RADICAL REINVENTION: CONTEMPORARY CERAMIC SCULTURE
Moontide #1 (2019)
Nancy Train-Smith, Glazed Stoneware
Radical Reinvention: Contemporary Ceramic Sculpture
March 13 - May 25
Ibrahim Said
Tomb 2, 2023
White Earthenware
25.75”x 13.5” x 6"
Ibrahim Said
Embrace, 2021
White Earthenware
17" x 9" x 9"
From the narrow streets, pottery ovens, and noisy workshops of Fustat, Ibrahim Said was born in 1976. Fustat is an area in Cairo, Egypt that has etched its name in the history of the pottery industry since the Islamic conquest. Ibrahim comes from a family of potters, and his father became his first teacher and the rich cultural heritage of Egypt became his second.
Known for his elegant vases that are included in some prestigious Middle East collections, Ibrahim’s work is inspired by the ancient work of Egyptians—the strong lines and bold shapes—although his signature work embodies a lightness that comes from his silhouettes, small bases, and delicate finials.
His carvings are derived from Islamic jug filter designs, which were both functional and aesthetic. The carved area in the neck of the jug filtered out impurities when water was collected in the Nile. Ibrahim wanted to find a way to bring these ancient carvings back to life while somehow maintaining their history.
He has participated in workshops and demonstrations throughout the Middle East, and has been highly recognized for his technical ability, creativity, and innovation in the field of ceramics.
I work with clay. My interests lie in expanding on forms and principles rooted in my culture: namely ancient Egyptian pottery and Islamic arts.
Through bridging the languages of function and sculpture, I hope to conjure stories about rituals, memorializing, and cultural proverbs, that feel both ancient and currently relevant.
Through the use of geometry, it is possible to explore ideas about perfection, order, and infinity that I find powerful and humbling.
The vase forms that inspire me are from the Naqada III period in Egypt from 3200-3000 BCE. The strong lines and bold shapes of that period in particular are my favorite. Their delicate finials and small bases embody an elegance and strength that are still unmatched for me.
My carvings are inspired by artifacts of water jug filters made between 900-1200 ACE in Fustat, Egypt. Although the carved designs were made for functional reasons, to filter out river sediment, the beauty of geometric, floral, and animal designs are prevalent in Islamic Arts and adorned many day-to-day objects.
But what was particularly poetic about them was that only those drinking could see the designs: it embodied a principle emphasizing inner beauty rather than the external, and emphasized an individual contemplative experience. Searching for ways to bring these ancient carvings and their narratives back to life has become one of my artistic challenges— I always want my work to feel Egyptian and build on that rich cultural history.
In the past ten years I have incorporated both wheel throwing and hand-building techniques into each piece giving particular attention to finials, surface carvings, and glaze color. The construction and engineering of them has become more complicated, pushing the material to its limit, and trying to invent new forms, but I believe the work cannot come easily. I believe the act of making is in itself an act of devotion and meditation to the beauty present and possible in the world.
Chris Gustin
Vessel #9901, 1999
Stoneware
20”x 23” x 21"
Chris Gustin
Vase #0309, 2003
Porcelain
29”x 17” x 13"
Born in 1952 in Chicago, Illinois, I grew up in Los Angeles, California, where I was surrounded by ceramics from an early age. My family were part owners of several commercial whiteware ceramic manufacturing companies. Spending my childhood around ceramic factories, it was an obvious choice for me to go into the family business.
After taking a pottery class at a local clay studio in Venice Beach while in high school, I went to the University of California, Irvine in 1970, where I studied biology and sociology. Because of my interest in clay, I also took an introductory studio ceramic course with John Mason. After a semester of college, I took a summer job at one of my father’s factories, located in Pasadena, California. I decided that I wanted to continue working in the family business, so in the fall of 1970, when I was 18 years old, I quit school and became the factory foreman and manager at Wildwood Ceramics, which I ran until 1972. Two years of running a small commercial ceramics factory was an apprenticeship that has since proved invaluable in my career.
