This exhibition explores artistic responses to the Anthropocene—the era in which human activity has reshaped the planet—and imagines what might follow it. Through painting, sculpture, installation, and time-based media, artists confront climate change, mass extinction, and the lingering shadow of the post-atomic age, while probing the accelerating entanglement of technology and time. Some works trace the fragile thresholds between collapse and adaptation; others speculate on post-human futures, ecological resilience, and planetary memory. Together, these visions ask how we narrate an ending that is also a beginning, inviting viewers to consider their place within deep time and the uncertain worlds still unfolding.
Moderne Gallery presents Subconscious Surfaced, a group exhibition featuring works from the 1960s through the early 2000s. The exhibition explores a shared thread of surreal, otherworldly sculptural form across a range of expressions, techniques, and contexts.
A number of works in the exhibition derive from the esteemed collection of Marc and Diane Grainer, renowned patrons, collectors, and champions of the arts, who assembled a singular collection over the course of more than forty-five years. Moderne Gallery is proud to present these works and to serve as stewards as they find their way into new collections.
On view are works featuring figures, narratives, and compositions drawn from deep within the subconscious, emerging from a realm beyond the threshold of immediate awareness.
Through incongruous forms and psychologically charged imagery, the artists give material presence to subconscious visions, bringing into view what ordinarily remains beyond immediate perception. Situated between the imagined and the tangible, these works offer insight into psychological dimensions that exceed the limits of ordinary experience.
FEATURED WORKS BY SERGEI ISUPOV
“The exhibition at Moderne Gallery includes works by Sergei Isupov from 1995 – 2002 from his studios in Louisville, Kentucky and Richmond, Virginia acquired by the Grainers from visits to his studio, exhibitions at numerous galleries and the fairs he participated in.”
–Leslie Ferrin, Founder & Director, Ferrin Contemporary and Project Art
“Over the course of 45 years, Marc and Diane Grainer collected functional and sculptural ceramics and juxtaposed them with studio furniture and textiles and household items that invariably bore the imprint of their maker. Although they are perhaps best known for their encyclopedic collection of British studio pottery, the Grainers consistently chose work by artists who draw from the Surrealist well like SergeiIsupov, Michael Lucero, Nancy Carman, and Sun Koo Yuh. Each of these artists mixes and matches strategies like chance operations, including automatism, dream logic, juxtaposing seemingly unrelated elements, and metamorphizing their subjects.”
–Garth Johnson, Curator of Ceramics, Everson Museum of Art
Sergei Isupov
“To Go All Out”
2000
porcelain, glaze, stain
14 x 11.5 x 17.5″
Sergei Isupov
“Genetic Bar Code”
1997
porcelain, glaze, stain
11 x 4 x 7.5″
Sergei Isupov
“Walking Through Memory”
1996
porcelain, glaze, stain
11 x 4 x 10″
Sergei Isupov
“Private Time”
1999
porcelain, glaze, stain
9 x 1.75 x 6.5″
Sergei Isupov
“Swimmer Teapot”
1996
porcelain, glaze, stain
13 x 11 x 10″
Sergei Isupov
“Indian Hotelier”
1996
porcelain, glaze, stain
10 x 5.5 x 6″
Sergei Isupov
“Obsession”
2002
porcelain, glaze, stain
13.5 x 8 x 6″
Sergei Isupov
“Limits”
1999
porcelain, glaze, stain
15 x 6 x 6″
The Marc & Diane Grainer Collection, Christian Giannelli Photography
EXHIBITION CATALOG
Subconscious Surfaced is accompanied by a catalog featuring installation and artwork images.
Published by Moderne Gallery, May 2026 Catalog Essays by Garth Johnson and Leslie Ferrin Catalog Design by Isabel Twanmo
Sergei Isupov exhibits and offers current and recent work at the galleries, studios, and showrooms of Project Art and Ferrin Contemporary to view and purchase. Multiple Public Artworks are on view permanently at Project Art and along Main Street in Cummington, MA.
Sergei’s most recent Public Art installation, Mama Cat (pictured), was just installed in a “Portal Gallery” in front of Project Art. The Portal Gallery was designed and built by Sergei with support from The Mass Cultural Council and is the latest public art in the Cummington Cultural District. Materials include repurposed components donated by artists Tom Patti, Joe Wheaton, and Cristina Córdova.
