Former curator of exhibitions and education at the Emerson Center for Arts and Culture in Bozeman, Ornitz is now a full-time artist. Most well-known as a sculptor, she renewed her practice during the pandemic with this series of ceramic vessels. Created with a primitive fire technique her palette is limited to the color of the clay and influences of smoke during the firing process. The vessels are intended, as she says, “to look unearthed, time-scoured and fossilized.” This fascination carries over from her sculptures, inspired by preserved human bodies of Pompeii and Iron Age “bog” people found in northern European peat bogs, their organic material preserved by tannins. She is an avid gardener who enjoys having her hands covered in earth, and her vessels often reveal the imprint of leaves and plants. In Ornitz’s work, there is a connection between ash, peat bog, earth, mud, and clay. This series is about transience and transition, and embodiment of mortality, and mediating fears and anxieties about the pandemic.

Ellen Ornitz has been a practicing ceramic and mixed media artist for nearly fifty years in the Gallatin Valley. She earned a B.A. in Painting and Printmaking from the University of California, Santa Cruz and a Masters in Secondary Art Education from the University of Indiana, Bloomington. She studied ceramics and sculpture with post-graduate work at Montana State University with John Buck and Akio Takamori.

She has exhibited her work at the Missoula Art Museum, University of Montana, Yellowstone Art Museum, Holter Museum of Art, Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art, Aunt Dofe’s Hall of Recent Memory, Turman-Larison Gallery, Blackwood Salon and Radius Gallery. She was a finalist for the Contemporary Northwest Art Awards at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon.

Ornitz has served on the Board of the Montana Arts Council, the Museum and Art Gallery Directors Association (MAGDA) and as an advisor to the Bozeman Sculpture Park. She also served as a juror for the Yellowstone Art Museum’s annual art auction and for numerous student exhibits at Montana State University and the University of Montana.