About

Toby Buonagurio is a professor in the Department of Art at Stony Brook University and has been the Head of Ceramics in the Art Department since 1976. She is a lifetime resident of New York City and is best known for her colorful, offbeat, tongue-in-cheek ceramic sculptures inspired by extensive international travel and her affection for Popular Culture, American and otherwise. Her work has been exhibited in 27 solo shows across museums and galleries throughout the United States and Japan, and has been featured in nearly 300 international shows, with extensive coverage in national periodicals, professional publications, books, monographs, and exhibition catalogues. Her work has also been featured in television documentaries on the arts internationally and is included in numerous private and public collections in the US and abroad. Buonagurio has created significant public artworks, including 'Times Square Times: 35 Times', a series of thirty-five glazed ceramic relief sculptures commissioned by MTA Arts and Design, permanently installed in the Times Square-42 Street Subway Station and viewed by nearly half a million subway riders daily. She was an invited guest artist at the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park in Japan in 1997, where she created artwork and traveled throughout the country for two months. Her other notable work, 'Earth, Air, Fire, Water', commissioned in 2010 for the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University, features eleven large glazed ceramic butterflies that symbolize elements of physics and are installed in the building's lobby. Her latest work involves high octane, brilliantly colored, reflective surfaces that activate her sculptures, representing a more extreme approach developed through extensive research.

Research topics

• Visual arts
• Geography
• Library science
• History
• Medical education

Selected publications

• SBU Faculty Exhibition, November 15 to December 14, 2005

  2005-11-15

  article
  Publisher

• Faculty Exhibition 2001, September 11 to October 20, 2001

  2001-09-11

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• The Faculty Show '94

  1994-09-13

Frequent coauthors

• Martin Levine

  9 shared

• Jacques Guilmain

  8 shared

• Howardena Pindell

  8 shared

• Stephanie Dinkins

  Stony Brook University

  5 shared

• Thom Thompson

  5 shared