UPCOMING: Opening May, 2025
Curated by Kory Rogers
Francie and John Downing Senior Curator of American Art
SHELBURNE MUSEUM
Shelburne, VT
Ceramics Gallery, Variety Unit
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Porcelain Love Letters: The Art of Mara Superior
Mara Superior’s porcelain art combines intricate painted imagery and sculptural forms to explore themes of art history, domesticity, and environmentalism. Often described as “love letters to the world,” Superior’s works invite viewers to engage with their timeless beauty and layered narratives.
Opening May 10, 2025
SHELBURNE MUSEUM
6000 Shelburne Road
PO Box 10
Shelburne, VT
ARTWORKS
Preview
Homes & Gardens
The Planet
PROGRAMMING
Webinar: Artistic Eye – Seeing the World through Mara Superior’s Ceramic Art
Join via Zoom on April 8 at 12:00 pm EDT. A live Q & A will close the program.
Free. Advance registration required.
American, b. 1951, New York, NY
lives and works in Williamsburg, MA
Mara Superior is an American visual artist who works in porcelain. Her ceramic high relief platters and sculptural objects reflect the artist’s passion for art history and the decorative arts, and her painterly motifs range from the pleasures of the domestic to serious political and environmental issues as points of departure to comment on contemporary culture and its relationship to history. Superior has received numerous awards including a National Endowment for the Visual Arts Fellowship, the prestigious Guldaggergård Residency in Denmark, and numerous individual artist grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
Superior has exhibited at the American Museum of Ceramic Art, (Pomona, CA), Scripps Women’s College, (Claremont, CA), and the Fuller Craft Museum, (Brockton, MA) among many other institutions. Her work can be found in the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, (Washington, DC), the Museum of Arts and Design, (New York, NY), the Peabody Essex Museum, (Salem, MA), Philadelphia Museum of Art, (Philadelphia, PA) the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, (Los Angeles, CA), White House Collection of American Craft, (Little Rock, AK). In 2018, through the generous support of the Kohler Foundation, gifts of art by Mara Superior were made to fifteen museums throughout the USA, increasing the public holdings of Superior’s artworks and including an in depth collection acquired by the Racine Art Museum, (Racine, WI) and shown in 2020 in Collection Focus: Mara Superior. In 2010 she was interviewed for the oral history program of the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, (Washington, DC).
Superior studied at the Pratt Institute and Hartford Art School, completing her BFA in painting from the University of Connecticut followed by a MAT in ceramics from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. She is represented by Ferrin Contemporary.
ABOUT THE SHELBURNE MUSEUM
Shelburne Museum is an unparalleled and unique experience of American history, art, and design. Designed to allow visitors the pleasure of discovery and exploration, the Museum includes thirty-nine distinct structures on forty-five acres, each filled with beautiful, fascinating, and whimsical objects. Come play in our gardens and open our many doors. You are welcome here.
SHELBURNE MUSEUM
6000 Shelburne Road
PO Box 10
Shelburne, VT 05482
INQUIRE
Additional works may be available to acquire, but not listed here.
If interested in lists of all works and series: Send us a message