The sculpture is located at 54 Main Street, Cummington, MA 01026 and visible to the public.
b. 1930, Norwalk, CT
d. 2018, Manhattan, New York, NY
Betty Woodman (b. 1930, d. 2018) is recognized as one of the most important voices in postwar American art, having synthesized sculpture, painting, and ceramics in a highly original and immediately recognizable formal vocabulary. Her embodied readings of a diversity of ancient and modern art historical traditions, as well as her fearless pursuits of visual pleasure, posited her as a boldly contemporary figure whose work proves revelatory in discussions about gender, modernism, craft, architecture, and domesticity. She began as a precocious studio potter in the 1950s; over the subsequent decades, she created a radical new vision of how ceramics could function in a contemporary art context. Beginning in the early 2000s, she took on the legacies of Modernist masters like Matisse and Picasso in increasingly direct fashion, incorporating canvas in multimedia works and rendering interior scenes with the breadth and drama of epic history painting.
Woodman was born in Norwalk, Connecticut, raised in Newton, Massachusetts, and studied ceramics at the School for American Craftsmen in Alfred, New York from 1948–1950. Woodman was the subject of numerous solo exhibitions worldwide during her lifetime, including a 2006 retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York—the first time the museum dedicated a survey to a living female artist. Other solo exhibitions have been presented at K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong (2018); Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, England (2016); Museo Marino Marini, Florence, Italy (2015); Gardiner Museum, Toronto, Canada (2011); American Academy in Rome, Italy (2010); Palazzo Pitti, Giardino di Boboli, Florence, Italy (2009); Denver Art Museum, CO (2006); and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands (1996). Recent group exhibitions include Sevres Extraordinaire! Sculpture from 1740–Today, Bard Graduate Center, New York (2024); Tender Loving Care: Contemporary Art from the Collection, Museum of Fine Arts Boston (2023); The Flames: The Art of Ceramics, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (2021); Less Is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2019); and Liverpool Biennial, England (2016). Woodman’s work is in numerous permanent collections worldwide, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museu Nacional do Azulejo, Lisbon, Portugal; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and World Ceramic Center, Incheon, Korea. Woodman lived and worked in Boulder, Colorado; Antella, Italy; and New York.
b. 1939, San Francisco, CA
lives and works in San Francisco, CA
Ron Nagle is known for his intimately scaled sculptures made of ceramic elements that are slip-cast, fired, and embellished with epoxy and other synthetic materials that allow him to expand his forms beyond the limits of clay. Some are glazed to a hot-rod finish, others textured like stucco and then airbrushed. Despite the work’s three-dimensionality, Nagle explains, “everything is done, even subconsciously, from a flat point of view.”Nagle began working with ceramics during the 1950s as a high school student. In 1961 he apprenticed to the pioneering ceramic artist Peter Voulkos at the University of California, Berkeley, and later exhibited his work alongside Voulkos, Ken Price, and other innovative West Coast artists working in clay. His work is inspired by such artists as Giorgio Morandi, Phillip Guston, and George Herriman, and by such varied forms as Japanese Momoyama ceramics and Hawaiian funerary monuments. This merging of incongruous elements also extends to his titles, which are loaded with puns and wordplay: Centaur of Attention (2014), for example, or Beirut Canal (2009). “I’m trying to create a hybrid,” he explains. “You can’t quite put your finger on it.”
Ron Nagle (b. 1939) was born in San Francisco, where he currently lives and works. His first one-person exhibition took place in 1968, and since then he has had exhibitions at numerous museums, including the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Secession in Vienna, the Fridericianum in Kassel, and the Berkeley Art Museum. In 2013 his work was included in the exhibition “The Encyclopedic Palace” at the 55th Venice Biennale. Nagle is also a musician, and a deluxe edition of his acclaimed 1970 album Bad Rice was released on Omnivore Recordings in 2015.
b. 1956, Aberdeen, Scotland, UK
lives and works in London, England, UK
Jennifer Lee was born in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, in 1956.