During my time at Wildwood, I was still making wheel-thrown pottery. Having decided that the studio side of ceramics was of greater interest to me, I left the factory in 1972 to attend the Kansas City Art Institute, from which I received my BFA in ceramics in 1975. I then went on to graduate school at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, where I received my MFA in 1977.
I established my first clay studio in 1977 in Guilford, Connecticut with my sister-in-law Jane Gustin. We shared the studio for five years, where we each produced functional and sculptural pottery. During this time, I was invited to teach at Parson’s School of Design in New York, where I was an instructor in the Crafts Department from 1978 to 1980. In 1980, I began teaching at the Program in Artisanry at Boston University, where I was Assistant Professor of Ceramics. In 1985, the Program in Artisanry moved to the Swain School of Design in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where I became Associate Professor of Ceramics and head of the ceramics program. Swain School subsequently merged in 1988 with Southeastern Massachusetts University, now the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.
It was during my tenure at Boston University in 1982, that I moved my studio from Connecticut to South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, where I purchased and renovated an 8000 square-foot building that was an old chicken farm. This building became both my studio and my living space.
In 1986, I became involved with a small group of artists interested in saving and preserving an old brick factory in southeast Maine. With Peg Griggs’ generous donation of the property, she, George Mason, Lynn Duryea, and I founded the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Newcastle, Maine. Watershed is now thriving, offering summer and winter residencies to artists from around the world.
I became interested in the production of tile in 1994 when my wife and I began to design our new home. I made all of the tiles for the new house, and out of that experience, I started Gustin Ceramics Tile Production in 1996. The tile company offered me another way to work with ceramics and has grown significantly over the years. The tile is represented nationally by architects, designers and tile showrooms.
I was Associate Professor of Ceramics and the senior faculty of the ceramics program during my ten-year tenure at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. After twenty years of teaching and working with hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students, in the summer of 1999 I retired from academia to devote myself full-time and energy to my studio work and the tile production company.
I am interested in pottery that makes connections to the human figure. The figurative analogies used to describe pots throughout history all in some way invite touch. The pots that I respond to all speak of a clear, direct sense of the hand. The hand is celebrated in the work by its maker, whether it is that of a fifteenth-century rural potter or a nineteenth-century court artisan. And it becomes a necessary tool for the user in understanding the relationship of the object to its function, and subsequently, to how that object informs one’s life.
Though most of my work only alludes to function, I use the pot context because of its immense possibilities for abstraction. The skin of the clay holds the invisible interior of the vessel. How I manipulate my forms “around” that air, constraining it, enclosing it, or letting it expand and swell, can allow analogy and metaphor to enter into the work.
I want my work to provoke an image to the viewer, to suggest something that is just on the other side of consciousness. I don’t want my pots to conjure up a singular recollection, but ones that change with each glance, with each change of light. I use surfaces that purposely encourage touch, and by inviting the hand to explore the forms as well as the eye, I hope to provoke numerous memories, recollections that have the potential to change from moment to moment.
Zemer Peled
Flowered Lion #2
Porcelain
10”x 11” x 8"
Zemer Peled
I Wanna Dance #2
Porcelain
11”x 8” x 8"
Zemer Peled’s work examines the beauty and brutality of the natural world. Her sculptural language is formed by her surrounding landscapes and nature, engaging with themes of memory, identity, and place. Her works are formed from thousands of porcelain shards constructed into large-scale/small-scale sculptures and installations.
Peled was born and raised in Israel. She earned her MA at the Royal College of Art (UK). In recent years, her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including Sotheby's, Saatchi Gallery (London), and the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City). She has been featured in Vogue, O Magazine, Elle, and other international publications.
Her work is found in many private collections around the world and museum collections, such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Fuller Craft Museum; Crocker Art Museum; and the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation.
