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At a time when art and cultural institutions are working to embrace diverse forms and ideas, it is no surprise that the intersection of art, craft and design at the heart of ceramics and its global histories are part of a new discourse. It’s one that the SVA has engaged in for decades with ceramics courses offered in several of its undergraduate, graduate and continuing education departments. 

The medium’s growing presence as a highly regarded art form in contemporary art galleries and museums challenges a centuries-old binary in Western culture between fine art and craft, one that is inextricably linked to broader questions of access, visibility and invisibility. Notably, The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2021 exhibition “Shapes from Out of Nowhere: Ceramics from the Robert A. Ellison Jr. Collection,” which featured a gift of 125 modern and contemporary ceramics from Robert A. Ellison, Jr., made in honor of the museum’s 150th anniversary, changed the game. 

Craft, which includes ceramics, has historically been associated with women, labor, utilitarian and functional objects, and by default disregarded in the realm of fine art, or relegated to the domain of the decorative. However, in the recent past a concerted challenge to this type of thinking has been underway, quietly building momentum, particularly in feminist art circles. 

The iconic 1970s work by artist and feminist Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, a long-term installation at the Brooklyn Museum since 2007, is perhaps one of the most significant challenges to the status quo. The multimedia work consists of a variety of art forms associated with “women’s work,” one of which is ceramics, in the form of 39 place settings on a triangular table in an installation that honors 1,038 women in history by name.

Another challenge to traditional thinking is the emergence of stoneware pottery by David Drake, an enslaved African American artist, who from census records appears to have lived between 1801 and the 1870s. An 1836 stoneware “catination” jar by Drake was bought at auction for $369,000 in 2020 by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, after an initial valuation of $40,000 to $60,000. Championed on the world stage by renowned artist Theaster Gates and increasingly in demand, one of Drake’s masterpieces currently sits in the American Wing Gallery of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Working in the context that was available to him, Drake’s work makes visible the invisible artisan, asserting his individual skill and refinement—and, similar to Chicago, raising questions around access and gatekeeping in an art-historical context.

Addressing similar issues from a different vantage point is Grayson Perry, an English contemporary artist and Turner Prize recipient known for his ceramic vases, tapestries, broadcasting work and cross-dressing as his female alter-ego, “Claire.” Perry has contributed to the movement of the art form into more contemporary, experimental and critical territory with subversive yet humorous commentary on class, classicism, taste and elitism embedded in the surfaces of large-scale ceramic objects and vessels. 

While questions on the value of ceramics beyond the classical and decorative realms are present at an institutional level, artists in the field are perhaps more consumed and excited by process than semantics. According to artist Nicolas Touron (faculty, BFA and MFA Fine Arts; MFA 2003 Fine Arts), “Most ceramists are so passionate and lost in the complexity of their production that the definition of ‘craft’ or ‘fine art’ doesn’t often come into the discussion. Discussions almost always start with the question: ‘How did you do it?’”

While deeply appreciative of the illustrative quality and color palette of Qing Dynasty porcelain from China (c. 1600s – 1700s) and Meissen porcelain from Europe (c. 1700s), as well as the the beautiful naive and abstract shapes of the Middle Jōmon period (c. 2500 – 1500 BCE) in Japan, Touron’s processes are informed by the latest in fabrication technology, such as 3D-printed porcelain and digital mold-making. “Using digital media to work with porcelain allows me to create juxtapositions between art forms considered naive and computerized forms of creation perceived as more concept driven,” he says. “It also allows me to assemble shapes and forms pulled out of the menagerie of personages from paintings and drawings I have been creating over the years.”

For artist Wushuang Tong (MFA 2019 Fine Arts), the juxtaposition of influences and ideas informs her work in ceramics as well. Pulling from both the East and the West—the subtle elegance classical Chinese ceramics, especially from the Song Dynasty (960 – 1279), and the voluptuous curves and intricate details of Rococo decorative arts, initiated in France and developed over the late 17th and early 18th centuries—Tong’s work engages ideas of both abundance and simplicity. “This may sound contradictory, as these two are opposite poles of style, but I do continuously pursue an enchanting and reserved ambience in a relatively sophisticated form,” she says. 

Working in white earthenware clay, air-dry clay and more recently polymer clay, Tong’s “tortured structures,” as she calls them, are created by free-hand sculpting and often read as abstract. While aware of typical assumptions that ceramics are simple, often functional objects, such as dinnerware or vases, Tong is concerned with the potential of ceramics as a tool for critical thinking. “When I first started learning ceramic techniques, I asked my teacher why he was so obsessed, and he said, ‘Because it is everything and it is nothing,’” she recalls. “In addition to his preference for the material as a ceramic artist, his answer also expresses the many possibilities of ceramics.”

While Tong and fellow alumni such as Heather Williams (MFA 2020 Art Practice), Katy Stubbs (BFA 2015 Illustration), Margaret Lanzetta (MFA 1989 Fine Arts) and Judy Mannarino (faculty, SVA Continuing Education; BFA 1981 Fine Arts), among several others, are poised to benefit from growing interest in ceramics as contemporary art, the recent success of Alice Mackler (BFA 1988 Fine Arts) as a ceramic artist began at the age of 82, with her first solo show in 2013 and her first monograph, published this year. After decades of painting and drawing, Mackler developed an interest in ceramics in the late 1990s, when obstacles associated with both her medium and gender were formidable. 

While galleries and museums offer a particular kind of critical acclaim, an active market for ceramics in general is also on the rise. Touron, who also works as an art director at Sculpture Space NYC, a facility that specializes in high-end ceramics, says, “Ceramics have definitely been a hot material for the last five to 10 years. Designers, sculptors and potters are selling work at an incredible pace, even during the pandemic.”

Enthusiasm for the medium among practitioners makes for a communal experience. “Because it encompasses so many fields and creates so many crossovers, it is often less ‘stiff’ than other creative environments. Ceramicists exchange ideas and techniques more often than a painter for example. It makes you feel like you are part of one big family,” he says.

As the field of ceramics intersects with new technologies and expands into the vast landscape of contemporary art while it continues to grow in decorative and utilitarian contexts, intermedia and interdisciplinary works are increasingly on the horizon. Whatever the case may be, any path forward is remarkably informed by millennia of histories of ceramics from multiple continents. Whether technologically informed or traditionally made, whether displayed in a museum or on a kitchen shelf, ceramics’ roots in the earth and natural materials offer a visual account of a shared human history illuminated by infinitely diverse forms of creative expression.

Diana McClure is a writer and photographer based in New York City. Her essays, reviews and profiles have appeared in Art Basel magazine, Art21, Cultured, catalogs, monographs and other publications.

A version of this article appears in the fall/winter 2021 Visual Arts Journal.