Special Topic Guide: The Art & Craft of Ceramics, with Spotlight on Women in Clay

It is often claimed that women were the first potters. While this may or may not be the case, the earliest pottery techniques are still used today in many parts of the world, largely by women. This beautifully illustrated book brings to light the often uncelebrated contributions women potters make to their cultures and describes the practical details of their craft. Moira Vincentelli proposes that a women's tradition in ceramics is one in which pottery making is a gendered activity intimately connected with female identity. Such work is easily taken for granted as mere everyday household equipment with no status as art. Vincentelli argues, however, that value is not intrinsic to an object, and a simple cooking pot or water jar can take on high importance if the significance for owners and users is considered--water out of a particular jar is said to taste sweeter, and a cooking pot is often buried with its owner, or broken when someone dies. Vincentelli guides the reader through these traditions continent by continent with beautiful, detailed maps and stunning color photographs from around the world. Central to her argument is the proposition that, far from disappearing, as is so often claimed, these traditions are adapting and accommodating to new conditions. Often potters are the bearers of cultural identity in an increasingly globalized world. This book will appeal not only to those interested in ceramics, but also to those with an interest in non-western traditions, women's studies, material culture, archaeology, and social anthropology.  

Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists explores the artistic achievements of Native women and establishes their rightful place in the art world. This landmark book includes works of art from antiquity to the present, made in a variety of media from textiles and beadwork to video and digital arts. It showcases artists from more than seventy-five Indigenous tribes to reveal the ingenuity and innovation that have always been foundational to the art of Native women. Women have long been the creative force behind Native art. Hearts of Our People accompanies the first major exhibition of artwork by Native women, presented in close cooperation with top Native women artists and scholars, honoring the achievements of over 115 artists from the United States and Canada spanning over 1,000 years. Their triumphs?from pottery, textiles, and painting, to photographic portraits, to a gleaming El Camino?show astonishing innovation and technical mastery. Beautifully illustrated and enriched by the personal reflections, historical research, and artistic insights of leading scholars and artists in the field, Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists pays tribute to the vital role and creative force of Native women artists, now and throughout time.

A global survey of 100 of today's most important clay and ceramic artists, chosen by leading art world professionals. Vitamin Ccelebrates the revival of clay as a material for contemporary visual artists, featuring a wide range of global talent as selected by the world's leading curators, critics, and art professionals. Clay and ceramics have in recent years been elevated from craft to high art material, with the resulting artworks being coveted by collectors and exhibited in museums around the world. Packed with illustrations, Vitamin C is a vibrant and incredibly timely survey - the first of its kind. Artists include: Caroline Achaintre, Ai Weiwei, Aaron Angell, Edmund de Waal, Theaster Gates, Marisa Merz, Ron Nagle, Gabriel Orozco, Grayson Perry, Sterling Ruby, Thomas Schütte, Richard Slee, Jesse Wine, and Betty Woodman. Nominators include: Pablo Leon de la Barra, Iwona Blazwick, Mary Ceruti, Dan Fox, Jens Hoffmann, Christine Macel, James Meyer, Jed Morse, Beatrix Ruf, Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Nancy Spector, Sheena Wagstaff, and Jonathan Watkins.

This volume focuses on the career of Eva Zeisel & her ceramic designs from the 1920s to the 1960s. Her long extensive career began in Europe & then to the United States where teaching & designing developed. Her leadership in the progression & development of the avant-garde style is covered in the book with seminal essays by well known ceramic specialists. Her individual approach to design reflect the changing face of American aesthetics as the reaction & influence by the Bauhaus movements & then the Scandinavians affected modern design. Her unique approach to design is uniquely illustrated with color photography & includes a special commentary by the designer on her work. A section also illustrates some of the markings on some of her ceramic ware & as well, a short bibliography. Eva Zeisel is well recognized for her designs in many museums in the US, Canada & Europe. This book is an informative resource for anyone interested in ceramics & the decorative arts. The scholarship in the book has become the standard reference book for collectors & scholars alike.

