Ceramics + Art Version 15.0, Innovating for the 21st Century Kiln tells a riveting narrative of the growth of a medium and its fight for change in art theory and critical writing that lead to the fine arts celebrating man’s oldest art form. This is a time that has been long in coming but is now irreversible and fast expanding.
The award-winning historian Garth Clark, writer, critic and peripatetic Chief Editor of CFile (the global, online campus for ceramics in art, design, architecture and technology) will premiere this new lecture on February 19, 2015, 7pm at the Barry Kaye Building room KH102, Dorothy Schmidt College of College of Arts and Letters at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton. A link to the college’s lecture series is included above.
His colorful talk illustrates how the ceramic discipline (which was once sidelined) has seen an explosion of recent activity and an enthusiastic acceptance into the realm fine arts. Art Critic Roberta Smith of the New York Times has declared ceramics to be “the new photography” and with that the rules and opportunities have all changed as boundaries have fallen and the kiln is now looked on with greater respect.
Clark, the author of over 70 books on ceramic art, has been an active architect in this transformation of the ceramic movement since 1972. He offers a tour of the changing paradigms in this field, the events that took it from the craft shop to blue chip art galleries and the roles architecture and design have played in its ascent.
The medium is being used in many more ways today. Among them: raw, unfired clay or terracruda is the fasted growing “new” medium for contemporary sculpture; ceramics as subject and innovative processes that mimic ceramics in bronze, epoxy and other media.
Among the designers, artists and architects he features in this riveting talk are the Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei, social artist 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, Dutch star Mark Manders, Ricky Swallow, Renzo Piano, Frank Gehry and others. This is no longer your father’s ceramic world!
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I would love to hear this lecture. Is it scheduled to be delivered anywhere else? Any chance a copy will be uploaded to CFile?
So much that’s new, old and wonderful to see….thanks!