When the Dutch East India Company brought Chinese treasures to Western shores in the 17th century, makers like Meissen in Germany and Sèvres in France rose up to serve the European market.
While ceramics have remained a cornerstone in the sector more commonly deemed craft, artists in the fine-art realm have paid increasing attention to it, starting in the mid-20th century. Hugely influential was Greek-American artist Peter Voulkos (1924-2002), who established ceramics departments at both the Los Angeles County Art Institute (now the Otis College of Art and Design) and the University of California at Berkeley. He taught major figures from the next generation, including Ken Price (1935-2012), a retrospective of whose work toured major American museums starting in 2013, and Ron Nagle (b. 1939), who earned a berth in the 2013 Venice Biennale. Also beloved from their generation is Betty Woodman (1930-2018); she was the subject of the first show for a living woman artist at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, in 2006.
International museums have also recently mounted major group shows devoted to the medium. London’s Hayward Gallery organized the 2022-23 exhibition “Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art,” which included Price and Woodman along with a new generation, such as Woody De Othello and Brie Ruais. “Funk You Too! Humor and Irreverence in Ceramic Sculpture” at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design (2023) united artists from the West Coast 1960s Funk generation with artists carrying on their subversive spirit, including Viola Frey from the former and, from the latter, Genesis Belanger and Ruby Neri. And from 2021-2023, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), in North Adams, showed “Ceramics in the Expanded Field,” featuring artists such as Francesca DiMattio, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, and Kahlil Robert Irving.
“The major turn toward ceramics in the past two decades is in great part due to a change in reception—by curators, museums, art historians, and art audiences,” said Susan Cross, curator of the MASS MoCA show, in an email. “Although artists have worked in clay for hundreds of years—for millennia actually—in the modern era (in the West), ceramics have been traditionally siloed as craft and undervalued. Ingrid Schaffer and Jenelle Porter’s 2009 exhibition ‘Dirt on Delight’ at the ICA, Philadelphia marked a shift. Featuring ceramic works by several generations of artists in a contemporary museum was called groundbreaking by [New York Times critic] Roberta Smith.
“Far from being siloed, clay is now integrated into practices that include video, painting, printmaking, etc.” she added. “Yet as the world is becoming more and more abstract, more digital, I also think the immediacy, the tactility of clay seems particularly appealing. It is simultaneously strong and fragile, contemporary and primordial, familiar and also so much about transformation.”
Some of the most interesting artists of our day are working in ceramics, expressing ideas about craft, high vs. low art, identity, and art history through this form. Here’s a far-from-comprehensive, alphabetically arranged roundup of some of the most acclaimed practitioners of the medium today, all born since 1970 and earning attention for their work in the press, in galleries, and at major museum exhibitions around the globe.
Woody De Othello
Born in Miami in 1991, Woody De Othello aims to interrogate the genre of still life, creating, as his dealer Jessica Silverman’s website puts it, “animistic vessels based on domestic objects.” He engages with the meaning of the ceramic medium through the study of sacred objects like Central African nkisi and its cosmological significance to people like the Dagara of sub-Saharan Africa. As Katie White wrote in Artnet Newsin 2024, “Othello’s connection to the earth, and to clay, is at the root of the power of his artworks. He sees the medium as a site of communion with history and ancestry, in which he can connect to nature and heal the wounds of the past.”
Since earning a BFA from Florida Atlantic University and an MFA from the California College of Arts in the Bay Area, he has risen to international renown, appearing in group shows at venues such as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and in major shows like the Whitney Biennial in New York and the Ljubljana Biennial, Slovenia; his works are in collections from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to the MAXXI National Museum of 21st Century Art in Rome.
Francesca DiMattio
“Francesca DiMattio’s work enthusiastically embraces pattern and decoration, exploring their relationship to notions of ‘the feminine,’” writes Susan Cross, senior curator at MASS MoCA, in a guideaccompanying “Ceramics in the Expanded Field.” DiMattio isn’t afraid to go big: for that show, she created a 25-foot-long ceramic mural, Mosaic (2021) that drew on the history of tile, calling on precursors from Rome, Spain, Turkey, the Netherlands, and more. The works in that show incorporated references to Meissen porcelain as well as contributions from her children.
Since earning a BFA from the Cooper Union and an MFA from Columbia University, both in New York, she’s had solo exhibitions at venues including Art Omi, Ghent, New York; Salon 94 Bowery, New York; the Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, Texas; and the Zabludowicz Collection, London. Her work resides in collections including the Pérez Art Museum Miami; the Frances Young Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York; the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York; and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts.
Read the full article online on Artnet.