From 1975 to 1979 she studied ceramics and tapestry at Edinburgh College of Art. She then spent eight months on a travelling scholarship to the USA where she researched South-West Indian prehistoric ceramics and visited contemporary West Coast potters.
From 1980 to 1983 she continued her work in ceramics at the Royal College of Art in London. Since then her travels have included trips to Egypt, India, Australia and Japan as well as Europe and the USA.
Lee’s pots are hand built and she has developed a method of colouring them by mixing metallic oxides into the clay before making.
Her work is represented in major public collections worldwide, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Philadelphia Museum of Art and Los Angeles County Museum. In 2018 the Victoria & Albert Museum purchased a fourth ceramic work and a drawing for their collections.
In 2009 she was invited by Issey Miyake to exhibit at his foundation 21_21 Design Sight for the exhibition ‘U-Tsu-Wa‘. The installation was designed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando – her pots appeared to float on a vast pool of water behind which cascaded a thirty metre waterfall.
She returned to Japan in autumn 2013 to take part in the International Ceramic Art Festival in Sasama, Shizuoka. In 2014, 2015 and 2018 Lee was guest artist in residence at Shigaraki Ceramic Culture Park and in 2019 she was guest artist in residence at Mashiko Museum of Ceramic Art.
In 2018 Lee won the LOEWE Craft Prize, an award initiated by Jonathan Anderson. Helen Mirren presented the prize at an awards ceremony at The Design Museum in London.
Jennifer Lee has had retrospective exhibitions of her work at the Röhsska Musset in Göteborg, Sweden in 1993, and the Aberdeen Museum and Art Gallery, Scotland in 1994. In 2019 Lee had a major exhibition of ceramics and drawings at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, Jennifer Lee: the potter’s space, curated by Sarah Griffin, exhibition design by Jamie Fobert.
In 2021 she was awarded an Order of the British Empire (OBE) for service to ceramics.
Jennifer Lee lives and works in London and exhibits worldwide.
Group Exhibition Curated by Armando Perla & Michael Patten
The Indigenous Contemporary Art Biennial ( BACA ), 8th edition
Launched in 2012, the Indigenous Contemporary Art Biennial ( BACA ) is a Montreal-based non-profit organization (registered in 2016) that promotes the work of Indigenous artists. The biennial takes place every two years in various locations, with each iteration focusing on a specific theme. The event caters to an increasingly broad audience—Indigenous and non-Indigenous—and showcases both emerging and established artists. Their mission is to promote Indigenous art and raise awareness and educate the public about First Nations cultural issues.
The Indigenous Contemporary Art Biennial ( BACA ) wishes to thank the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Quebec (Quebec Arts and Letters Council), the Montreal Arts Council, Tourisme Montréal, Desjardins Collection.
FEATURED ARTISTS
Tessa Alexander
Arawhetū Berdinner Jacqueline Bishop
Josue Castro
Silvia Caxi
Filiberto Chali
Venuca Evanan
Carlos Lara
Luisfer Morales
Ehikoo Odeh
Jakob Olive
Paula Rivera
TRAMA Textiles
Matt Tini
ARIA XYX
Situated above an active public market, this exhibition approaches the market as a living Indigenous archive shaped through trade, movement, and women’s knowledge systems. Across Mesoamerica and beyond, markets have long functioned as spaces where Indigenous women sustained economies, preserved ceremonial materials, transmitted artistic and medicinal knowledge, and maintained cultural continuity despite colonial disruption.
Rather than treating exchange as separate from culture, the works presented here understand circulation itself as a form of memory. Textiles, foodways, fibres, adornment, plants, and handmade objects move through relationships of barter, care, and reciprocity that continue to structure Indigenous life across territories. Throughout the exhibition, adornment appears as a living market practice, circulating through powwows, Indigenous trade networks, street markets, and intergenerational systems of making that connect aesthetics, ceremony, and exchange. In this context, the market operates simultaneously as school, social infrastructure, ceremonial site, and public space of Indigenous presence.
The exhibition also challenges museum models rooted in accumulation and permanence. Value emerges through movement, reuse, encounter, and redistribution. Through sculpture, textile, installation, adornment, and performance, the artists foreground economies grounded in relationality and survival, where objects remain alive through exchange and where women’s labour continues to sustain collective memory across generations.
