When our Zoom squares flicker to life, I see Ehren Tool—artist, Marine Corps veteran, and self-described “sphincter of ceramics” at UC Berkeley—sitting in a cramped studio behind a table covered with not-quite-dry ceramic cups. His grey beard almost reaches the top seam of his green, clay-spattered apron, just as the wall behind him (I think there’s a wall in there) almost reaches toward and past him, into the camera. Its floor to ceiling bins, posters, bags, colors, buckets, flags, and tools seem to crowd over his shoulders as if to get a better look at what he’s making now.

If you ask Ehren what he does as an artist, he doesn’t hesitate. “I make cups!” Then he laughs. But that isn’t all that Ehren does. He also talks and listens to people who receive these cups, considering they aren’t for sale but will be exchanged for dialogue—often about war and the military experience, but not always.

Here are some edited highlights from the conversation Collateral had with Ehren, which you can watch in full on our YouTube channel.

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When you ask who he is, Ehren says:

When you asked that question, it really threw me off. Like, who am I? …deep!

I’m Argil’s dad, Sara’s husband, David’s son, Bill’s grandson… Anyway. I make cups. I work at UC Berkeley. I’m the sphincter of ceramics there: I’m what everything passes through, floating through the kilns, and firing the kilns. I’ve made and given away about 25,000 cups since 2001, mostly to vets and their families, but you know, other folks that war resonates with.

I’m a Marine Corps veteran of the ‘91 Gulf War, so issues of war and violence are close to me, but the military doesn’t have a corner on the market of trauma and violence. You know, war is murder, and military sexual trauma is rape, and lots of folks outside in the civilian world suffer from those things also. But there’s no place to talk about that so they kinda end up—the cups bring up different things for different people.

I just make cups. That’s who I am: the guy that makes those cups.

When you ask why art school?

So I joined the Marine Corps [because] I wanted to be a cop, right? LAPD, “to protect and serve,” that was what I thought I wanted to do. After the Gulf War, I was less interested in carrying a gun to work. I actually volunteered, after the Gulf War, for embassy duty, and had two hardship posts back to back. I was in Rome fifteen months, and then Paris fifteen months. A hundred pounds ago, I looked good in a uniform!

But then I got out, took the GI bill, and was just swinging from class to class [at Pasadena City College]. But you know, the idea was, find something I like to do, and do it well, cause if I do it well, someone will pay me. The “pay me” thing has been a bigger trick… but maybe I’m still not doing it that well, even though I enjoy it! [laughs] All things in time.

When you ask if working with ceramics came naturally:

No. Actually, as a young man, I thought being able to take a life was power. But after you see somebody flopping around on the ground, bleeding out, you feel like—you know. Being able to save a life is a bigger thing. So I took an emergency medical technician course and couldn’t complete the training because I broke my ankle drinking too much one night. I was taking a drawing class, and I asked if I could join the painting class, because I couldn’t complete [the EMT course] and I wouldn’t meet my full units for the GI bill.

So Ben Sakaguchi (drawing & painting faculty at Pasadena City College), a Japanese American, raised in internment camps, says all art is political. And he lumps my work in with the feminist movement as the “personal is political.” And it’s like, what the hell did you say? Then he retired, and his best friend was Phil Cornelius (ceramics faculty at PCC). Prior Army [service] between Vietnam and Korea. And, you know, I’m trying to center the clay, right, a Marine, and he’s prior Army, [saying] look at Big Sergeant Tool, getting his ass kicked by five pounds of clay! [laughs]

“The gap between what I thought I was gonna do and what I did was vast and painful.”

And [Cornelius] said I couldn’t decorate my work. So I went home and made molds and started decorating my work, and I’ve been doing that now [for a long time]. Actually [holds a ceramic mold up to the camera], this might have been one of those molds. That mold is probably twenty years old.

I swear I think a lot of school for me was teachers telling [me] how it is, or the writers, or the art historian, or something. And then me saying, No, I don’t think so, and going in a different direction. Like, okay, is that so? Clement Greenberg, huh? Like, what’s your relationship with the CIA, you know? That’s the thing with art. And that was the deal.

