Lightner Museum
St. Augustine, FL
April 24, 2025 – October 27, 2025
NEW AMERICAN SCENERY: The Art of Paul Scott: Paul Scott’s New American Scenery will open at its 7th tour location on April 24th, 2025. The exhibition at the Lightner Museum marks the artist’s fifth solo show in the US, spanning 2019 to 2025.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
In American Scenery and Souvenirs British artist Paul Scott reanimates historical transferware to create new works depicting scenes from contemporary American life.
In the nineteenth century, blue-and-white printed transferware plates portraying images of American scenery, cities, and their significant landmarks were mass-produced by potteries in Staffordshire, England for export to the US. By the turn of the twentieth century these works became tremendously popular collectibles, cherished by the American middle class as souvenirs of travel and experience.
Paul Scott’s current work combines the visual vocabulary and processes of historical transferware with unexpected and incongruous vignettes of life in America today, engaging with themes of globalization, energy consumption, capitalism, social justice, immigration, and the environmental impact of human activity. In American Scenery and Souvenirs, nuclear power plants, decaying urban centers, abandoned industrial sites, wildfires, and border walls intrude amidst the traditionally bucolic landscape. These provocative scenes subvert the picturesque aesthetic traditionally associated with American transferware, challenging the viewer to reconsider the nation’s environmental and social realities. The exhibition presents Scott’s work in dialogue with vintage Rowland & Marsellus transferware from the Lightner Museum collection to showcase Scott’s technical and poignant interventions.
American Scenery and Souvenirs: Transferware by Paul Scott is presented at the Lightner Museum by the Community Foundation for Northeast Florida. Additional support comes from the St. Johns County Tourist Development Council and the St. Johns Cultural Council.
English, b. 1953, Darley Dale, Derbyshire, England
lives and works in Cumbria, UK
Paul Scott is a Cumbrian-based artist with a diverse practice and an international reputation. Creating individual pieces that blur the boundaries between fine art, craft and design, he is well known for research into printed vitreous surfaces, as well as his characteristic blue and white artworks in glazed ceramic.
Scott’s artworks can be found in public collections around the globe – including The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design Norway, the Victoria and Albert Museum London, National Museums Liverpool, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh and Brooklyn Art Museum USA. Commissioned work can be found in a number of UK museums as well as public places in the North of England, including Carlisle, Maryport, Gateshead and Newcastle Upon Tyne. He has also completed large-scale works in Hanoi, Vietnam and Guldagergård public sculpture park in Denmark.
A combination of rigorous research, studio practice, curation, writing and commissioned work ensures that his work is continually developing. It is fundamentally concerned with the re-animation of familiar objects, landscape, pattern and a sense of place. He was Professor of Ceramics at Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO) from 2011–2018. Scott received his Bachelors of Art Education and Design at Saint Martin’s College and Ph.d at the Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design in Manchester, England.
His current research project New American Scenery has been enabled by an Alturas Foundation artist award, Ferrin Contemporary, and funding from Arts Council England. More on New American Scenery, here.
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
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).