The Market Woman
Centered around artist and scholar Jacqueline Bishop’s Fauna (2024) tea service and related textile, painting, and poetic works, this installation examines the market woman as a keeper of botanical knowledge, reproductive autonomy, and cultural continuity within the violent economies of colonialization, the transatlantic slave trade and plantation economies. Works such as The Keeper of All the Secrets (2023), printed on Sea Island cotton, foreground the exchanges of plant knowledge between Indigenous women of Abya Yala and forcibly displaced African women, tracing how these forms of knowledge became crucial to survival, healing, and reproductive care within the Caribbean. Bishop follows how these systems of medicinal practice and communal support moved through markets, shaping Caribbean women’s worlds across generations. Within these histories, Black women used plants, herbs, and market exchange networks to regulate fertility, terminate pregnancies resulting from sexual violence, and sustain forms of care excluded from colonial archives.
Installed on a textile by Trama Textiles, a cooperative of Maya women weavers formed during the Guatemalan genocide, the tea service situates women’s knowledge within broader Indigenous and diasporic systems of survival carried through markets, fabric, foodways, and oral transmission. Bishop’s paintings, garments, and poem Island Women extend this reflection, foregrounding women whose knowledge circulated through gesture, memory, and trade despite displacement and rupture.
Surrounding the installation, works by Black women artists including Ehiko Odeh and Tessa Alexander further engage plant knowledge, market economies, and the layered relationships between Blackness and Indigeneity across the Caribbean and the broader African diaspora. Together, the works ask what it means to remain Indigenous after forced displacement, enslavement, and rupture from ancestral territories, foregrounding the market as a space where memory, land-based knowledge, and cultural continuity continue to be carried through women’s labour and exchange.
ABOUT JACQUELINE BISHOP
Jacqueline Bishop is an accomplished writer, academic, and visual artist with exhibitions in Belgium, Morocco, Italy, Cape Verde, Niger, USA, and Jamaica. In addition to her role as Clinical Full Professor at New York University, Jacqueline Bishop was a 2020 Dora Maar/Brown Foundation Fellow in France; 2008-2009 Fulbright Fellow in Morocco; and 2009-2010 UNESCO/Fulbright Fellow in Paris. Bishop has received several awards, including the OCM Bocas Award for her book “The Gymnast & Other Position”, The Canute A. Brodhurst Prize for short story writing, The Arthur Schomburg Award for Excellence in the Humanities from New York University, A James Michener Creative Writing Fellowship, as well as several awards from the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission. Jacqueline’s recent ceramic work consists of brightly colored bone China plates used symbolically in Caribbean homes and explores how they hid the violent legacy of slavery and colonialism in the Atlantic world.
Berry Campbell is pleased to present a focused exhibition of porcelain sculptures by Sally Silberberg, an extraordinary and largely unseen body of work that marks a pivotal moment in the artist’s practice. The exhibition is curated by Glenn Adamson, an independent curator, writer, and historian, and previously Director of the Museum of Arts and Design and Head of Research at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The exhibition is accompanied by a 72-page catalogue.
Created during the 1980s, a concentrated period of experimentation for Silberberg, these sculptures are a decisive shift away from functional ceramics and toward a radical new sculptural language. After years of working on the potter’s wheel, Silberberg developed a new method built from solid blocks of porcelain. Layered with pigment, cut, torn, and carved, each work introduces both risk and unpredictability and pushes porcelain to its structural and perceptual limits.
These works challenge perception, and Silberberg asks whether porcelain, “an elegant material hovering between rough clay and glass” as the artist put it, could instead be experienced as dense and geological. The resulting sculptures are angular, striated, and weighty, their layered surfaces and sharp angles evoking fractured stone or exposed strata. Both controlled and unstable, the sculptures balance precision with disruption, and give the impression of forms under pressure caught in a state of continual transformation.
While firmly rooted in ceramic tradition, these works also engage with broader currents in postwar and 1980s art. Disorienting spatial collisions reference Cubism, exposed stratigraphy can be read in relation to the work of Naum Gabo, and the works’ activated grids and stripes relate to patterns of 1980s design and architecture. The exhibition’s curator, Glenn Adamson, calls her more of “a deconstructivist than a constructivist” and relates her orchestration of chance and control to that of Gerhard Richter.
