Brief Bio

Christopher Miles

Born 1968, Pomona, CA.

Lives and works in Los Angeles, Long Beach.

BA, College of Creative Studies, UC Santa Barbara, 1991.

MFA, University of Southern California, 1994.

Professor and Program Head for Ceramic Arts Studies, California State University Long Beach.

Co-founder and Director, Center for Contemporary Ceramics, CSULB.

Christopher Miles is a Los Angeles based artist. Since 1998, he has served on the faculty of the School of Art at California State University Long Beach where he is Program Head for Ceramic Arts Studies as well as Co-founder and Director of the Center for Contemporary Ceramics.

Chris grew up in Southern California surrounded by a family-run ceramics manufacturing business and the ceramics industry that proliferated in the region in the 1970s and 80s. He spent much of his youth working in his family’s small ceramics factory and riding along on supply runs and deliveries among the many hubs of ceramic industry that dotted the Southern California map: San Juan Capistrano, Alberhill, Corona, Santa Ana, Gardena, La Mirada, Santa Fe Springs, South LA, East LA, the City of Industry among others. He cites this early experience as formative in shaping how he approaches thinking, working, and making—having seen how materials were handled in industrial production settings and how ideas took form in product-development and prototyping phases concurrently with his own early experiences in working with material, tinkering, and making art.

As a young person drawn to metaphysical and spiritual thinking, and considering a future in the clergy, Chris began his undergraduate studies at Illinois Wesleyan University in 1986 as a double major in Religion/Philosophy and Art. In 1988, Chris transferred to UC Santa Barbara, initially lured by the university’s renown Religious Studies Department, but ultimately hooked by the curriculum and faculty of the College of Creative Studies. In 1991, he completed his BA with emphasis in Art at CCS. In 1994, Chris earned his MFA at the School of Fine Arts (now the Roski School) at the University of Southern California.

After undergraduate and graduate studies in art exploring a variety of 2D, 3D, and 4D media and genres, followed by years focused largely on art writing and curating, Chris refocused his activity on materials-based studio practice, frequently returning to the material and making languages familiar from his youth—producing with clay, papier-mâché, woodworking and carpentry, metalworking, painting and drawing, collage, and assemblage.

Chris’ work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at venues including ACME gallery, Actual Size gallery, Jason Jacques Gallery, L.A. Louver Gallery, the Pacific Design Center, the Pasadena Museum of California Art, Patricia Sweetow Gallery, the Pit, the Torrance Art Museum, and UC Santa Barbara. Chris’ work has been reviewed in ARTLURKER, Artillery, Artweek, Art in America, Ceramics Monthly, the L.A. Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, Notes on Looking, Square Cylinder, and Sculpture Magazine.