Dana Sherwood
Winged Medusa
Glazed Stoneware With Gold Lustre
9”x 8” x 6"
Dana Sherwood
Proserpina And The Sphinx
Glazed Stoneware With Gold Lustre
9.5”x 5.75” x 6"
Dana Sherwood is an American artist whose diverse practice explores the relationship between humans and the natural world in order to understand culture and behavior in a changing environment. Employing video, painting and sculpture in her work, nature, often in the form of non-human animals, plays a complex role as both subject and collaborator, asserting its presence and subverting the artists’ perceived control. Sherwood relies upon her own style of magical-realism to portray contact between human and non-human animals as a tool to expand our concept of communication and knowledge, and more importantly to recognize the interconnectedness of our ecosystem. What we can learn from plants and animals when we shift our perception to be more inclusive and open to other intelligences. Her paintings, videos, and sculptures depict ritualized feedings created for animals who live on the frontiers of human civilization such as raccoons, possums, and foxes as well as for our close companion species like horses and dogs. The animals assert their presence and desires as the work reflects on the Anthropocene, and our place in the natural world. Set in a magical, wonderland-esque universe, the work weaves together visually beautiful and occasionally humorous imagery while conveying important messages related to ecology, mythology and eco-feminism. Sherwood's projects investigate alternate ways of communicating with the more than human world around us, with the goal of re-connecting with and learning from the intelligence of the earth. Her paintings, videos and sculptures, are informed by intuitive, magical and ancestral practices in order to create conversation and connection with the wider, more than human world. Since graduating from the University of Maine in 2004 Sherwood has exhibited throughout The Americas, Europe and Australia including solo exhibitions at Nagle-Draxler Reiseburogalerie (Cologne), Denny Gallery (New York) and Kepler Art-Conseil (Paris). Her work has also been shown at Storm King (New York), James Cohan Gallery, The Jack Shainman School, The Fellbach Sculpture Triennial (Germany), Pink Summer Gallery (Italy), Kunsthal Aarhus, The Palais des Beaux Arts Paris, Marian Boesky Gallery, Socrates Sculpture Park, Flux Factory, The Biennial of Western New York, Prospect 2: New Orleans, Scotia Bank Nuit Blanche (Toronto), dOCUMENTA 13, and many other venues worldwide. Her solo exhibition, "Dana Sherwood: Animal Appetites and Other Encounters in Wildness" opened at the Florence Griswold Museum in 2022 with accompanying monograph. She is currently working on a new body of work to be presented in 2025 at The Fondazione Morra Greco in Naples, Italy and an upcoming solo exhibition at Geary Contemporary in NY. "My work consists of two practices: the fieldwork where I am waiting, watching, filming and responding to the animals, and the studio where I edit the videos and make paintings and sculptures. I have found that over the years making this work that as much as I have learned about the animals I am watching, these reflections on nature have also affected the way that I approach art making and life in general.
Nancy Train-Smith
Moontide #1, 2019
Stoneware
36" x 36" x 4"
Nancy Train-Smith
Bait Ball, 2017
Porcelain
15" x 19" x 11"
I began working in ceramics in 1980 at Clay Dragon in East Cambridge, Massachusetts. After a short time there, Anne Smith and I moved to our own studio in Somerville, MA, and continued to work there for the following eight years. During that time I was working figuratively, specifically on a long series of self-portrait busts inspired by French 19th century sculpture. Eventually, the self-portraits gave way to an exploration of the character of Eve as a kind of everywoman, and the work changed scale to a “figurine” approach. At the time there was an infatuation with teapots in the ceramic world, and I responded with tongue in cheek in a series of eccentric woman teapots. This extended body of ceramic work came to an end when I moved to South Dartmouth, MA.
Perhaps a decade or more ago, I fell in love with Chinese Scholar Objects. The scholar objects depend on a “found” object that appears to distill the form taken by the movement of energy in nature. Though I loved them, I felt at the time that it would be impossible for me to come up with an authentic way for me to approach that material in my own work. Still, the desire was there, and eventually I began to find a way into it. My current ceramic work represents an on-going exploration of that passion.
The porcelain fish are an off-shoot of “Migration”, bringing that body of work back to the discrete gallery object.