Works from this series are in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum and the Smithsonian. Silberberg’s porcelain sculptures constitute a distinct and powerful body of work that expands the possibilities of porcelain and marks a pivotal moment in sculptural achievement.
ABOUT SALLY SILBERBERG
American, b. 1945, Syracuse, NY
lives and works in Plainfield, MA
Sally Silberberg began her professional career in 1969 as a traditional production stoneware potter producing utilitarian forms. Through the following decade, she began working translucent porcelain, her glazes became painterly abstractions, and her pots became vessels. In the early 80’s, Silberberg experimented with nerikomi, a technique uniting her interests in color and sculptural form. Exploring the vulnerabilities of the clay material through large scale solid forms and movement in the firing process, her work became an amalgam of fissures and disruptions of lines that converged three-dimensional forms. The tension between graphic, two-dimensional patterning within a three-dimensional structure led Silberberg to painting, which thirty-years later, is a continuation of the energy that grew from the works in clay.
Silberberg’s ceramic sculpture has been exhibited internationally at the Everson Museum, (Syracuse, NY), the Woodmere Museum, (Philadelphia, PA), East-West Contemporary Ceramics Exhibition, (Mino, Japan), the Parrish Art Museum, (Southampton, NY), and the Institute of Design, (Sacramento, CA). She has received numerous awards, including a fellowship from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation. In 1967, Silberberg graduated with a BFA in ceramic design from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. Her studies included a year abroad at Nyckelviksskolan, Stockholm, Sweden and an introduction to modernist aesthetics. Silberberg’s first small studio in Brooklyn, NY, the Clay Pot, moved to Plainfield, MA in 1974.
This one-of-a-kind architectural tableau is an unabashedly patriotic celebration of the founding aspirations of the United States. Superior’s witty interpretations of “American” symbols–apple pie, a Phrygian cap, a copy of the Declaration of Independence, a picnic plate with a hamburger and hotdog–embellish the surface and are interspersed with miniature presidential portraits and historical references, rewarding close inspection. The material–porcelain–constructed in successive slab-built lavers atop a robust foundation, signals both strength and fragility. The Pursuit of Happiness is a hopeful expression of the country’s ideals, and a timely reminder that democracy is a delicate experiment.
In 2012, Barry and Merle Ginsburg commissioned Superior to create an all-American tribute to the founding fathers and the best of 18th century American democratic ideals. Completed in 2015, the architectural stacked porcelain commemorative sculpture uses symbols and references drawn from history and decorative arts including miniature presidential portraits, busts, The Declaration of Independence, and an apple pie.
It took Superior three years to complete The Pursuit of Happiness, an impressive wedding cake-like ceramic piece that is an amalgam of the White House and the Capitol—the whole surrounded with elements of American iconography—including Abraham Lincoln’s top hat, a hot dog, miniature presidential busts, and an apple pie.
“The sculpture is not political, but historical and patriotic, and reflective of early American history,” said Barry.
“We’re far from being solely ‘political,’” Merle added. “The activities we engage in are to support people to be able to grow and live where they want to, and to work against the sense of inequality in the way women, and people in general, are treated.” The signs of true modernism could not be better described.
—Suzanne Slesin, “Patriotic Passions.” Galerie Magazine, Sept. 2016, p. 176.
From a distance, Mara Superior’s The Pursuit of Happiness looks like a beautiful, tiered wedding cake. Its architectural surface has the color and texture of buttercream frosting, drawing viewers in to explore its many layers. Like a cake carefully crafted by a master baker, this sculpture is built with both physical and symbolic layers, each helping to tell a larger story about the effort it takes to create a more perfect union. Superior’s artistry shines as she blends a couple’s love for history with their hopes for the future.
Commissioned by Merle and Barry Ginsburg in 2012 and completed in 2015, The Pursuit of Happiness is Superior’s most detailed and ambitious work yet. It stands out not just because of its size but because of its powerful, nonpartisan, patriotic message. Working closely with the Ginsburgs, Superior created a sculpture that reflects the founding values of the United States. She describes it as “a commemorative celebration of the American idea, the great experiment, the system—three branches of government, checks and balances, Grecian democracy dependent on an educated citizenry. Our democracy has been admired the world over.”
