Gerald Eskin

ESKIN, ISRAEL

Posted By: Tara (email)
Date: 7/1/2011 at 11:22:13

Gerald Eskin of Iowa City, Chicago, and Aspen, died June 28 of complications following heart surgery last March. He was 76. He was a man of many talents who excelled as a professor, an entrepreneur, and an artist.

Gerald Julian Eskin was born on October 10, 1934, to Rose and William Eskin of Washington, DC. His father, a butcher, owned a grocery store, Spic ‘N Span Market. At 15, as a member of B’nai B’rith Youth Organization, he met the vivacious Sandra Israel, then 12. Their first date was her sweet 16; during the party they discovered they shared a taste for jazz and the same birthday. Two years later, in 1956, the pair married.

As a teen, Eskin learned to shoot photographs using a Graflex Speed Graphic camera. He was hired as stringer for the Washington Daily News, covering sports, crime, and nightlife. It was a job he later thought of as his favorite.

At Eastern High School, a journalism teacher named “Doc” Regis Boyle insisted Eskin try something he’d never considered: college. Eskin graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park and later served as a photographer for the Air Force Reserves. He earned his doctorate in economics from the University of Minnesota. He taught marketing and market research at Stanford University and at the University of Iowa.

In 1979, Eskin and three partners founded Information Resources, Inc., a market-research firm based in Chicago. Exploiting the potential of new technology that allowed grocery products to be scanned via barcode, Information Resources grew to one of the world’s leading market-research firms. Early on, a shipment of cables arrived incorrectly fabricated. The couple’s three teenaged children and their friends established an impromptu workshop in the family dining room, fitting the cables with the correct couplings and their fingers with many Band-Aids. Eskin was awarded three U.S. patents for technology he developed for IRI.

After retiring from IRI in 1995, Eskin turned his attention to his long-time pursuit, ceramics. He moved from throwing functional plates and cups to building large platters, and eventually towering sculptural forms. His work is held in major collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Arts & Design (formerly the American Craft Museum), Longhouse Reserve, the Mint Museum, the University of Iowa Museum of Art, and the Racine Art Museum.

Eskin returned to the University of Iowa as an adjunct professor of studio art and art history. He also returned to photography, mastering digital technology to produce vast panoramic landscapes. He noted that while the technique was new – he studied ink-jet-printer pixels through a microscope – the subject matter was old. “I am still trying to record objects, places and events, the same goals I had some 50 years ago when I worked as a photo journalist in Washington, D.C.” wrote Eskin in an artist’s statement.

Eskin conceived, designed and developed the ceramics collection for the University of Iowa Art Museum. Generous with time and money, if not small talk, he served as chairman of the advisory board of the National Council on Education in the Ceramic Arts, as a board member of the American Craft Museum, and as a member of the advisory board of the University of Iowa Museum of Art.

Eskin was an avid sailor, who kept a boat on Lake Michigan. He was an enthusiastic skier, who maintained a home and studio in Aspen, Colorado. Students often joined him there to help with the three-day process of wood firing and to help move his sculptures, many of which weighed more than 1,000 pounds. He was an adventurous traveler, visiting potters across Asia and ancient ruins in Europe and the Middle East. These influences are clear in his work.

His work was inspired by some of civilization’s earliest ceramic forms. He created “spirit houses” fashioned after ancient ossuaries, and imposing eight-foot tall vessels that resembled sarcophagi. “In all the things that Gerry Eskin creates, there is a basic sense of humanity,” wrote friend and renowned ceramicist Jun Kaneko, in the catalog to “Scale,” Eskin’s 2010 show at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa.

Eskin was at home in Aspen preparing for that show in March, 2010, when he suffered a heart attack. He underwent bypass surgery at the University of Colorado Hospital, Denver. Shortly after, he collapsed into multi-organ failure. Over the next 15 months, under the vigilant care of his wife, Eskin made a nearly miraculous recovery. The feat surprised his many doctors; it did not surprise his many friends, who in 2000 had witnessed him recover from tongue cancer thought to be fatal. This spring, though still hospitalized, now in Iowa, Eskin had returned to shaping pots and was learning games for the iPad when he succumbed to an infection.

Eskin preferred a casual style – jeans and a beard. He regularly met friends for coffee at Lou Henri’s restaurant on Iowa Avenue. Once he sold a ceramic platter to owner Jeffery Curie, who paid by waiving Eskin’s breakfast bills. Currie instructed his staff not to charge Eskin, provoking a reaction from a waitress that Eskin loved to retell. “She said, ‘I didn’t know that man was homeless.’”

Eskin is survived by his wife of 54 years, Sandie “Zoe” Eskin, his younger brother, Howard Eskin, of Charlton, New York, and three children: Joshua Eskin of Boulder, Colorado; Leah Eskin of Baltimore, Maryland; and Benjamin Eskin of Minneapolis, Minnesota; as well as seven grandchildren and one dog, Jackson. Eskin’s website, gerryeskinstudio.com, includes a tribute to his black lab, Claude, who died in 2006. It concludes: “In lieu of flowers, feed a dog some table scraps or let your dog off the leash for a few minutes.” He would likely offer the same advice today.

Contributions in honor of Eskin can be made to the University of Iowa Museum of Art or the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa.

A private burial was held Thursday. The family plans memorial services in Iowa City and Aspen later this year.