2025 | Common Reading Series: Artist Marilyn Lysohir

Join artist Marilyn Lysohir for a talk about art and chocolate

Artist’s Talk
Thursday, February 6, 2025, 4:00-5:30pm
Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art WSU

Join Moscow-based artist Marilyn Lysohirto learn about the history of chocolate and how it has influenced her artistic practice. Lysohir’s first job was at a candy store in Pennsylvania and she took a break from her art career to start Cowgirl Chocolates in Moscow, ID in the mid-1990s. Lysohir’s life-sized ceramic work Bad Manners is currently on view as part our 50th anniversary exhibition, Your Collection: Faculty Remix, on view January 14 through June 28, 2025.

Come for the talk, stay for a bite of complimentary chocolate and a coupon to Moscow Candy, just in time for Valentine’s Day. Moscow Candy is co-owned by Lysohir and Carise Skinner.

Funding for this program is provided by the David G. Pollart Center for Arts and Humanities.

About |  Marilyn Lysohir was born in the rust belt town of Sharon, Pennsylvania, and earned a Bachelor’s Degree at Ohio Northern University 1972. She moved to Pullman, Washington, to attend graduate school at Washington State University and earned her MFA in 1979. She moved across the Idaho state line to Moscow and began her art career, breaking ground as a young, female ceramic sculptor. As a ceramist in the early 1980s, Lysohir had to push against the boundaries of being labeled a craft artist. She was one of the unique artists of her generation to see the possibilities of ceramics as a sculpture medium and earned the reputation as one of the leading ceramic artists of the 1980s. Her first solo exhibition was in 1984 in Los Angeles, where she showed a major ceramic installation, Bad Manners (Version 1). Lysohir was adjunct professor at WSU-Pullman from 1979-1985 and has served as visiting art professor at numerous universities including Kansas City Art Institute, University of Idaho, and New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. Her list of accolades includes lectures, workshops, and two Kohler Factory Arts in Industry Program residences.

Common Reading Series | The 2024-25 Common Reading Series at the museum is a collaboration between the Schnitzer Museum WSU and the WSU Common Reading Program. Talks in the series will address a wide variety of food-related topics to deepen our community’s understanding of this year’s common read, How the Other Half Eats by Priya Fielding-Singh, and The Art of Food: From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation exhibition, on view at the art museum from August 20, 2024–March 8, 2025.