Yet, contemporary practitioners like Fred Okai, Simphiwe Mbuyunza, Djakou Kassi, and Ngozi-Omeje Ezema are pushing the medium into what the renowned author Rosalind Krauss defines as the “post-medium condition.” In this state, Krauss argues that the clay is liberated from the “craft ghetto” and reborn as a site of socio-political inquiry, monumental expression, and architectural intervention.

Although these artists are not exiles in the traditional sense, their relocation has entailed significant forms of loss-distance from place, community, and familiar modes of making. Rather than allowing these losses to undermine their practice, they are redirected into material and conceptual inquiry. Their work reflects an ongoing process of reconstruction, where memory, cultural reference, and contemporary experience are assembled into new visual languages that respond to both personal histories and collective conditions.

Hybridity, then, is not an endpoint. It is a condition of survival, resilience, and imagination. And through it, international graduate artists continue to expand what contemporary studio practice can hold, and who it is for. Within postcolonial and material culture discourse, hybridity has been understood not as synthesis, but as a condition shaped by power, translation, and uneven access.

Notkin’s anti-war stance was not just addressed to the Vietnam War. His exposure to the reality and enormity of the Holocaust deepened his approach. He was also part of the young generation at the start of the environmental movement (the first Earth Day was in 1970). Couple these with anti-nuclear protests, and it would probably be better said that Notkin grapples with humanity’s failures, in whatever form they take, including new instances as they arise: the Iraq war and the recent Trumpolini works show his ongoing concerns.

This isn’t just a sculpture, it’s a sacred geometry of Black adornment. The ceramic orbs resemble braid beads, yes, but they also evoke planets or memory knots, binding the spiritual to the sensual, the cosmic to the communal. "Hairloom" becomes chandelier and root system at once – radiant, grounded, reaching.
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When Perron was gifted with a nineteenth-century rebus plate manufactured in Gien, France, she was both thrilled and suitably puzzled. Although fluent in French and English, it took her literally years to fully decode the message, as the “translation” (usually found on the back of the plate) had been worn away.

The relief that we receive from our craft is the relief we offer to our present tense and historical future in studio settings and mindsets that invite the fragile society around us to join. Dreary from days driven by computers and data and speed, we offer the example of our life augmented and sustained by the “need to touch what is touching us.” Safeguard what you are. The craft arts must continue to be the relief from the emergency of our times. History will safeguard the truth that what we create as craft artists is first aid.

With the conclusion of the workshop series, Project Cup will continue to exist as a physical cup repository available for public use at Charlotte Street Foundation, as a podcast hosted digitally by Artaxis, and as a book that provides an open template for other artists. In a society lacking accessible third spaces, Project Cup models the incredible power of art to shape open spaces for learning and connection.

“I am one of the fortunate ones. Had I believed what I was being taught in school, I would never have known the true meaning and greatness of my last name, “Chukes.”
– Michael Chukes

In essence and methodology, I believe that AI is an extension of collage. As with genres before it, like Dada, this system pulls from previously formulated objects, symbols, and language that hold defined meaning to compile it into a newly formulated thing that either reinforces the original or redefines the object/symbol; either way, it transforms from its source, and AI follows suit.

Visitors were greeted by three goddesses imagined and interpreted by Ray based on mythologies from the continental Americas, the African continent, and the Asian continent. Rising from pedestals, they stoically greeted visitors. Imbued with powerful, feminine energy, Ray’s goddesses’ heads were not fixed in place, a nod to the feminine ability to transform.

How do we make relevant work that can help heal humanity? As a maker I want my work to be that thing that someone wants to keep around. Something that touches a part of them, challenges them, provides beauty, and over time is associated with joy in their lives. It should convey the human condition so that my audience can relate to the ideas encapsulated in the form or surface of the art. For me, this means the good and bad of the human condition from happiness to rage.

Performative activism is done out of a desire to make oneself look better, rather than a desire to help the cause being promoted. While it is perfectly acceptable to utilize social media to amplify important causes, the problem arises when these efforts do not transcend into the real world.

It would be easier to write about ceramics if there were more jokes about ceramists. The lack of humor surrounding ceramic technologies is due to the industrialization of ceramic production and the emergence of ceramics as an academic discipline.

Before that, potters used to tell more jokes.

Many of us are drawn to clay because of its capacity for creation, but it also humbles us. We can never be entirely certain. To be committed to ceramics is a commitment to the ebbs and flows in our life/studio balance, with our bodies, with our facilities, and with the tools and materials that are precious to us.

Nascent for some time, Conscious Dreaming as a concept began pre-COVID-19, in 2020, when Lindo and Brookes were invited by Aberystwyth University’s School of Art to make a new body of work using the institution’s collection of prints and ceramics as their starting point. Drawn to the work of the somewhat obscure printmaker Christine Penn and the early pioneer studio potter Frances Emma Richards, Lindo and Brookes referenced the former’s darkly-surreal iconography and the latter’s serenity of form through their ceramics.

"Since the news broke about the budget crisis and the drastic measures that are now being proposed at WVU, I want to thank all of you students, alumni, friends, colleagues, and strangers who have reached out to offer support and help. You have reaffirmed that what we do matters and that art matters. Unfortunately, what is happening at WVU is not isolated, and I’m afraid it will continue as educational policies and priorities begin to shift in an era where publicly funded universities continue to receive less and less support from state legislatures." By Shoji Satake. This month's FREE article.

