Anthony Sonnenberg

Anthony Sonnenberg (b. 1986, Graham, TX) is an artist whose practice ranges from ceramic sculpture to performance. He earned a BA with an emphasis in Italian and Art History in 2009, followed by an MFA in Sculpture from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 2012. Sonnenberg’s work has been exhibited across the United States and internationally, reflecting his exploration of ornamentation, material excess, and historical references. He currently lives and works in Fayetteville, AR.

His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions, including State of the Art II at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2020); I’m Going to Dance the Way I Feel at Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, FL (2021); Ceramics Now at Galerie Italienne, Paris, France (2021); Cannons Buried in Flowers at Gavlak Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2023); and My Eyes are Starving for Beauty at Big Medium Gallery, Austin, TX (2024).

Sonnenberg has participated in several prestigious residencies, including the Windgate Museum of Art’s inaugural Artist-in-Residence program (2021), the CSULB-CCC Summer Residency at California State University, Long Beach, CA (2018), Yaddo Artist Residency in Saratoga Springs, NY (2017), and the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft Residency, Houston, TX (2016). In 2012, he was named an Emerging Artist in Residence at Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, WA.

Visit Anthony Sonnenberg’s website and Instagram page.

Featured work

Selected works, 2021-2024

Anthony Sonnenberg ceramics
Anthony Sonnenberg artist

The most consistent underlying motivation that has guided my practice since its beginning is to advocate for the underdog. I am always looking for the things I encounter in my life that from the dominant heteronormative perspective seem to be the most unimportant. Once I find these things, I then work hard to make more visible why they matter.

Still lives (especially with flowers), fat bodies, femme queers, being extra, bongs and other domestic artifacts, are all prime examples of the types of underdogs that I fight for in my practice. But for many years the most important and all encompassing underdog I fight for is Decoration. There is, in my opinion, no force in our society that does more work and receives less credit than decoration. For proof, I turn to the timeless phrase: To see is to believe. I believe decoration makes visible all the innumerable intricate structures of social hierarchy. Decoration provides all the visual contexts that let us know who is favored by our current society and who is not – who is a president, a priest, or a prisoner.

The challenge for me is that this visual system is so effective and pervasive that we hardly notice it and so we are often unaware of the effects of its power. To counteract this, I try to focus on those areas of decoration that accompany the edges of normal everyday social life such as those objects associated with death and funerary processes, or the expression and delineation of queer identities and histories. In these areas, the rules of how things are supposed to work are not so clear, which then makes the cracks in the system more visible, which in turn makes questions and alternative suggestions that challenge the status quo more possible. Once these challenges are allowed in the world, possibly only as a whisper at first, they begin to grow louder and reverberate. They then echo from the out skirts of society all the way through to the center of things; to those aspects once so certain as to be thought impervious to change.

When over the years I have been pushed to be introspective and clarify the underlying motivations in making this work, e.i. why do I return to the studio day after day when the reasons to quit are always so abundant? I come back, again and again, to the belief that this work is about empowerment. Both by centering the margins and by showing that the ability to affect change in how we see ourselves, our place in the world, and how the world could work better does not belong only to the currently rich and powerful, but also to those who are intelligent, sensitive, and pay attention to the things that don’t seem to matter.