Established | 2003 |
---|---|
Location | 399 N. Garey Ave Pomona, California 91767 |
Coordinates | 34°03′40″N117°45′02″W / 34.0610°N 117.7506°W |
Type | Art Museum |
Collections | Ceramics, Sculpture |
Founder | David Armstrong |
Director | Beth Ann Gerstein |
Architect | Benjamin Hall Anderson |
Public transit access | Pomona–Downtown |
Website | amoca |
The American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA) is an art museum for ceramic art, located in Pomona, California. [1] Founded in 2003 as a nonprofit organization, the museum exhibits historic and contemporary ceramic artwork from both its permanent collection of 10,000 objects [2] and through temporary rotating exhibitions. [3] [4]
The American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA) was founded in Pomona, California in 2003 by David Armstrong, a Pomona businessman and ceramic artist. [5] It is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. [1] The museum was first located in a Pomona storefront. [6] In 2010, Armstrong purchased a two-story building, the former headquarters of Pomona First Federal Savings and Loan, which was designed by Benjamin Hall Anderson in 1956. [7] The Anderson building houses a legacy mural in the interior by the Southern California artist Millard Sheets. [8] The museum was relocated into the larger building in 2011.
In 2014, AMOCA hired Beth Ann Gerstein to serve as the executive director. [9] [4] Gerstein joined AMOCA after a twenty-year tenure at The Society of Arts and Crafts of Boston. [9] Gerstein succeeds founding executive director Christy Johnson who retired in 2013. From 2004 to her retirement in 2013, Johnson facilitated a diverse, five-exhibition-a-year schedule. While at AMOCA, Johnson was involved with the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time initiative, producing a critically acclaimed exhibition, Common Ground: Ceramics in Southern California (1945-1975), and book of the same title.
The museum's founder, David Armstrong, moved to Pomona, California with his family in 1944. His father, David S. Armstrong, opened a furniture and appliance business at 150 East Third Street. [10] Armstrong earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Pomona College in 1962 and while earning his degree, he also studied with ceramic artist Paul Soldner at nearby Scripps College. [6]
In 1969, Armstrong converted the family furniture business into Armstrong's Gallery which featured limited edition ceramic collectibles and specialized in porcelain figurines and collector plates.
Armstrong began producing porcelain collector plates in the early 1970s. [11] He generated a series of collector plates in collaboration with comedian Red Skelton, who was also a painter known for portraying clowns, in 1975. [11] For 27 years, Armstrong produced and distributed Red's limited edition ceramic collectibles through the use of ceramic decals fired onto porcelain. [11] Armstrong's ceramic products included ceramic baseball cards and plaques, [11] along with elaborate gold borders on collector plates to enhance the artist's design.[ citation needed ]
In 1993, he earned his Master of Fine Arts degree with a concentration in ceramics from Claremont Graduate School studying with Paul Soldner. [11] Around the year 2000, Armstrong shifted the focus of his gallery towards contemporary studio ceramics. He closed Armstrong's Gallery in 2014 to focus on AMOCA.[ citation needed ]
AMOCA's permanent collection consists of more than 10,000 pieces [2] and includes California pottery, Southern California ceramics [12] and dinnerware, Mettlach ceramics, industrial ceramics, factory made ceramics, ancient vessels from the Americas, fine porcelains of Asia and Europe, and functional and sculptural contemporary ceramics.
