The award-winning historian, writer, critic and peripatetic Chief Editor of CFile’s online campus for ceramics in art, design, architecture and technology Garth Clark will premiere his fast–paced new lecture “Ceramics + Art Version 14.0” in Boise. The Lecture is in the Hatch Ballroom A & B, Boise State University Student Union Building, University Drive at 5:45 p.m. on Tuesday, May 6. It will be preceded by a catered reception from 4:30 – 5:30 p.m. (same venue). Both events are free and open to the public.
The lecture examines the recent explosion of ceramic activity in the fine arts. As art critic Roberta Smith of the New York Times says in her oft-quoted comment, “ceramics is the new photography.”
Clark, the author of over 70 books on ceramic art, has been an active part of the transformation of the ceramic movement since 1972. Clark will give a summary of the events leading to ceramics’ move from the craft ghetto to the blue chip art galleries. He succinctly examines several directions ceramics is now taking from ceramists who have crossed over to the fine arts to established artists who have now taken on ceramics. He will also discuss the way architecture and design have played into this movement.
The medium is being used in many ways, raw with unfired clay, ceramics itself and then innovative processes that mimic ceramics in bronze, epoxy and other media.
Among the artists he features in this riveting talk are the Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei, Theaster Gates, Richard Tuttle, Sterling Ruby, Urs Fischer, George E. Ohr, Ron Nagle, Grayson Perry, Kathy Butterly, Arlene Shecket, Edmund de Waal, John Mason, Julian Stair, Ken Price, Mark Manders, Ricky Swallow and many others.
“Ceramics + Art Version 14.0” tells an exciting narrative; the growth of a medium and the fights for changes in art theory and critical writing that lead to this about face for man’s oldest art form, long in coming but now firmly entrenched.
Above image: Theaster Gates, An Epitaph for Civil Rights and Other Domesticated Structures, an intensive commentary about class and race in the United States. Gates is part of a new wave of leading artists in the fine arts dealing with ceramics.
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