Jesse J. Ring was born in 1984 in the octagonal home his father built in the Mark Twain National Forest. Growing up as a "turnkey kid," street skating and throwing pottery were formative influences that inspired him to study studio art and ceramics. He received his MFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred in 2015 and his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2006. He has taught studio art full-time since 2016.
Jesse’s professional accomplishments include being a Creative Fellow at The Hambidge Center, a Windgate Fellow at the Vermont Studio Center, and an artist in residence at Zentrum für Keramik Berlin and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. His work has been exhibited nationally at the Alfred Ceramics Museum, the American Museum of Ceramic Art, the Aspen Art Museum, the Burchfield Penney Art Center, and the Pensacola Museum of Art, as well as internationally in China, Germany, and Hungary.
Jesse currently lives in San Diego, where he has a sculpture studio in City Heights.

Statement
Totems of The is it built or grown, a future technology or magical fruit?
The series Totems of The is intentionally absurd and optimistically poetic. The relationship between speculative technologies, magical artifacts, psychoactive plants, garbage, and the ground is used to explore the fuzzy boundary between culture and nature.
The sculptures are made of materials ranging from ceramic to metallic and soil to litter. Forming them together by hand, tool, computer, and chemical reaction, the sculptural processes further reflect the confusion of this boundary.
First Nature was primordial, and Second Nature