After my disappointment in the Marine Corps, you know, I joined for good and noble reasons; I was gonna do good and noble things. The gap between what I thought I was gonna do and what I did was vast and painful. So that gave me the strength actually, to go to school, like [blows raspberry]! You gonna tell me I can’t do that, this is wrong, this is right, this is—I’m just gonna go to school and see what I want to do with my life!

And I was hoping to find something above crass commercial garbage, right, like art, science, medicine, religion; those things should be above, you know, just makin’ that money, but…womp womp! Nothing in our culture is above it.

In grad school, some guest artist came and talked, and their advice was, Follow your heart, and I was like, oh my god, did we pay this person to come in? That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard! But then people [said to me], tell me about the trajectory of your career, and I was like, I kinda just followed my heart. I mean, I would never say it like that, but if you break it down it’s like, this gig felt good, that one felt bad, I said yes to this, and no to that.

When you ask why cups?

Stalin said one death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic, but in war, one million is an incalculable tragedy! Everybody had a mother and a father, and that’s gone. Even thinking about the thousands of cups that I’ve made and the millions or trillions of bombs that have been made, you know, and for what? If everything goes according to plan, they blow up and destroy a bunch of other things? And yeah, we’re doing it “to protect American lives” but you know what protects American lives? American doctors. Killing random people doesn’t save other random people. And the money that we spend on it, what are the returns on it? Clean water for the planet?

When you ask why conversation?

So I think LAPD, “protect and serve,” [and] Marine Corps rifle squad, “locate, close with and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver,” right? And now I’m an artist, [and] I still want to locate, close with, and destroy the enemy. But through shared experience, and maybe a couple beverages, and a conversation…

“In grad school, some guest artist came and talked, and their advice was, Follow your heart, and I was like, oh my god, did we pay this person to come in? That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard! But then people [said to me], tell me about the trajectory of your career, and I was like, I kinda just followed my heart.”

That was the thing, I got out on Embassy duty in Rome, and I was discharged overseas and was coming back through Siena, and was drinking and talking to the waiter, and it turned out he was from Jordan, and he got drafted during the ‘91 Gulf War, he was studying medicine in Iraq, and now he was in Siena studying medicine. So he got off work and took me all around Siena and introduced me to other Gulf War vets from the Iraqi side, who are all working bars.

Anyway. It’s the conversations. A little empathy, a little insight. I’m so grateful to the people—and having been in the military, right—I’ll meet trans people, Black, Native, disabled, rich, poor—but they’re vets. So, in a bar or a car dealership or the subway, immediately there’s a conversation, there’s a trust. My hope is, through the military connection, I can reach out into the trans community, reach out into the Black community.

About divisions and disconnects in the military, during and after war:

There’s an image from a Marine Corps manual, an image of how you fold up an American flag when somebody passes, you know, and you give it to the family? I painted one with brown hands, and people lost their minds! I was like, what?! [They said] “I didn’t serve in the Marine Corps with any Black guys, they were dark greens!” But now, how can you say Black lives don’t matter? They’ve been in every war since the beginning, and we cared about them, and they cared about us. Now, Navajo code talkers, you’re gonna turn your [back]?… there’s still no clean water on the reservation! If you say that we’re America, and we’re gonna support each other in combat, then how do we turn off when we come home? We can train together, we can fight together, we can die together, we can be buried together. There’s no place in the United States that we can all live together.

“We can train together, we can fight together, we can die together, we can be buried together. There’s no place in the United States that we can all live together.”

If you ask whether all the cups are given away eventually:

Or thrown away, or dropped. I’ve sold a couple for charity stuff. Man, they’re just cups. I had my first show in Los Angeles, and the gallery owners said, I’m gonna give you this show, even though your work isn’t relevant to anything that’s going on in Los Angeles. And the show opened the month after 9/11 and people were like, oh my god, your work is so timely! People were all excited about it.