Trophallaxis focuses on the breast as a site of labor. In that, there is the juxtaposition of comfort and discomfort, familiar and unfamiliar: the cracking nipples and boot prints showcase bodily violence and the physical impact of breastfeeding. Fecund breasts with gold-plated areoles and nipples, constructed from terracotta, porcelain, antennae, and epoxy, suspending from the ceiling.

No matter what Ehren says, his cups are more than "just cups;" they are an important contribution to contemporary ceramic art.

When we feel overwhelmed by the scope of misery or frozen by survivor's guilt from seemingly endless natural disasters that affect the world, Clay for Charity gives us a purposeful outlet. What can we do from the comfort of our homes and the sanctuary of our ceramic studios? Clay workers in my community tend not to have excess cash but have an excess of will – the will to help.

"Henry was beloved," said Reena Kashyap, director emeritus of the Clay Art Center. "He did his best. He was more concerned about the soul of the place than collecting rent from the artists. People who were there in those days remember it as an incredible environment."

What I learned while centering the clay and obsessing over the clay-to-water ratio in class for weeks is that clay particles are like platelets; water and earth dance around and are compressed in the process of sculpting. While the goal is cohesion, it starts as a suspension. White supremacist capitalist patriarchy, not to oversimplify it, is in suspension, as it is multiple different ideologies pulling apart rather than binding together. I learned this profound lesson from Simone Leigh’s "Jug" (2014).

For those interested in building a sustainable society rooted in freedom and justice – issues that seem important to most of the potters I have known – we need to understand the threads that tie ideas together. We are at a moment in history when many disciplines must make choices, articulate a collective sense of concern, and consider the available paths toward voicing and acting on those concerns.

Endless exposition could be laid down about the way a beautiful bowl or cup enhances the act of eating or drinking. Less is said of what to make of pots at rest. I propose that pots at rest are still engaged in a unique passive utility by defining and enriching how we experience our domestic space.

The more I thought about this title, the more I puzzled over time's material mysteries. What does it look like for a form or an object to exist in the future? Does an object, like the lived experiences of the hands that built it, always appear relative to the past? How do I see time through an object?

Whether your work is rooted in environmental concerns or not, it is everyone's responsibility to be aware of how we affect the world around us. It is time for us to connect to the Earth through art.

FREE ARTICLE! “Even though we have creative artists, media, and consumer feedback now, as a society, we never backtracked the indoctrination of White supremacy on its people. We just kept moving forward … As a speck of hope, our work aims at decolonizing an art form that should have always remained intimate and unscathed by European inadequacies.”

Defining failure is an ambiguous paradox bolstered by its relationship to success. The two – failure and success – oscillate in a dichotomy without room for an alternative. They permeate normative ceramics through studios and art institutions as gatekeepers to creating in clay.

Listening to Clay will undoubtedly form an important resource for years to come. In the Introduction, the authors describe this “listening” as an “attitude of receptivity, collaborating with rather than imposing intention on the material.”

By presenting art-goers with a dazzling array of objects, they are forced to think of themselves in their own space, and the relationships that they, as consumers, have with objects of both nominal or grandiose values.

What if value was not placed on objects but, instead, on investment in social restoration? Through discursive thinking, critical inquiry, and the functions of a cup, Hughes and Ginsburg have done just that.

Green asks essential questions – both before and after their death – how do we care for fragile, shifting, and complex archives? And more so, how do we best care for the people, narratives, and ideas these archives represent?

Vessels made heavy by encrusted layers of gritted slip, balance like monoliths en pointe, defying gravity. Yet there is no question of teetering. They hold themselves, as the title implies, in perfect equilibrium.

“A work of art is a thesis. Every decision that the artist makes supports their thesis. In order to discover that thesis, it is the job of the critic to interpret the visual language used by the artist."

. . . To work with a plan that is pre-set is one way of avoiding subjectivity. . . . The plan would design the work. . . . the artist would select the basic form and rules that would govern the solution of the problem.

To point out the act of speaking with precision can appear redundant and excessive, but within the need to overemphasize there is immense intentionality.

Their ceramic objects serve as repositories of technique, mobility, potential, and function, enhancing our understanding and appreciation of situations afforded by domestic environments. Creating meaningful relationships with objects enables us to envision more sustainable worlds with fewer, but, better, things.

Haas doesn’t create traditional crockery or Asian ceramics, but he is informed by them. He isn’t making radical ephemeral sculpture, but he is informed by it. In the collide lies Haas and his evolution.

Three films by Culture Colony featuring Walter Keeler (The Making of Flailed), Adam Buick (The Making of the Intertidal Jar) and Claire Curneen (The Making of Touched).

A timely reminder for those working in traditional craft disciplines that handwork can be deeply resonant beyond the categories used to define the works it produces.

The world is facing a crisis. I don’t know what the situation will be when this gets published, but somehow the issues I raise might get lost in the shuffle. There is a reason bottom-line thinking is so highly regarded: it solves problems. And right now we are facing a problem whose sudden urgency…

Jack Troy reviews Janet Koplos's new text, What Makes a Potter: Functional Pottery in America Today, featuring fifty interviews with contemporary potters.

Modest in appearance, simple in its curation, but big in intention; this gallery is a gem. Long may it, and shows like Tanio/Ignite, continue.

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