American Ceramics, 1876 to the Present

American Ceramics, 1876 to the Present

Author: Garth Clark

Publisher:

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"In American Ceramics: 1876 to the present, the noted ceramics authority Garth Clark gives us the most richly illustrated, up-to-the minute, and comprehensive publication on the history and triumph of our most tactile art. With a text that elegantly marries cultural history to critical analysis, Clark reveals, decade by decade, how American ceramics emerged from an incipient art-pottery movement in the late nineteenth century to its position of international preeminence in the last thirty-five years. Clark's cogent narrative and aesthetic insights are illuminated by more than one hundred color and 140 black-and-white reproductions, which enable us to see afresh the full range of imagery and forms--pottery, sculpture, events, and environments--that American artists have created with clay during the past one hundred eleven years. We are informed of the divers achievements of more than two hundred artists, from the pioneering potters Mary Louise McLaughlin, Maria Longworth Nichols, and, later, Adelaide Alsop Robineau, and the maverick George Ohr to such contemporary figures as Peter Voulkos, Robert Arneson, Kenneth Price, Jim Melchert, Betty Woodman, Viola Frey, Beatrice Wood, and Adrian Saxe. This encyclopedic work concludes with an extensive chronology of ceramic milestone, a list of significant exhibitions, and more than 170 biographical essays illustrated with photographs of the artists. The bibliography is the most comprehensive ever compiled on American ceramics and includes 1,200 entries indexed by both subject and artist." -- Publisher's description


Live Form

Live Form

Author: Jenni Sorkin

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-07-26

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 022630325X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Ceramics had a far-reaching impact in the second half of the twentieth century, as its artists worked through the same ideas regarding abstraction and form as those for other creative mediums. Live Form shines new light on the relation of ceramics to the artistic avant-garde by looking at the central role of women in the field: potters who popularized ceramics as they worked with or taught male counterparts like John Cage, Peter Voulkos, and Ken Price. Sorkin focuses on three Americans who promoted ceramics as an advanced artistic medium: Marguerite Wildenhain, a Bauhaus-trained potter and writer; Mary Caroline (M. C.) Richards, who renounced formalism at Black Mountain College to pursue new performative methods; and Susan Peterson, best known for her live throwing demonstrations on public television. Together, these women pioneered a hands-on teaching style and led educational and therapeutic activities for war veterans, students, the elderly, and many others. Far from being an isolated field, ceramics offered a sense of community and social engagement, which, Sorkin argues, crucially set the stage for later participatory forms of art and feminist collectivism.