I had 1,000 cups with military images and letters I’d sent to the Pentagon and the White House, and there was some gallery owner from another gallery who was like, all the other artists, they’re bitches man, this was a coup de grâce, that’s the best show that ever happened in Chinatown, oh my God, I want to sign you! I didn’t say anything, but I was like, no thanks. If you’re talking about other artists that way, I don’t want to work with you.

“If it’s queer art, if it’s vet art, if it’s disabled art, if it’s Black art, if it’s Latin art, if it’s outsider art, if it’s street art—that’s interesting to me. But Art? No.”

So I was feeling all up about myself, and we went out to dinner, and then coming home, walking back to the car, [I saw] there were cups with cigarette butts in them, and shards in the gutter, after people have been crying and telling me these crazy stories. But in the end, you know, meh, it’s just a cup.

When you ask about the kind of art he likes:

If it just says Art, then it’s white, bougie art, and I’m not such a fan. If it’s queer art, if it’s vet art, if it’s disabled art, if it’s Black art, if it’s Latin art, if it’s outsider art, if it’s street art—that’s interesting to me. But Art? No.

When you ask if Art is basically hotel lobby art:

I mean, some of that’s not fair, right? There’s a lot of stuff that I just don’t get, but it can be moving, and the work represents who it was made for, you know? They didn’t make those 8x12 foot paintings for, you know, veterans. [laughs] Maybe for the Raytheon lobby…

I don’t like talking smack about artists for sure, but it shouldn’t be like, because I think that a cup is the appropriate scale to talk about war, that doesn’t mean I think people who are making paintings or big sculptures shouldn’t.

With artists, with doctors, with anything you’re doing, the best thing you can do is be true to yourself, right? Do the thing that you really want. If you’re in a situation where you gotta make some stuff to sell, I’m not knocking you; make that stuff to sell. There’s worse things to do. But don’t give up on that stuff you really want to make, even if it doesn’t sell, even if nobody wants to read it. It’s really important that you make that thing that makes your heart sing or cry. We don’t need any more products; we need real, sincere expressions of being human.

That’s another thing: as a cup, [my art] can live for a while on a pedestal as ‘big A’ Art and then the show’s over and it’s in storage, and then it’s at Goodwill, and now it’s an ashtray for some vet. So then he passes, then it’s got an opportunity to live, as art, or as a functional thing.

To have your work interact and resonate with people… Emory Douglas, the Black Panther and Minister of [Culture] in Oakland, I asked him what he thought success was, and [snaps] right away, he said, when your work resonates with the people. No question. And I’ve never heard any other artists say that’s how they feel: that the success is when your work resonates with people. As an artist, I’ll say that that is absolutely the best feeling, you know, when it—I don’t wanna say when it makes somebody cry, but when it makes somebody cry! It’s resonating, somebody’s getting it!

I have a lot of people that come up and say, I don’t talk about my experiences in war, I can’t talk about my experience in war, and a few of them have thanked me, but just to have it out there… it’s true, I think, that the people who talk most about war are liars, you know. It’s entertainment and politicians—it’s not combat vets, that’s for sure. And with so much garbage talk out there, it makes it harder to have honest talk about anything. Like, if you’re not blowing it up as a patriot and rah, rah, rah, any kind of questioning of the morality or the price you’re paying gets twisted.

When you start talking about how we define our own art, and the art of people around us:

I think a lot of the time, artists think, look what I made! [And] the stuff I made twenty years ago, if I win the lottery, I’ll gladly buy it back and smash that stuff up, cause I was so proud of it the time, but man, it’s some bad work!

And I think that continues: you know what you know, and you think you’re relevant. So criticism, positive or negative, is like, interesting, we’ll see what the critics say in a hundred years! It’s out of my control, you know.

What he says about art as commodity:

When I left undergrad, [I was] with Ken Price, and I was like, man I’m super frustrated because I know there’s stuff I’m gonna want to know, that I’ll wanna ask you, but you’re not gonna be around for me to ask. And he was quiet for a long time, then he said, yeah, I’m trying to think of something good to say. He said it sucks when nobody knows you, nobody knows your work, obviously you’re broke, you’re not selling. And it sucks when they do know you because they want you to do [just] that one thing. They want you to make that product over and over again.

