One of the many things that awaited me when I stepped into the Curator role at The Clay Studio was a juried national exhibition that was planned as a part of our 40th Anniversary. I was equally overjoyed and nervous. What kind of work would people submit? Would that work reflect the exciting ways that artists currently use (and abuse) clay? I typed up some thoughts, and the team at The Clay Studio released this call:
To celebrate its 40th Anniversary in 2014, The Clay Studio will present a juried national exhibition exploring the diversity within contemporary ceramics. Over the past 40 years, The Clay Studio has served as a launching pad for a vast array of makers. Your participation in this exhibition will help us launch the next 40 years.
The exhibition will be juried by Garth Johnson, The Clay Studio’s new Curator of Artistic Programs. “My personal tastes tend to lean toward.... the extreme and the exotic, but that's only a part of my mission,” says Garth. “As a Curator, NCECA board member, and member of the clay community, I'm constantly working to ensure that the clay world retains as much diversity as possible.”
Send us functional pots, figurative sculpture, process-based art, digital clay... or even videos of performance-based work. Whether your references are historical, functional, alchemical or pure science fiction, show us what you’ve got!
In the end, I needn’t have worried—about the volume of submissions or the quality of those submissions. 316 artists submitted more than 700 pieces to the show. I could have put together at least a half-dozen knockout shows with different themes from the pieces that were submitted. In the end, I had to edit the accepted pieces down to 40, leaving out some living legends, popular mid-career artists and talented up-and-comers.
The Clay Studio National does, in fact, contain figuration, process, performance, alchemy, and maybe even a dab of science fiction. Once the work was installed in our galleries, I was kind of surprised by how the show looked and felt. Even though there are some very earthy, elemental pieces to ground it, the show as a whole is a little bit pink, fluffy, goopy, colorful and funny. I’ll own up to a weakness for color and humor, but I was still a bit puzzled by the overall lightness (in tone, not importance) of the show.
I think I literally slapped my forehead when I realized what was going on. It’s been a long, cold snowy winter in Philadelphia—one of the snowiest on record. This show, with all of its color and lightness is a ray of March sunshine in our white cube of a gallery. The Clay Studio National that I put together is a tribute to the vitality that the artists bring to the act of making things with clay.
Plenty of delights and surprises await you in this exhibition. The thaw begins here.
Garth Johnson
March 2014