At the heart of The Pursuit of Happiness are two of America’s most famous buildings—the White House and the U.S. Capitol—stacked on top of each other. By placing the People’s House above the Presidential Mansion, Superior highlights the relationship between leadership and democracy, reminding us that everyday citizens are both the foundation and the guiding force of the country. This striking design encourages viewers to think about the balance of power and the ideals that shape the nation.
The title comes from Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, which lists the “pursuit of happiness” as one of three unalienable rights. The meaning of this phrase has remained open to interpretation since 1776. Over time, people have understood it as the right to privacy, self-determination, and the freedom to follow their dreams. The Ginsburgs hope that Superior’s sculpture will inspire viewers, reminding them of “the enduring ideals of our Union and the bedrock of our democratic government: the unalienable rights of all people to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Originally designed as a centerpiece for a dining table, The Pursuit of Happiness was meant to be seen from every angle. However, as the sculpture grew larger, it no longer fit in its original intended space. Luckily, it found a perfect new home on the Ginsburgs’ 18th-century American sideboard, set against the backdrop of a colorful Zuber wallpaper showing scenes from the American Revolution. This unexpected placement added even more meaning to the piece, creating a connection between the past and the present, history and art, and the dreams of early America and the possibilities of today.
–Kory Rogers, Francie & John Downing Senior Curator of American Art at Shelburne Museum
From a distance, Mara Superior’s The Pursuit of Happiness looks like a beautiful, tiered wedding cake. Its architectural surface has the color and texture of buttercream frosting, drawing viewers in to explore its many layers. Like a cake carefully crafted by a master baker, this sculpture is built with both physical and symbolic layers, each helping to tell a larger story about the effort it takes to create a more perfect union. Superior’s artistry shines as she blends a couple’s love for history with their hopes for the future.
–Kory Rogers, Francie & John Downing Senior Curator of American Art at Shelburne Museum
Below the White House’s North Portico, the base of the sculpture displays portraits of Benjamin Franklin and President George Washington on either side of its title, between two “supporter” eagle seals.
Under the White House’s South Portico, the base is decorated with a portrait of President Abraham Lincoln and his stovepipe hat bearing the famous phrase from his Gettysburg Address: “For the people, by the people, and of the people,” framing E Pluribus Unum—Latin for “Out of many, one.”
The base of the sculpture, located under the east end of the White House, features a Fourth of July dinner plate with a classic American meal—a hot dog, a hamburger, and French fries. It also includes a portrait of President Thomas Jefferson and a copy of the United States Declaration of Independence.
The base, located under the west side of the White House, features the first American flag with 13 stars and stripes, a portrait of President James Madison, and a replica of the United States Constitution.
Two statue busts of Presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson stand on top of the Capitol, each with a special bottle of alcohol. Washington has a bottle of whiskey made at his Mount Vernon estate, while Jefferson has a bottle of his favorite Madeira, a sweet Portuguese wine.
Although apple pie was first made in England in the 14th century, it has become a well-known symbol of American culture. This is mainly because, in the 1800s, people in the United States were eager to cultivate and propagate different varieties of apples. Later, patriotic advertisements during World War I and World War II helped make apple pie a quintessentially American dessert.
To Superior, this elegantly dressed figure, wearing a ball gown and a tall wig, titled Mademoiselle de Paris, represents the wealthy and influential members of French society that Thomas Jefferson interacted with during his time as the U.S. Minister to France from 1785 to 1789.
This small teapot is decorated on both sides with the slogans “No Stamp Act” and “American Liberty Restored.” It is a replica of an 18th-century English teapot that was made especially for American consumers. The Stamp Act, passed by the British Parliament on March 22, 1765, placed a tax on all printed materials in the American colonies. This angered many colonists and led to strong protests, eventually causing the British government to repeal the tax in 1766.