I’m actually hearing from a gallery owner, too, like it’s a big fancy gallery owner in L.A., he came to the show at the Craft and Folk Art Museum, and he’s like, hey, come to the gallery. And I was like, yeah, right, he’s blowing smoke. But I went and the dude hung up his phone and was like, get the catalogs on—I’m blanking on the name—he’s got this whole stack of catalogs on this German artist who left after WWII and came to the States. [Note: after this interview, Ehren clarified: the catalog was work by Swiss artist Hans Burkhardt, who left Europe before the war.] It was really political, and this gallery owner was almost in tears, showing me this guy’s work that he had, and he was like, I want to give it away. I wanna give it to somebody who appreciates it, but I can’t. It would destroy the market value of his work, and all this stuff would end up in the dumpster. It would. So [he had] this frustration of having to collect it, and having to restrict access to it to make it valuable enough that it doesn’t all get discarded.

“The cups at the museum are dead. They’re just sitting on the wall, all gone. The cups that are out in the world are still collecting stories.”

So, there again with the cups, with the weirdness, I’m just lobbing them into the ocean. I’ve got them at the Smithsonian, but…the cups at the museum are dead. They’re just sitting on the wall, all gone. The cups that are out in the world are still collecting stories, and conversations are happening. I don’t know that objects actually have auras that they collect, but it does feel like that’s more. Like I give the cup to you and then, when you’re gone, the people that care about you will care about the cup, because you cared about the cup, right? So having the work move through the world in that way is so much more interesting than having it out on consignment or loan from this museum to that museum.

When you talk about hope and art:

Paul Soldner is a big American ceramics hero, and he [helped] liberate a death camp as a medic [in WWII], and the story his daughter told was that in one of these barracks, somebody had drawn these just beautiful pictures of some park scene, and he was like, fuck it, if these guys could do it in those situations, I sure as hell can make art. And another, Peter Voulkos, you know, was in the Army Air Corps, bombed Japan, and his thing was, he said that he was gonna make something beautiful every day after having taken part in that. But again, we’re not the only ones. A Black man aged 18 to 30 is statistically safer in the Marine Corps in Afghanistan at the worst part of the war than in any large city in the United States. So how can [Americans] say with a straight face that we’re out here for freedom and democracy? We can be better. Universal healthcare, universal basic income, some housing, that would definitely lower the stress level of people who are on the edge anyway [with their] mental health—then you take their housing, you take the healthcare, and they’re gonna be in a much worse space.

When you ask what he’d like to create next:

“A Black man aged 18 to 30 is statistically safer in the Marine Corps in Afghanistan at the worst part of the war than in any large city in the United States. So how can [Americans] say with a straight face that we’re out here for freedom and democracy? We can be better.”

I’ve had this fantasy of an occupation, like a military occupation, [to] set up a bunker made of bags of clay, with wheels and concertina wire and big kilns, and then camp there for as long as it takes to take the bunker down. Take the walls down and turn them into cups.

You want to protect yourself, protect your community, so the temptation is to separate yourself, separate your community; but another way to protect yourself, protect your community, might be to expand it. Destroy your enemy by making them friends. So, take the bunker down, turn it into cups, and give the cups away, then that creates some kind of weirdo community of people that have the cups and have conversations.

And that’s what I’m trying to do, twenty-something years into the cups, I’m trying to figure out [how] we’ve done all this, we’ve been through all this, and to what end? It’s like Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk, talking about veterans being the light at the tip of the flame. And if we can find a way to deal with our pain and trauma, then we can light the path for the rest of the world. So that’s the hope.

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To learn more about Ehren, check out this short video from Craft in America, or start making art and conversations that create healing community bonds.

“You want to protect yourself, protect your community, so the temptation is to separate yourself, separate your community; but another way to protect yourself, protect your community, might be to expand it.”

— Ehren Tool

Interview with Ehren Tool—Artist & Veteran