news
- Skip Navigation
- News and Events
- News Archive
- Calendars
- For the Media
- Colby-Sawyer Currents
- Alumni Magazine
- Sports News
- Faculty Experts Guide
- Contacts
for more information
Kimberly Slover
Director, College Communications
(603) 526-3647
campus events
Rarely Seen Works by America's Finest Ceramic Artists On View in Colby-Sawyer College Exhibition
NEW LONDON, N.H.,Aug. 16,2006 – Works by some of the most important American ceramic artists of the last 35 years will be on display in the exhibition The Studio Potter Collection. The show opens September 7, 2006, at the Marian Graves Mugar Art Gallery on the Colby-Sawyer College campus in New London, N.H.
Presented by the Colby-Sawyer College Department of Fine and Performing Arts, The Studio Potter Collection will be the public's first opportunity since 1992 to see selections from the exceptional New Hampshire-based ceramics collection of the same name. Chosen by the ceramic artists themselves as gifts to The Studio Potter magazine and its parent nonprofit foundation, the Studio Potter Collection is one of the most important of its kind in the United States. Board members of The Studio Potter foundation will also loan recent works to the exhibition.
The exhibition is co-organized by Professor of Fine and Performing Arts Jon Keenan and master potter Gerry Williams, New Hampshire's first Artist Laureate and founding editor emeritus and executive director of The Studio Potter. Starting with teapots, platters, and other useful pieces and ranging to expressionistic vessels and monumental wall plaques, the selection of some 30 works will display the full variety of the styles, ceramic techniques and expressions explored by contemporary artists in clay. The exhibition continues through October 5.
The Mugar Gallery will hold a public reception on Thursday, Sept. 14, from 7 to 9 p.m. in the gallery. Gerry Williams will present a gallery talk and discussion at 7:30 p.m. The gallery is handicapped accessible and open to the public free of charge.
“I'm looking forward to a spectacular show of what is going on in ceramics these days,” said Rebekah Tolley, director of the Mugar Gallery and assistant professor of fine and performing arts. “Besides the important earlier work, we will be seeing some unique pieces and trends in contemporary ceramics where artists have gone beyond the form and function of traditional ceramics to bizarre forms and innovative designs that make their work truly art objects. I am happy we are able to support such an important organization as The Studio Potter and am very excited about this show.”
Remarkable Works by Extraordinary Artists
As co-curator Jon Keenan explains, The Studio Potter Collection not only represents some of the most important ceramic work being done in the United States but also some of America's most extraordinary artists. Among those included in the show will be Beatrice Wood (1893-1998), whose event-filled, 106-year life was the inspiration for the Kate Winslet character in the 1997 Hollywood film, “Titanic.”
Wood's work as an actress, painter, friend and collaborator of French Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, and student of Eastern philosophies culminated in her career as a beloved and world-renowned ceramic artist in Ojai, California. She was declared a California Treasure in 1984.
Keenan describes another artist in the exhibition, Sana Musasama as “arguably the most prominent African-American woman ceramic artist.” Based in New York City, Musasama will be represented in the Mugar Gallery show by a wall piece from a series dealing with the controversial African ritual procedure of female circumcision. She will be a visiting artist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, from January through February 2007.
Other prominent clay artists in the exhibition include Don Reitz, prominent member of the Abstract Expressionist clay movement; Mary Roehm, a professor at SUNY New Paltz, known for her traditional wood firing; Malcolm Wright of Marlboro, Vermont, who works with Japanese climbing kilns both in the United States and Japan and Mary Barringer of Shelburne, Massachusetts, current editor of The Studio Potter, whose work in the show includes a fascinating low-temperature fired texture with abstract imagery.
Other works on view will run the gamut of ceramic techniques and types, from salt-glazed stoneware to slip-decorated white ware to painted porcelain.
Keenan, a well-established studio potter himself who exhibits regularly in both the United States and Japan, is a member of the The Studio Potter board. He has taught ceramics and Asian art history at Colby-Sawyer since 1990.
“This exhibition is a wonderful opportunity for students or anyone else interested in the world of ceramics,” says Keenan. “I am grateful to Gerry Williams for making this possible.”