The Phrygian cap, also known as the “Liberty cap,” is a soft, cone-shaped red hat with a forward-bent tip. It became a strong symbol of freedom from oppression during the American and French Revolutions. In the United States, it appears in government seals and patriotic artwork.
Mara created the detailed architectural features, like balusters, colonnades, and windows, using wooden stamps that her late husband, artist Roy Superior, had made by hand.
“Artists can actualize tangible objects which address the frustrations that we commonly feel. In ceramics, there is a long, historic tradition of political commentary. Themes that pique our visual outcries range from canaries in the coal mine to thinking about citizenship, American and world history, power, democracy and the value and vulnerability of freedom. Since the invention of the printing press, drawings of political satire and humor have been used to inform and get a message out to the population. 17th and 18th century British and French political satire, as well as comic art and prints by James Gilroy and William Hogarth changed thinking with brilliant wit equaling high art. Goya, Daumier, Picasso, the Gorilla Girls, and today’s New Yorker Magazine covers by Barry Blit come to mind as artists make political-commentary in reaction to their times.”
In commemoration of the 250th anniversary of America’s founding, Norman Rockwell Museum will debut a major exhibition in 2026: American Stories: From Revolution to Rockwell. This sweeping exhibition explores how artists—from the Revolutionary era to today–have made visible the evolving story of America. Featuring nearly 100 powerful works across themed sections, American Stories reveals how illustrations—from the 18th century to today—have reflected and shaped what it means to be American.
The exhibition includes original paintings, prints, book illustrations, broadsides, posters, advertisements, and digital media, from the Museum’s expansive holdings as well as major loans from important institutions and private collectors across the country, including the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. From iconic masterpieces to everyday media, these works chart the nation’s ambitions, struggles, and enduring pursuit of freedom.
The exhibition places Rockwell’s iconic images in a broader national context, spotlighting illustration’s role in illuminating America’s ambitions, achievements, and struggles. Alongside Rockwell’s work, visitors will discover pieces by Virginia Lee Burton, Aaron Douglas, Rockwell Kent, J.C. Leyendecker, Jerry Pinkney, Howard Pyle, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Paul Revere, Faith Ringgold, Jessie Wilcox Smith, N.C. Wyeth, and many more
Each chapter of the exhibition addresses a major theme that has shaped the United States and its critical fortunes. One section explores how artists have helped form our understanding of the natural world—from Audubon’s early bird studies to illustrations of gargantuan infrastructure projects that reshaped the land. Another highlights the role of illustration in capturing the excitement of new technologies, from Edison’s lightbulb to the jet age. A third examines how images have fueled social change and shaped public opinion, tracing a path from Revolutionary-era prints to today’s viral memes. Together, these themes reveal how illustration has not only reflected American life but actively influenced it—making this exhibition both a visual journey through history and a fresh look at the power of images to tell our collective story.
Rockwell Kent
“Vernon Kilns Brown ‘Our America’ Chop Plate”
c. 1940–43
earthenware
16.5″ dia.
Decorated porcelain and ceramic wares have long functioned as “message-bearers.” transforming everyday domestic objects into vehicles for political expression, diplomacy, and propaganda–whether exchanged among heads of state Or circulated within middle-class homes.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, amid the aftermath of the Great Depression and the rising threat of fascism in Europe, illustrator and painter Rockwell Kent extended his socially engaged practice into industrial design, collaborating with Vernon Kilns of California to create tableware for the Our America series. Kent’s woodcut-inspired imagery appeared on plates, cups and saucers, bowls, pitchers, and other service pieces marketed to middle-class consumers. Offered in three colorways-blue, brown, and maroon -sets ranged from $8.80 to $26.90 and were advertised as featuring “more than thirty different drawings representative of scenes and activities in the various regions of the United States.” This chop plate features a map of the United States with illustrations representing the nation’s industries and geographical features.
–Normal Rockwell Museum, American Stories: From Revolution to Rockwell
Paul Scott
“Cumbrian Blue(s), New American Scenery Broken Treaties, Standing Rock/1, (after Ryan Vizzions, with Mega May Plenty Chief, Lakota Oyate on horseback)”
2022
inglaze decal collage on Crown Ducal Colonial Times, William Penn’s Treaty plate c.1950
10.5 x 10.5 x 1.5″