AMOCA's Mettlach collection was donated by Robert D. and Colette D. Wilson, collectors of Mettlach pieces who grew their holdings over a 30-year period. AMOCA contains a 3,000+ piece Mettlach Collection, one of the largest collections of Mettlach wares (dating from c. 1840–1915) in the world.[ citation needed ] The museum regularly displays several hundred pieces from the permanent collection in the building's lower level. [13]
Robert Wilson, born in Southern California, started collecting at the age of thirteen from antique shops on Sepulveda Blvd in Los Angeles. At the beginning of WWII Robert Wilson started a Mettlach stein collection. Colette Wilson, raised in Southern California, was instrumental in starting the Royal Worcester collection of ceramics that the pair also donated to AMOCA. The Wilson collection was first exhibited at AMOCA in October 2012. At the opening reception Isabella von Boch, from the family that now manages the Villeroy & Boch, Mettlach Factory, declared that "this was the largest and most comprehensive collection in the world."[ citation needed ]
The building was previously the site of a former bank, Pomona First Federal, that commissioned Millard Sheets along with his frequent collaborator Susan Lautmann Hertel to create a 78-foot mural for the interior. [14] [15] Titled Panorama of the Pomona Valley, the mural (1956, paint on canvas) is part of AMOCA's permanent collection. [15] Sheets and Hertel depicted the history of the valley from the time of Native American inhabitants to the arrival of the railroad and the incorporation of Pomona in 1888. [7] Sheets, an art professor and prolific public muralist, created works for commercial and governmental buildings many in Los Angeles County. Susan Lautmann Hertel, a painter and designer, worked with Sheets at the design firm Millard Sheets Designs, Inc., [16] which she took over following his retirement in the 1970s. [17] [18]
Other exhibitions have included artwork by Peter Voulkos, Betty Woodman, Beatrice Wood, Chris Gustin, Tim Berg & Rebekah Myers, Lisa Reinertson, Rebekah Bogard, Betty Davenport Ford, Connie Layne, Jamie Bardsley, [24] Don Reitz, [25] Marguerite Wildenhain, [11] Peter Callas, [26] and Viola Frey. [4]
The museum has exhibited objects from Gladding, McBean [6] and Villeroy & Boch.
AMOCA's 12,000 square foot ceramics studio hosts workshops, lectures, and educational programs for artists in residence, studio artists, students, members of AMOCA and the general public. [27]
The ceramic studio has offered classes to the public since 2011. The 12,000 sq. foot studio currently offers semi-private and private studio rentals for artists with ceramic experience, artists in residence opportunities, and classes and workshops for all levels of experience. [28]
AMOCA received a donation of 3,000 books from Helen and Roger Porter in 2010. The collection focuses on ceramics, including technical handbooks, books on the history of ceramic art, and exhibitions catalogs from international and national exhibitions. The library also includes approximately 4,000 monographs and 2,000 periodicals spanning from 1883 to the present. [29]
Paul Edmund Soldner was an American ceramic artist and educator, noted for his experimentation with the 16th-century Japanese technique called raku, introducing new methods of firing and post firing, which became known as American Raku. He was the founder of the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in 1966.
Peter Voulkos was an American artist of Greek descent. He is known for his abstract expressionist ceramic sculptures, which crossed the traditional divide between ceramic crafts and fine art. He established the ceramics department at the Los Angeles County Art Institute and at UC Berkeley.
Studio pottery is pottery made by professional and amateur artists or artisans working alone or in small groups, making unique items or short runs. Typically, all stages of manufacture are carried out by the artists themselves. Studio pottery includes functional wares such as tableware and cookware, and non-functional wares such as sculpture, with vases and bowls covering the middle ground, often being used only for display. Studio potters can be referred to as ceramic artists, ceramists, ceramicists or as an artist who uses clay as a medium.
Jun Kaneko is a Japanese-born American ceramic artist known for creating large scale ceramic sculpture. Based out of a studio warehouse in Omaha, Nebraska, Kaneko primarily works in clay to explore the effects of repeated abstract surface motifs by using ceramic glaze.
Millard Owen Sheets was an American artist, teacher, and architectural designer. He was one of the earliest of the California Scene Painting artists and helped define the art movement. Many of his large-scale building-mounted mosaics from the mid-20th century are still extant in Southern California. His paintings are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, the Chicago Art Institute, the National Gallery in Washington D.C.; and the Los Angeles County Museum.
Joan Takayama-Ogawa is a sansei (third-generation) Japanese-American ceramic artist and currently professor at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, California. Takayama-Ogawa's heritage since the 15th century of Japanese ceramic art influences her work, that usually explores beauty, decoration, ornamentation and narrative while also introducing a dialogue that rejects the traditional role of women in Japanese culture. Her most recent work addresses issues like climate change.
Villeroy & Boch is a German manufacturer of ceramics, with the company headquarters located in Mettlach, Saarland.
