About the artist

Sara (Weisblat) Schastok was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and later attended and graduated from Cornell University before pursuing graduate work in Asian art at the University of Michigan. After completing coursework in Ann Arbor, Schastok spent 15 months in India. She did extensive fieldwork exploring mother goddess images and their close relationship with Siva, one of Hinduism’s major deities and god-concepts.  The Chicago area became her base for a first career teaching Asian art at colleges and universities across the country. With PhD in hand and drawing on these teaching experiences, she moved into curricular policy work at Northwestern, then on to institutional advancement and finally into community development through locally-oriented philanthropy. She was president and CEO of the Evanston Community Foundation for fifteen years and has lived in Evanston since 1983. 

Art in general, though, and ceramics in particular have been interwoven through her life and career, sometimes in the background and sometimes in the foreground.  Forms in the natural world have been a constant inspiration, whether as seen by the eye or as seen through art.  Initially she drew upon her direct relationship with the trees and plants on “The Acres,” the rural landscape of her childhood.  When she returned to ceramics five years ago, inspiration flowed from her many years of research and teaching Asian art.  Her aesthetic base is anchored in non-European art traditions and interpretations.  Traditional Chinese painting was fused with the literary arts—brush, ink, silk or paper being common to both.  Forms within nature were conveyed through the artist’s hand, brush, and mind.  In Schastok’s eyes, the pure white surfaces of Grolleg porcelain parallel the Chinese artist’s unpainted silk or paper and invite a celebration of the natural world.