Biography

I come to my work, impelled to give tangible presence to the episodes in my life of peculiar intensity – the ones that announce their transcendence, and touch the common core of human experience…where my past merges with the observer’s present to create something greater than either of us alone.

—Luis Bermudez

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Luis Bermudez (1953–2021) is known for his architectural sculpture and installations that merge experiences of landscape, memory, and pre-Columbian indigeneity. Over the course of a career spanning five decades, Bermudez created a body of work that fuses individual and cosmic scales with remarkable economy, innovated the discipline of ceramics through his advanced mold-making practice and development of a unique castable refractory, and influenced countless generations of artists as a curator and educator.

After graduating from Notre Dame High School, Bermudez attended California State University, Northridge, where he received his BA in 1976 and his MA in 1978. Two years later, in 1980, he would receive his MFA from the University of California Los Angeles. Though a lifelong Angeleno, Bermudez’s worldview and artistic practice were influenced early on by his travels to Mexico as a young boy.  Journeying to his grandparent’s ranch outside of Guadalajara, known as El Piño, Bermudez first began to recognize the power of the individual in nature, and the interwovenness of the self, shared humanity, and the natural world that would drive him for years to come. The significance of these formative adventures is reflected in many of Bermudez’s works.

Seeded early, Bermudez’s curiosity and hunger for travel would bring him to Southeast Asia, Iceland, South America, Europe, and throughout the Western United States, shaping his understanding of sacred spaces as universal phenomena to be explored — and shared — through sculpture. As he once reflected, “My goal is to empower these objects and communicate to the viewer the essence of my personal experiences at these sacred or special places.” Bermudez predominantly created individual works as part of ongoing series that negotiated cross-cultural themes through specific, multivalent elemental forms found in both natural and human environments: among them portals and windows, spirals and vortexes, mountains, and caverns. Developed during his graduate studies, Treaty Stones (1976-77) drew from Celtic monuments and ignited this driving interest in , geography, and iterative practices. One work from this series was acquired early in his career by the E.B. Crocker Art Gallery (today the Crocker Art Museum) in 1977. 

Beginning in the mid-1970s, Bermudez showed his work extensively, both nationally and internationally. He exhibited alongside Peter Voulkos, Ken Price, Paul Soldner, Laura Andreson, and many other notable artists in the 1984 Art in Clay exhibition at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, and he was shown alongside John Mason in the 1985 traveling exhibition Pacific Connections, organized by the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art. A year later, Los Angeles’s Garth Clark Gallery hosted Bermudez’s first solo exhibition. He was awarded a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship in 1988, and shortly after featured in the 1989 exhibition Twentieth-Century Ceramics at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Bermudez’s fearless embrace of experimental methods in clay was critical to his creative evolution and each subsequent body of work that he created. As early as 1979 he was developing his own castable refractory formula and dynamic mold making methods which allowed him to explore pieces of greater density and scale. Distinguished by this architectural approach to the medium, Bermudez expanded his sculptural practice to include built environments that explicitly invited viewers to immerse themselves in the work. For La Caja del Piño Grande (Para Apolinario) (1991-1993), as an example, Bermudez built on his recurrent themes of rebirth, passage, death rites, and the form of the sarcophagus with a multi-faceted, room-sized installation incorporating a ceramic doorway, window, and peephole. Each of these hand-built “portals” provided a unique vantage from which to view the sculptural mountain landscape at the installation’s center, emphasizing Bermudez’s fascination with fluid, non-linear perspective and scale between the human and natural worlds. During this same period, Bermudez added steel to his material repertoire, crafting functional thresholds at a human scale for immersive installations, among them Sobre la Vida (1994) and El Portal de la Memoria (1993-1994). Through such large-scale installations, Bermudez effectively widened his practice beyond studying sacred architectural forms to making and inhabiting them. Bermudez excelled in bringing sacred locations into semi-abstraction so that they might act as universal points of connection. And while such universal touchstones were critical to Bermudez’s worldview, he nonetheless drew extensively from his own Mesoamerican heritage and what he identified as “genetic memory.” In 2009, his works were shown alongside ancient Mayan ceramics in Cerámica de la Tierra – The Pre-Columbian Tradition at the American Museum of Ceramic Art. Cerámica de la Tierra was closely followed by Luis Bermudez: Myth, Place and Identity at the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts in 2010. This major solo exhibition served to emphasize how Bermudez conceived himself and his work as belonging to both the contemporary moment and ancient lineages. Exhibited alongside abstracted cenotes, mountains, and other geological features, Bermudez alternately depicted the heads of serpentine Mesoamerican deities and himself, emerging from the fangs of snakes. Perhaps no other work in Bermudez’s oeuvre is as explicitly autobiographical as this Myth, Place, & Identity series. As art historian Manuel Aguilar-Moreno observed, “[Bermudez’s] art is original, but it is clear that ancient Mexico is ingrained in his blood, genetics, and ultimately his vision. It is a work charged with vitality and nostalgia that connects the viewer with a mysterious and ancestral world.”

Throughout his career, Bermudez taught extensively, holding teaching positions at institutions including California State University, Northridge, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Otis College of Art and Design. His longest appointment was as professor at California State University, Los Angeles, where he taught from 2002 to 2021, before his untimely death. He is remembered by his students as a mentor who struck a potent balance of generosity and rigor, and who was dedicated to guiding young artists in honing their own skill and passion. Bermudez’s commitment to encouraging his students found expression not least in his work as a curator, in which he acted as a significant conduit between the academic and professional spheres of artmaking. In 1992, Bermudez curated the UCLA Ceramics Invitational, which included the work of 12 UCLA alumni past and present, including several whom he had taught.  In 2005, he worked with the Consulate General of Mexico to present NEPANTLA DREAMS: Cal-Mex State L.A., an exhibition featuring the work of 16 Cal State LA alumni artists of Mexican heritage.

Bermudez’s work has been shown at the Everson Museum of Art, the American Museum of Ceramic Art, the Museum of Contemporary Crafts (today the Museum of Art and Design), and the Armory Center for the Arts, among many others. His work is held in the permanent collections of institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Crocker Art Museum, the Scripps College Ceramic Collection, and the Long Beach Museum of Art.