The official publication celebrating Judy Chicago's feminist art masterpiece, The Dinner Party installation at the Brooklyn Museum, and an introduction to outstanding women in history. Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party is a defining work of feminist and contemporary art that brought women's history to light on the national stage when it was completed in 1979. Published to coincide with Chicago's 75th birthday and a nationwide series of events and exhibitions, the book features newly commissioned photography and two new essays by Chicago, along with essays by art historian Frances Borzello and historian Jane Gerhard, and a foreword from museum director Arnold Lehman. The Dinner Party, a monumental triangular table, and the Heritage Floor on which the table rests, represents 1,038 women in history - 39 by unique large ceramic plates and runners with another 999 names inscribed on the floor's ceramic tiles. It has been seen by more than a million visitors during its international exhibition tour, and has been a principal destination at the Brooklyn Museum since its permanent housing in 2007. A perfect companion to a revolutionary artwork, the book is a must-have for both long-standing fans of Judy Chicago's oeuvre and young artists and women looking for reflections of themselves in the history of Western Civilization.

"The Victorian era provided few opportunities for women in the professional world. The American Arts and Crafts movement, which began in the late nineteenth century to promote handcraftsmanship over mass production, was a major factor in changing the status of women as professional workers. In Professional Pursuits, Catherine Zipf examines the participation of women in this significant design movement and the role they played in revolutionizing the position of women in the professional world. It also shows how, in turn, the Arts and Crafts movement set the stage for social and political change in future years." "Zipf focuses on five gifted women in various parts of the country. In San Diego, Hazel Wood Waterman parlayed her Arts and Crafts training into a career in architecture. Cincinnati's Mary Louise McLaughlin expanded on her interest in Arts and Crafts pottery by inventing new ceramic technology. New York's Candace Wheeler established four businesses that used Arts and Crafts production to help other women earn a living. In Syracuse, both Adelaide Alsop Robineau and Irene Sargent were responsible for disseminating Arts and Crafts-related information through the movement's publications. Each woman's story is different, but each played an important part in the creation of professional opportunities for women in a male-dominated society." "Professional Pursuits will be of interest to scholars and students of material culture and of the Arts and Crafts movement. More importantly it chronicles a very significant, little-understood aspect of the development of Victorian capitalism: the integration of women into the professional workforce."--BOOK JACKET.

This unprecedented survey of the most outstanding ceramics being created today offers a sweeping close-up look at the work of more than 260 artists from more than thirty countries. A special feature of this collection is the range of work from China, almost unknown outside of this country until now. Organized by the distinctive categories of functional ceramics, figurative pieces, and installation works, the book gives a complete picture of the latest developments in each area of contemporary ceramic art. Chapters on materials, firing techniques, ethnic influences in design, and related topics delve into every aspect of ceramics creation that would be of interest to crafters, collectors, and other readers who are drawn to contemporary art. Stimulating essays by the author tie together the wide range of work shown in superbly detailed color photographs. Artists included: John Mason, Jun Kaneko, Peter Voulkos, Ralph Bacerra, Rudy Autio, Ken Price, Peter Lane “The book is lavishly illustrated and delights the eyes with the exuberance and variety of ceramic art in the 20th century.”—Mills Quarterly, Spring 2001

For nearly a century British potters have invigorated traditional ceramic forms by developing or reinventing techniques, materials, and means of display. Things of Beauty Growing explores major typologies of the vessel--such as bowl, vase, and charger--that have defined studio ceramics since the early 20th century. It places British studio pottery within the context of objects from Europe, Japan, and Korea and presents essays by an international team of scholars and experts. The book highlights the objects themselves, including new works by Adam Buick, Halima Cassell, and Nao Matsunago, featured alongside works by William Staite Murray, Lucie Rie, Edmund de Waal, and others, many published here for the first time. Rounding out the beautifully illustrated volume is an interview with renowned collector John Driscoll and approximately fifty illustrated short biographies of significant makers.  

In 1899 at the age of fifty-six, Josephine Jefferson Foard moved from the East Coast to Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, where she built her own house and a kiln for firing pottery. Her intent was to show Pueblo potters how to strengthen their pottery by using better firing methods and by glazing it on the interior to make it waterproof. She also aimed to assist potters by marketing their products in the East, not just as decorative items but as functional additions to Anglo households. Through collecting and studying historic pueblo pottery and with access to Foard's correspondence with family and the Commissioners of Indian Affairs, the authors of this book provide a rare glimpse into the life of a remarkable woman who ventured to the Southwest as an artist, potter, and entrepreneur. Foard's letters, included in the appendices, describe at length her experience at Laguna Pueblo and offer insights into her life and work and also the lives of people of Laguna Pueblo and others in New Mexico.

Includes chapters on artists Betty Woodman, Viola Frey, and Beatrice Wood.

"A beautiful full-color history of Rookwood Pottery, a great female-founded and female-owned American art pottery company, telling women's history, art history, and part reportage of the developments over time, as well as an ""inside"" look into the company and its products today."