Don Reitz
Geode, Oval With Red, 2008
Wood-Fired Stoneware, Color With Salt
3.5”x 16” x 14"
Don Reitz
Ring Toss, 2011
Wood-Fired Stoneware With Salt
13”x 12” x 11"
Don Reitz (1929 – 2014) was one of the most virtuosic throwers the field has ever seen, the foremost leader of the workshop circuit, a charismatic educator and man of exceptional warmth, kindness and generosity. In 1981 he was named one of the top twelve world’s greatest living potters by Ceramics Monthly readers. Reitz earned his MFA at Alfred University in 1962, where he began experimenting with salt-glazing, a technique largely neglected by the post-World War II ceramic studio movement. Readily embracing this firing technique, Reitz quickly realized that it allowed the clay to keep its natural character, and its malleability did not obscure the creator’s hand. In a decade’s time, he was dubbed “Mr. Salt” by his peers. He spent many years as an educator as well as a potter; he taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for more than 25 years before retiring as a professor emeritus in 1988. His extensive body of work is represented in over 50 distinguished public and private collections. Don Reitz lived and worked in Clarkdale, Arizona. He claimed that he would have been a poet but for dyslexia and his inability to process language. This redirected him toward visual art where he found his voice in clay. Reitz’s art is his legacy, and through constant reinvention and originality, he extended the definition and potential of the ceramic arts.
Rigoberto Torres
Jack and Jill, 1984
Ceramic and Plaster
43”x 93” x 1.5"
Deborah Coolidge
Navigators Dilemma, 1990
Clay, wood, paint
22.5”x 3.5” x 6.5"
Rigoberto Torres (born 1960) is a sculptor who was born in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico and worked in New York City, before moving to Florida where he currently lives and works.[1] Torres began working in a factory where religious figures were cast,[2] producing religious statuary.[3] He also considers himself to be a community based artist.[4] Torres is known in part for the sculptures in plaster and fiberglass that he created of his neighbors in the Bronx, together with his partner John Ahearn. Between the years 1981 and 1985, they collaborated on four murals. These were We Are Family, Life on Dawson Street, Double Dutch, and Back to School.[5] The mural Double Dutch (1981/2010), for example, was acquired by the Pérez Art Museum Miami, city in which Torres lives.[6] The sculptures, like much of Torres' work, were displayed in public attached to buildings, free standing and in street events as an element of performance art.[1] On many occasions, Torres would prompt Ahearn to move their studio to the sidewalk along Walton Avenue so that neighborhood children could watch and also volunteer as subjects.[7][8] Torres' sculptures show an instinctive drive to create tableaux[9] from single figures and are included in the field of humanistic naturalism because they accurately portray people.[1] He met frequent collaborator Ahearn in 1980, when Torres was working in a factory casting religious statues. They worked together on the Bronx sculptures, sometimes known as the South Bronx Hall of Fame, creating monuments to ordinary people as a response to the practice of enshrining famous, heroic figures in public places.
As a child I often thought there was an upside down world that mirrored mine or that the sky was a lid to a huge box that the world existed in. Discovering the existence of world mythology had me hooked into a way of thinking that my queries could be expressed. These stories often reinforced an idea I was working with and broadened my understanding or gave context to my visual imagery. Choice of materials were important. Clay had plasticity, ease in forming (and destroying) and at times was a surface for images, textures and colors. Paper became a great alternative to work more intensely with color and texture. The results are intriguing to me.!!
