Project Type: UPCOMING

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Porcelain Love Letters: The Art of Mara Superior

Artist Mara Superior has a deep love for porcelain—a dedication that compels her to work with this ancient and often unpredictable material. She works with slab construction and fires her pieces in a high-temperature reduction atmosphere, techniques that make the process even more challenging and increase the risk of warping or breakage.

Trained as a painter, Superior discovered the beauty and creative possibilities of porcelain in the late 1970s. Since then, she has focused entirely on this bright but delicate material, appreciating both its fragility and its strength. She describes porcelain as a “magical three-dimensional canvas,” where she carefully paints detailed, whimsical images and adds sculpted designs to create pieces that are both visually striking and rich with meaning. 

Superior’s art draws inspiration from many sources, including Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, illuminated manuscripts, Renaissance art, historical ceramics, and Americana. She blends these influences to create her distinctive and romantic style. Each piece feels like a love letter to the world—reflecting her deep affection for home, good food, the environment, and her country.

This exhibition showcases a wide range of Mara Superior’s work, from her early explorations to her latest creations. It features commissioned pieces from private collections along with deeply personal works from her own home—many of which have never been shown before. Superior considers these her most treasured pieces, reflecting both her artistic skill and creative imagination.

PROGRAMMING

Webinar: Artistic Eye – Seeing the World through Mara Superior’s Ceramic Art

ABOUT MARA SUPERIOR

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