Linda Ganstrom

Redwood Art Association Fall 2026

Biographical Statement for Curating

Engaged, Linda Ganstrom enjoys wearing a variety of career hats. In her fifth decade as an artist, teacher and advocate for the arts, she seeks to balance local and international engagement with a treasured family life. For instance, she served as a juror for the San Angelo North American Ceramics competition in 2026, the Jingdezhen International Ceramic Art Biennial 2023 in Jingdezhen, China and was the 2025 juror for the Ninnescah Biennial Exhibition at the Vernon Filley Museum in Pratt, KS. As the Exhibitions Director for NCECA from 2008 – 2014, she worked with hundreds of venues and artists. She organized three NCECA Biennials working with venues such as the Tampa Art Museum. She co-curated the Annual Invitational exhibitions: Earth Matters, Push Play at the Bellevue Arts Museum and Flow at the Milwaukee Art Museum. She served on curatorial teams for Ecumene: Global Interface in American Ceramics during the International Academy of Ceramic General Session in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2012; Continental Divide Ceramics Exhibition and Earth Moves: Shifts in Ceramic Art and Design at the Arvada Center, Arvada, Colorado, and Global Positioning at the Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute Gallery, Jingdezhen, China. She was a finalist in the curatorial competition of Taiwan Ceramics Biennial at the Yingee Museum for Ceramics in Taipei in 2013. As an NCECA Collectors’ Tour Leader from 2018 - 2023, Ganstrom enjoyed being a member of a team dedicated to creating connections between communities, collectors, artists and art professionals in building a more vibrant ceramics culture through curating and facilitating ceramics exhibitions.

Earning three degrees from Fort Hays State University in Hays, Kansas, Linda Ganstrom currently serves as their Professor of Art and Design teaching Ceramics where she has hosted over 80 visiting artist workshops and mentored over 60 graduate students. She lives and works in Hays, Kansas and shares a studio with her husband, the ceramic artist, Sheldon Ganstrom. As an exhibiting artist, she is currently preparing to exhibit a life-scale figurative installation in the Walters Museum in Baltimore for the NCECA Annual, Throw Back.  Her work was recently shown Workhouse Clay International, in Lorton, District of Columbia and at the Leopold Gallery in Kansas City. Included in over a dozen books and publications, her article “Care Create” was recently published in the Studio Potter Magazine. She has exhibited in over 300 shows, including solo, invitational group and juried exhibitions including  the Meissen Porcelain Biennale, Meissen, Germany, 2022 and the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts Ceramic Competitions six time since 2014 and won the First Place Award in 2018.

As a child raised on a Kansas farm, Linda Ganstrom found joy in outdoor, imaginative play and remembers her first experiences with clay as creating impressions of leaves and flowers in the soft mud next to her grandfather’s welding shop.  As a young adult, she was attracted to the discovery, discipline and self-expression offered by ceramic art. Working in ceramics for five decades, Linda Ganstrom explores issues relating her personal experiences to big picture questions primarily through figurative ceramics and travel to Mexico, China and Europe.  Her art has undergone many evolutions as she makes and experiences art to understand herself, the world around her and discover her truth. Art, teaching, curating, travel and service connect Ganstrom to life and fuel her passion for art.