Endowed Professor Spotlight: Ted Aub
21 August 2018 Endowed Professor Spotlight: Ted Aub
Professor of Art and Architecture Ted Aub, who holds the Class of 1964 Endowed Professorship, is an internationally recognized sculptor who has been awarded numerous public sculpture commissions in the United States, Korea and China. In addition to teaching sculpture and design at Hobart and William Smith Colleges for the past three and a half decades, he has exhibited his work widely, including in solo and group shows at galleries across the country.
It has been a great honor to hold the Classes of 64 Endowed Chair.Funds have benefited studio art programs allowing us to build a large covered work space behind Elliott StudioArts Center, creating and outfitting a ceramic studio in the basement of Houghton House, and purchasing many new pieces of equipment to better both our woodshop and metal shop,says Aub. I have personally benefited with a new website and forthcoming catalogue of my work, funding for supplies, materials, and studio assistance.As well, I have enjoyed some wonderful travel to destinations such as Ronchamp France and Istanbul Turkey to view architecture, art, and artifacts I have had a long held interest in seeing first hand.Many thanks to the Classes of 64 for their generous support to faculty through the Endowed Chair position.
Working with bronze, marble and plaster, Aub describes his sculptures as a paradoxical marriage of clarity and enigma. As in dreams, content seems both rational and irrational. His intention, in part, is to blur the distinction between that which is horrific and humorous, and, in the tradition of the absurd, to find meaning in the meaningless.
Awarded the HWS Faculty Prize for Outstanding Scholarship in 1999, Aub has also produced commissioned sculptures of local luminaries and notable figures from the Colleges history, including Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell 1849 and William Smith. Recently, his sculpture of Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, the physician, Civil War field surgeon and first woman to receive the Medal of Honor, was featured in an art auction to benefit the National Womens Hall of Fame, which inducted Walker in 2000. Aub is presently at work on a sculpture to immortalize Geneva-raised jazz legend Scott LaFaro in the downtown area of the city.
Aub holds a B.F.A. in painting from Washington University and an M.F.A. in sculpture from Brooklyn College. Following his undergraduate degree, he attended the Brooklyn Museum Art School as a Max Beckmann Scholar and later traveled to Europe for a year of artistic exploration and to study marble carving in the Tuscan town of Pietrasanta, Italy.