This volume initiates a gender-based framework for analyzing the folk art of Latin America and the Caribbean. Defined here broadly as the "art of the people" and as having a primarily decorative, rather than utilitarian, purpose, folk art is not solely the province of women, but folk art by women in Latin America has received little sustained attention. Crafting Gender begins to redress this gap in scholarship. From a feminist perspective, the contributors examine not only twentieth-century and contemporary art by women, but also its production, distribution, and consumption. Exploring the roles of women as artists and consumers in specific cultural contexts, they look at a range of artistic forms across Latin America, including Panamanian molas (blouses), Andean weavings, Mexican ceramics, and Mayan hipiles (dresses). Art historians, anthropologists, and sociologists from Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States discuss artwork from Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Suriname, and Puerto Rico, and many of their essays focus on indigenous artists. They highlight the complex webs of social relations from which folk art emerges. For instance, while several pieces describe the similar creative and technical processes of indigenous pottery-making communities of the Amazon and of mestiza potters in Mexico and Colombia, they also reveal the widely varying functions of the ceramics and meanings of the iconography. Integrating the social, historical, political, geographical, and economic factors that shape folk art in Latin America and the Caribbean, Crafting Gender sheds much-needed light on a rich body of art and the women who create it. Contributors Eli Bartra Ronald J. Duncan Dolores Juliano Betty LaDuke Lourdes Rejón Patrón Sally Price María de Jesús Rodríguez-Shadow Mari Lyn Salvador Norma Valle Dorothea Scott Whitten

Beautifully illustrated with colorful photographs, this volume traces the living heritage of locally made pottery in the English-speaking Caribbean. Patricia Fay combines her own expertise in making ceramics with two decades of interviews, visits, and participant-observation in the region, providing a perspective that is technically informed and anthropologically rigorous. Describing the pottery created in Saint Lucia, Nevis, Antigua, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad, and Guyana, Fay reveals that the traditional skills of local potters are inherited from diverse points of origin in Africa, Europe, India, and the Americas. She explores the challenges that lie ahead for this utilitarian art form as the tourist industry expands, showing how heritage ceramics exemplify the continuing Caribbean encounter between old and new, local and global, and traditional and contemporary.

"An impressive work. It is an exhaustive study of all aspects of pottery making. . . . Its discussion of the technical and economic aspects is noteworthy and thorough and] its treatment of the cultural and gender context is superb."--Miles Richardson, Louisiana State University Ronald Duncan explores the ways that male gender power combined with capitalism to bring about sweeping economic changes and the transformation of a centuries-old tradition of women's ceramics in the Andes. In the village of Raquira, Colombia, two pottery-making styles coexist: while devoting time to domestic tasks, women make traditional cooking pots and water jugs in the same style and with the same hand-working techniques they've used since before the time of Columbus; in contrast, men--working full-time in shops established in the last 50 years--mass-produce planters and other ware, using molds and potter's wheels in a style of primarily Spanish origin. Throughout the community, men control capital and have greater mobility in marketing their products; many women have become assistants to their husbands. Along with discussion of this contrast between cultures, the book raises the issue of whether indigenous pottery in Raquira--highly prized by collectors--will completely disappear in the next century. Filling a gap in village ethnography, this is the first major publication in English on the traditional ceramics of Colombia. It offers both a history of the craft, illustrated with 40 photographs, and a compelling discussion of how individuals, families, and communities respond to historical, economic, and personal change. Ronald J. Duncan is professor of anthropology at Oklahoma Baptist University. He is the coauthor of "The Art of Shamanism, Health and Life: Tumaco/La Toli"ta and has written extensively in Spanish on ethnicity and social change.

In February 2004, when her American husband, a recently ordained Zen monk, leaves home to train for a year at a centuries-old Buddhist monastery, Tracy Franz embarks on her own year of Zen. An Alaskan alone--and lonely--in Japan, she begins to pay attention. My Year of Dirt and Water is a record of that journey. Allowed only occasional and formal visits to see her cloistered husband, Tracy teaches English, studies Japanese, and devotes herself to making pottery. Her teacher instructs her to turn cup after cup--creating one failure after another. Past and present, East and West intertwine as Tracy is twice compelled to return home to Alaska to confront her mother's newly diagnosed cancer and the ghosts of a devastating childhood.  Revolving through the days, My Year of Dirt and Water circles hard questions: What is love? What is art? What is practice? What do we do with the burden of suffering? The answers are formed and then unformed--a ceramic bowl born on the wheel and then returned again and again to dirt and water.