A New Hampshire Collection with a Special Purpose
The Studio Potter Collection is not a conventional museum, public or private collection but a unique offshoot of the New Hampshire-based ceramics magazine, The Studio Potter, and its rich history. Founder Gerry Williams sought out the thriving studio pottery community of New Hampshire more than half a century ago.
Born in 1926 and raised by his missionary parents in India, Williams came to the United States in 1943 to attend Cornell College in Iowa. Attracted to a career in ceramics as a young man of 23, he learned from a potter friend that the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen was one of the best places in America to learn the craft. In 1949, he traveled to the League's Concord, New Hampshire, headquarters to take up his studies and his new career as a potter, which soon flourished.
Williams explains that he founded The Studio Potter in 1972 “as a means of communication between working potters.” The highly regarded, twice-yearly magazine, which takes no advertising, is designed to encourage the work of America's studio potters---artists who create unique objects in clay, made for everyday use, decoration or as fully independent works of art.
Articles have ranged from the practical and mundane---“Clay, Why It Acts the Way It Does,” and “To Sciatica and Back: A Potter's Journey”---- to the humanistic and scholarly--- “The University of Dirt,” “Toward Humanism in Apprenticeships” and “Reflections on a Feminist Aesthetic.”
Over the years, The Studio Potter grew into a full menu of services for ceramic artists. It has sponsored influential symposia on challenges facing the working ceramic artist and has established a network to support ceramic guilds, workshops, exhibitions and cooperative ceramic programs throughout the United States, Europe and the Far East.
The Studio Potter Collection was established in 1992 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of The Studio Potter. Leading ceramic artists donated works of their own to the collection. Each piece was intended as the artist's personal choice for representation in a museum collection.
Since 1992, the collection has added gifts from new artists who want to support The Studio Potter and its work. Sales from the collection to museums and individual collectors help provide funds for the on-going work of the magazine and its related organizations.
Meanwhile, Gerry Williams and his work with ceramics and The Studio Potter has attracted widespread acclaim and affection. In 1998, Williams was named New Hampshire's first Artist Laureate in recognition of his contributions to the New Hampshire cultural landscape.
“The covenant that Gerry Williams made with his muse is a wonder and mystery,” writes Jonathan Leo Fairbanks, Weems Curator Emeritus of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. “Gerry's humanity has given him another calling as well. As founder and editor of the magazine The Studio Potter, Gerry's genius is to listen quietly, reflect and write from the heart. The leading ambassador for the field of studio pottery, Gerry is also an exceptional practitioner whose contributions to art are known and admired world-wide.”
The Marian Graves Mugar Art Gallery
The Marian Graves Mugar Art Gallery, directed by Assistant Professor of Fine and Performing Arts Rebekah Tolley, hosts a number of major exhibitions and related public events each academic year. The Gallery is located on Seamans Road on the west side of campus in the Sawyer Fine Arts Center. Admission is free and open to the public. Hours are 10 a.m.–5 p.m., Monday through Friday, and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. The gallery is fully accessible. For additional information, please call (603) 526-3000. Please visit Colby-Sawyer College on the World Wide Web at http://www.colby-sawyer.edu.
Photographic images:
(top) Don Reitz (b. 1929), Platter, 1986. Wood-fired and salted stoneware, 3” x 19.” The Studio Potter Collection. Photograph by Bill Truslow.
(bottom) Beatrice Wood (1893-1998), Vessel, 1991. Earthenware with gold luster, 10” x 10.” The Studio Potter Collection. Photograph by Bill Truslow.
Contact Kimberly Slover for information about the exhibition or to arrange interviews with the artists at kslover@colby-sawyer.edu.
Colby-Sawyer, founded in 1837, is a comprehensive liberal arts college located in the scenic Lake Sunapee Region of central New Hampshire. Students from 25 states and five foreign countries learn in small classes through a select array of programs that integrate the liberal arts and sciences with pre-professional experience.
Colby-Sawyer College, 541 Main Street, New London, N.H. 03257 (603) 526-3000 (phone)
