexican, Pasatiempo, September 25, 2009
Santa Fe sculptor, blacksmith, designer, and educator, Tom Joyce, is no stranger to special recognition and accolades. To name a few, in 1989, he received the highest honorary fellowship into the Worshipful Company of Blacksmiths based in London. It was the first time the fellowship had been awarded to a non-Brit since it was incorporated in 1571.
Tom Joyce: Broadband Virtuoso
By MaLin Wilson-Powell
Metalsmith Magazine, Volume 29, 2009
As the MacArthur Foundation fellowship comes to an end this year, their no-strings-attached funding has increased Joyce's appetite for inquiry, innovation, and action. Although he never did manage the five-month sojourn to Africa he originally planned, during his spring 2008 visit to that continent, he cultivated new connections and renewed longstanding ones. Most significantly, in his work with metal, the MacArthur support meant Joyce successfully explored a dramatic scaling up of his sculpture and challenged himself to find ways of using his expertise within the environment of a large industrial forge.
Tom Joyce: The Iron Iceberg
By Kathleen Whitney
Sculpture Magazine, December 2008
When the Twin Towers fell, Tom Joyce was in New York for an exhibition of his work at the Museum of Arts and Design. Several months later, a friend sent him a vial of ash from the site. On the one-year anniversary of 9/11 while on a John Michael Kohler Art/Industry Residency in Wisconsin, Joyce decided to blend the ash into a cast iron alloy that included sand from a mandala made by Tibetan monks in Santa Fe and blessed soil from a shrine in Chimayo, New Mexico. Using this symbolic fusion of tragedy and faith, Joyce designed and cast a [three dimensional] vesica pisces, a 3000 year old fish shaped symbol. Common to both Christians and Muslims, the vesica pisces also represents the mystical Pythagorean union of the divine with the world of matter and creation.
Tom Joyce: Sculpture
By MaLin Wilson-Powell
Rotary Foundation for the Arts, 2006
Tom Joyce's art embodies its meaning, as all art must do. In the case of the artist's recent series of sculptures and wall pieces, titled Sotto Voce, his ideas arise from hard-won, hands-on intelligence. Joyce has refined his concepts over decades of forging iron. His mastery in crafting a leaf, a hinge, a tool, a door handle underpins his nimble skill in working with tons of hot metal. In a society that by and large has little respect for physical work, unless it is athletic performance, Tom Joyce distinguishes himself as a maker of authoritative, sophisticated, and physically engaging art.
Tom Joyce at Evo
By Arden Reed
Although Santa Fe-based sculptor Tom Joyce recently won a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, it was his reputation as a longtime blacksmith that gained him admission to an Illinois firm that consumes 250 million pounds of metal a month, turning out work for various industries. Joyce diverted some of its products from circulation and melted down scrap to produce several new bodies of sculpture.
Tom Joyce: Forging Ahead, Looking to the Past
By Elizabeth Cook-Romero
Santa Fe New Mexican, Pasatiempo, October 13-19, 2006
Joyce has forged iron for more than 45 years. His sculpture and functional architectural details are in the collections of The Detroit Institute of Arts; the de Young Museum in San Francisco; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Renwick Gallery in Washington D.C.
Swords Into Plowshares
By Ellen Berkovitch
New York Times, August 14, 2005 [510 KB PDF]
War has been very much on Tom Joyce's mind lately. For this artist-blacksmith, the relentless images of sniper fire and exploding bombs in Iraq testify to metal's enduring, yet endlessly mutable role in human aggression. "The solutions blacksmiths arrive at tend to be the same century after century after century - the practical solutions for developing ... more efficient weapons," said Mr. Joyce, who has been forging... sculpture... and public art in Santa Fe for 28 years.
Tom Joyce: Sotto Voce
By Rinchen Lhamo
Tom Joyce's most recent forged-metal pieces, ironworks, whose abstract qualities of design, though immediately captivating in their own right, have an intense vitality that reflects a deeper, fuller meaning as well. That his work has been consistently interesting, robust, and invigorating is no surprise, given that Joyce has been honing his intimate relationship with fire and iron, since he was thirteen.
Tom Joyce: Genuine Work
By Kathleen Whitne
According to John Cage, "the object is a fact, not a symbol." Because of their facticity, objects become inductors for associations with ideas or actual symbols. It is this grounding in "fact" that gives the objects of metalsmith, Tom Joyce a particular conceptual stability as they move with no apparent conflict between function and aesthetics.