Clay artist Diane Solomon Kempler is perhaps best known in Atlanta for her large bronze fountain sculpture New Endings, which was commissioned by the Corporation for Olympic Development in conjunction with the 1996 Olympics. It was installed downtown that year and was moved later to Freedom Park in Candler Park, where it still stands.
In 2021, MOCA GA presented a retrospective of her work, From Then to Now: Diane Solomon Kempler, which included her photography as well as ceramics representing her long and prolific career.
Throughout her life, Kempler’s art focused on the ideas of transition and transformation in the natural world as well as in humans.
Kempler was a senior lecturer in ceramics at Emory University for more than 20 years and taught at Callanwolde Fine Arts Center for over 30 years. At Emory in the early 2000s, she collaborated with entomologist and Emory professor Nicole Gerardo on a ceramics course titled “Clay and Science: A Symbiotic Relationship.” The works that emerged from that collaboration were exhibited in Garden of Biotanical Delights at the University of Georgia Circle Gallery in Athens and the Turchin Gallery at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.
Kempler died on August 2 at her home in Atlanta at the age of 85.
Born in New York City, Kempler received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Brandeis University. She later studied architecture at Harvard University. In 1963, she moved to Atlanta with her former husband, Bernhard Kempler, and established a ceramic workshop in the basement of their home. In 1971, she attended a workshop with ceramic artists Robert Turner, Cynthia Bringle and Paulus Berensohn at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina that expanded her perspective and catalyzed her work.
Kempler…
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