Project Tag: contemporary ceramics

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. 

Read More on the David Kordansky Gallery Website

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.

Read More on the Matthew Marks Gallery Website

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.

Read More on Jennifer Lee’s website

American, b. 1950
lives and works in Tempe, AZ

Kurt Weiser’s ceramic work draws inspiration from rich evocations of plant life to narratives derived from myth and history, placed into highly detailed tropical landscapes. These images are meticulously painted onto porcelain teapots, globes and other vessels. As Weiser notes “the painting is the three-dimensional reality”.

His most recent body of work includes linoleum-cut prints, inspired by decades of drawings from his sketchbooks. He has paired these prints with black and white vessels, relying on his graphic and fantastical style as the means for relating these rich narratives.

Weiser has shown internationally and throughout the United States, including solo exhibitions at the Montgomery Museum of Art (Montgomery, AL) the Museum of Contemporary Craft (Portland, OR) and the Holter Museum of Art (Helena, MT). His work can be found in numerous public collections, including Smithsonian Institution, Alfred University School of Ceramics, and the Los Angeles Museum of Art among many others. Weiser received his M.F.A. from the University of Michigan and recently retired from the position of Regents Professor of Art at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.

b. 1925, New York, NY
d. 2016, Morgan, VT

Karen Karnes is known for wheel-thrown functional pottery, especially her iconic covered casseroles and her experiments with wood firing both functional and sculptural pottery.

Early in her career Karnes worked with molds and fired work in an oil-fueled kiln. It was during Karnes’ time in Italy that she learned to work with a potter’s wheel. Returning to the US, she studied at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. In 1952 she and her then husband, David Weinrib, were potters-in-residence at Black Mountain College where they remained until 1954. They were present for the series of seminal ceramics symposia bringing together Soetsu Yanagi, Shoji Hamada, Bernard Leach, with Marguerite Wildenhain as the moderator. Attended by makers and ceramics educators, these symposia had a far-reaching effect on the making and firing of pots in the United States.

In 1954 Karnes and her husband moved to Stony Point, New York where they worked with other potters to develop the Gate Hill Cooperative. During this period Karnes concentrated on the production of multiples, functional pottery, and developed her iconic flame ware casseroles. These sturdy walled vessels were thrown with deep finger ridges that hold the glaze to create a two-tone appearance. They were finished with a pulled and folded or open loop lid handle attached at an angle. The natural rhythm of the lid handle retained the sense of plasticity of the clay. The casseroles are an example of Karnes’ respect for ceramic traditions with a modern approach.

While teaching at Penland in 1967 she began to use salt in her firings, something she would continue to do throughout her career. After returning to Gate Hill she built a salt kiln there with the help of her friend Mikhail Zakin, also a potter. Karnes moved to Vermont in 1979 where, after producing primarily functional work for many years, she created a series of sculptural pieces that referenced functional forms. She continued to explore atmospheric effects of wood and salt firing and their results on the finished ceramic surface. She stopped firing her own kiln after 1998 when a fire destroyed her kiln shed and home. Subsequently, her pieces were fired in the wood-fueled kilns of fellow potters around New England.

Karnes’ later work consists of sculptural objects of manipulated thrown pots transformed into objects unrelated to their original components or utility.

Read More from The Mark’s Project

“Kathy Butterly has created distinct, evocative sculptures for more than two decades, contributing to and expanding the tradition of studio ceramics.  Through her practice, Butterly engages with concepts ranging from materiality and line to the history of the vessel.  She uses traditional ceramic forms as her starting point, referring to these historical templates as her “canvas”; however, Butterly contorts and misshapes these forms in ways that veer toward the iconoclastic. She then adds layer upon layer of glaze – sometimes to the point of creating additional volume – and fires the works repeatedly.  The colors and textures Butterly chooses and their relationship with each other are simultaneously seductive and jarring. Her strange forms and surprising palette decisions often generate an uncanny awareness in the viewer and produce a visceral impact.”

Read More from the James Cohan Gallery Biography