William Underhill: The Geometry of Beauty, 18th Dorothy Wilson Perkins Lecture by Ed Lebow

Ed Lebow, a 1976 BFA graduate with honors from the School of Art and Design, NYSCC at Alfred University is an award-winning arts writer, scholar, and lecturer. Lebow is the recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Critics Award. He is the principal author of the upcoming, 2023, book William Underhill: Casting A Legacy produced by the Alfred Ceramic Art Museum and published by Arnoldsche Art Publishers, Stuttgart, Germany.

Lebow has contributed art criticism, feature articles and essays to museum and gallery catalogues, and such publications as American Ceramics, American Craft, House & Garden, Industrial Design, Metalsmith, Phoenix New Times, Places, Studio Potter, Vogue, On The Ground. He has written catalogue and book essays on ceramic artists Kenneth Ferguson, Chris Gustin, Karen Karnes, Jean–Pierre Larocque, Joan Miró, Ken Price, Akio Takamori, and Kurk Weiser. In addition, from 1989 – 1996 Lebow provided vision, planning, budgeting, and overall direction for the City of Phoenix's award–winning Public Art Program, integrating art into architecture and infrastructure.

Lebow writes the following about William Underhill:

William Underhill was one of the great talents and enigmas of the modern American studio craft movement. He became an acclaimed master of lost–wax casting, pursuing the sculptural potential of bronze vessels with unrivaled persistence and virtuosity. He "molded and scratched the wax until the final bronze surface embodied all of the mystical connotations of a ritualistic object," said Lee Nordness in his groundbreaking 1969 "Objects USA" survey of modern studio crafts. Then he left the limelight to ceaselessly explore the power of beauty and form–making to shape the spirit.