Karla Lieberman liked to build tottering things, held together by the force of their personality. In ceramic and later in glass and ceramic, she made elephants as spirit catchers, boats to cross troubled waters and towers to take you higher.
She died at home on Tuesday a year and a half after being diagnosed with ALS, better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. She was 57.
“She was gracious about her illness,” said her sister, Joan Lieberman-Brill. “It was devastating to get the diagnosis because there is no cure and its progression is terrible, but she stayed true to who she was.”
Lieberman-Brill remembers visiting her sister in her dorm room at Evergreen State College to find her reading Ram Dass. Like him, Lieberman became a spiritual person in the widest sense and completely free of dogma. “She wasn’t judgmental, didn’t care about acquiring material things and gave everybody the benefit of the doubt,” said her sister.
Lieberman was a founding faculty member of The Northwest School, where she taught ceramics for 28 years, retiring because of her illness.
Michael Bell, who gradated in 2009, wrote of her in the Northwest
School Magazine that she taught with “mystical Peruvian music” in the
background.
Help was easy to receive whenever you needed it, because Karla was
always available to teach you how to construct anything you wanted. She
knew that a few students may be too timid to ask for help, so she would
patrol the studio and take it upon herself to help those who looked
stuck. She always provided constructive criticism on any piece, and was
more than willing to take whatever steps necessary to help you improve.
Sometimes Karla would just walk up and share a book on ceramics that
she thought would spark up some new ideas. Every day, five minutes
before the end of class, you would hear her tell the class, “It’s
cleanup time in the valley, and this is the valley.”
Blue Pagoda Boat Float #2 2002 ceramic, glass 14.5″ H x 18″ W x 10″ D 2002
With fellow artist Kirk Bell, Lieberman created the Garden of Everyday Miracles in a vacant, overgrown lot in Fremont. When it was razed in favor of condos, Robert Zverina expressed his indignation, here. Liberman did not express hers. It existed, acquiring temples made of old TV sets, ceramic balls and pink flamingos. “Everything’s temporary,” she said at the time.
She traveled widely, most frequently to India, Costa Rica and Nepal. One a week she met with friends who chanted through a prayed service. Her work is in the collections of the Fred Jones
Junior Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma, OK, the Johnson County College/Nerman Museum
of Contemporary Art, KS, and the Museum of Northwest Art. In Seattle she is represented by the Patricia Cameron Gallery.
She is survived by her parents William. S. Lieberman and Mae
Samuelson Lieberman, both of Mercer Island; her sister
Joan, brother-in-law John, nephew Alex and niece Danielle of Bellevue. A memorial service will be held on March 23 at 2 p.m. at Seattle Unity Church, 200 8th Ave. N., with a reception to follow.
I did not know you – I wish I had. It looks like your spirit and beautiful art will live on!
Linda Morris
Karla’s work has a spiritual monumentality that is visceral, rough hewn, skilled and gem-like. I was lucky to have met and done a little piece about her for Art Access a year or so back. Brenda Ueland wrote that the only way to become a better writer is to become a better person. Karla was a better person.
Molly. Brenda Ueland is wrong. Just straight up wrong. There are no moral standards to being a great writer or a great artist of any kind. None. Regina (See Auden: “Language with this strange excuse Pardoned Kipling and his views, And will pardon Paul Claudel/ Pardon him for writing well.”)
I knew Karla only peripherally, but the impression that she made on me
was much larger than our time together would typically generate. Our lives intersected occasionally, but mostly, I remember the generous and warm studio visit and tour of The Garden of Everyday Miracles that she gave me in Fremont before the studio and garden were
demolished. Everytime I drive by that block I think of her, and it’s been years since that visit. My son Max is now at The Northwest School – a
fantastic start to his middle/high school years, made sad for me only by
Karla’s absence from the ceramic’s studio. I feel privileged to have been
touched by Karla’s spirit.
I knew Karla through church, where she and I were prayer partners for the better part of a year. I knew her playful, thoughtful, deep, supportive, wise and inventive self for only a few years. Last we spoke was 2003. I am shocked and saddened that she has passed – she was so young. I loved her adventurous, curious spirit, and remember her love for Al Green music! Rock on, Karla – you are missed!