I grew up in the home that my great grandfather designed and built in Concord Massachusetts. An unorthodox Victorian home with oval rooms, curved windows, hidden spaces, full of family relics; a place that sparked magical thinking. In the front yard lived a beautiful copper beech and silver maple whose carved bark displayed ancestral names. My mother’s extended family is from Westport, Massachusetts. We spent our summers in a home that floated to its current destination in the 1938 hurricane on my grandparent’s property. Family mythology was and is abundant. Always aware of early and present time and whose footsteps we might be tracing. I graduated from UMass Amherst with a BFA in ceramics, followed by an MFA at Rhode Island School of Design. My art work began as three -dimensional clay work, painted with brilliant color and patterns. Evolution moved me to two-dimensional work on paper and an examination and interpretation of trees. Forest tramping in search of an extraordinary tree is my True North. My work has been shown in many one and two person exhibitions throughout the United States. I have taught workshops in Bratislava, Slovakia, been awarded several faculty development grants, received Massachusetts council grants, and lectured on the history of boats and biomimicry. I’ve been teaching “Spatial Dynamics” in RISD’s foundation program since graduating. My assignments have ranged from wood sled making and large functional cardboard boats, to building wood egg tools that pick up, crack and beat eggs. My husband and I built a home in Dartmouth that houses two studios. Our artwork is intermingled with our sprawling garden, maze meadows and the beginnings of a small arboretum. Each new tree becomes an inspiration for my next artwork. The variations are endless.
Betty Woodman
Marsden Hartley, 1996
Ceramic
21”x 28” x 8.75"
Peter Voulkos
Lidded Jar, Early 1950's
Stoneware
16”x 12.5” x 12.5"
Betty Woodman (1930–2018) was a pioneering American ceramic artist whose innovative approach to clay redefined the boundaries between craft, sculpture, and painting. Over her nearly seventy-year career, Woodman transformed the vase from a functional object into a dynamic sculptural form, integrating influences from global artistic traditions, architecture, and theatricality. Born in Norwalk, Connecticut, and raised in Newton, Massachusetts, Woodman studied ceramics at The School for American Craftsmen in Alfred, New York, from 1948 to 1950. In 1951, she embarked on a solo journey to Italy, where an unplanned apprenticeship in Fiesole profoundly shaped her artistic vision. She continued to travel extensively throughout her life, drawing inspiration from Korean folk painting, ancient Greek and Roman pottery, Matisse, Bonnard, and Renaissance frescoes. During the 1950s and early 1960s, Woodman worked as a functional potter, creating beautiful objects for everyday use. However, the vase soon became both her subject and muse, leading to an exploration of deconstruction and reassembly that resulted in exuberant, colorful ceramic sculptures. Her signature works blur the boundaries between two and three dimensions, often combining ceramic elements with painting, wood, and other materials to create theatrical, immersive environments. Woodman taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder, from 1978 to 1998, eventually becoming Professor Emeritus. In the 1980s, after moving to a loft in New York City, she shifted away from functional pottery to focus on sculptural work, exhibiting in contemporary galleries in New York and Los Angeles. Her career flourished with numerous accolades, including National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1980, 1986) and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship (1995). A landmark moment came in 2006 when Woodman became the first living woman artist to receive a solo exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Her work has been featured in major institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. She also completed significant public commissions, such as the U.S. Embassy in Beijing (2008) and the U.S. Courthouse in Jefferson City, Missouri (2012). Until her passing in 2018, Woodman lived and worked between New York and Antella, Italy, continually exploring new possibilities in ceramic art and leaving an indelible mark on contemporary sculpture.
After serving in the U.S. Army Air Force from 1943 to 1946, he entered Montana State College, earning a B.S. degree in 1951 and, the following year, an M.F.A. degree at California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. Returning to Montana in 1952, he established a pottery workshop in Helena. In 1953 while teaching a three-week summer course at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Voulkos met innovative figures in the arts such as Josef Albers, Robert Rauschenberg, and John Cage, which significantly influenced the direction of his work. In 1954 Voulkos became chairman of the new ceramics department at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. His pottery shop soon became the mecca for artists in the area, launching the Los Angeles clay movement, with Voulkos as its leader. Despite the accolades for his work, Voulkos began to feel constrained by the traditional forms of pottery. His Black Mountain connections led to his meeting Franz Kline and other abstract expressionist artists in New York. Absorbing their ideas, he sought to use clay as an expressive, sculptural medium and began to execute many works on a monumental scale. In 1959 Voulkos became professor of design and sculpture at the University of California at Berkeley.