A ceramics museum is a museum wholly or largely devoted to ceramics, usually ceramic art. Its collections may also include glass and enamel, but typically concentrate on pottery, including porcelain. Most national collections are in a more general museum covering all of the arts, or just the decorative arts. However, there are a number of specialized ceramics museums, with some focusing on the ceramics of just one country, region or manufacturer. Others have international collections, which may be centered on ceramics from Europe or East Asia or have a more global emphasis.
Rupert Deese was an American ceramic artist. He is known for innovative design and decoration of high fired ceramics. Deese wrote "It is my hope in making these vessels that as the perception of their beauty diminishes over time, they will sustain themselves by pleasant usefulness."
Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945–1980 was a scholarly initiative funded by the J. Paul Getty Trust to historicize the contributions to contemporary art history of artists, curators, critics, and others based in Los Angeles. Planned for nearly a decade, PST, as it was called, granted nearly 60 organizations throughout Southern California a total of $10 million to produce exhibitions that explored the years between 1945 and 1980. Underscoring the significance of this project, art critic Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times:
Before [PST], we knew a lot [about the history of contemporary art], and that lot tended to greatly favor New York. A few Los Angeles artists were highly visible and unanimously revered, namely Ed Ruscha and other denizens of the Ferus Gallery, that supercool locus of the Los Angeles art scene in the 1960s, plus Bruce Nauman and Chris Burden, but that was about it. After, we know a whole lot more, and the balance is much more even. One of the many messages delivered by this profusion of what will eventually be nearly 70 museum exhibitions is that New York did not act alone in the postwar era. And neither did those fabulous Ferus boys.
Patti Warashina is an American artist known for her imaginative ceramic sculptures. Often constructing her sculptures using porcelain, Warashina creates narrative and figurative art. Her works are in the collection of the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Cheryl Tall is an American visual artist whose work is primarily in the medium of sculpture and large wall installations in addition to, mixed-media, oil and acrylic painting. Tall is most notable for her intricate sculptures and her works have been in prominent and private collections all over the world. She has an MFA from the University of Miami and her present art studio is in Leucadia, CA.
Dora De Larios was an American ceramist and sculptor working in Los Angeles. She was known for her work's clean lines and distinctive glazes, as well as for her line of tableware created under her family-run company Irving Place Studio. Also a muralist working with tile, De Larios was noted for her style, which reflects mythological and pan-cultural themes.
Harrison Edward McIntosh was an American ceramic artist. He was an exponent of the Mid-century Modern style of ceramics, featuring simple symmetrical forms. His work has been exhibited in venues in the United States including the Smithsonian and internationally including at the Louvre in France.
Stephen Dixon is a British ceramic artist and Professor Emeritus at Manchester School of Art. He is also a satirist, writer, lecturer and curator. He is known mainly for his use of dark narrative and for using "illustrated ceramics pots as an unlikely platform for social commentary and political discontent." From Renaissance paintings and British politics to pop culture, Dixon draws on a variety of sources to "challenge the status quo and inspire new ways of thinking." His interests include the British satirical tradition, commemorative wares, and the development of socio-political narratives in contemporary ceramics. In 2021 Dixon was awarded the prestigious British Ceramics Biennial AWARD for his installation 'The Ship of Dreams and Nightmares'.
Chris Gustin is an American ceramicist. Gustin models his work on the human form, which is shown through the shape, color, and size of the pieces.
Donna Polseno is a contemporary American visual artist known for pottery, ceramics, and sculpture.
Nan Bangs McKinnell (1913–2012) was an American ceramicist and educator. Nan was a founding member of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts, a member of the American Craft Council College of Fellows, along with receiving several awards for her work. James "Jim" McKinnell (1919–2005), her spouse, was also a ceramicist and they made some collaborative work.
Jennifer Elizabeth Lee is a Scottish ceramic artist with an international reputation. Lee's distinctive pots are hand built using traditional pinch and coil methods. She has developed a method of colouring the pots by mixing metallic oxides into the clay before making. Her work is held in over forty museums and public collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. In 2018 Lee won the Loewe Craft Prize, an award initiated by Jonathan Anderson in 2017. The prize was presented to her at an awards ceremony at The Design Museum in London.
Chun Wen Wang is a Taiwanese-American ceramic artist living in San Diego, California in the United States. He primarily specializes in high-fired temperature liquid-in-liquid saturated glazes.