The California Clay Movement (or American Clay Revolution) was a school of ceramic art that emerged in California in the 1950s. [1] The movement was part of the larger transition in crafts from "designer-craftsman" to "artist-craftsman". The editor of Craft Horizons , New York-based Rose Slivka, became an enthusiastic advocate of the movement. [2]
Peter Voulkos was one of the movement's driving forces. He established the Ceramic Center at the Los Angeles County Art Institute (now the Otis College of Art and Design), where he created massive, abstract ceramic sculptures. [1] He felt that his free-form ceramic works were like jazz compositions: improvisational and free spirited. [3] Voulkos began creating ever larger ceramic works to break away from the conventional arts and crafts of his day. Some of his work, named "plates", "ice buckets" or "tea bowls", were "deconstructed" traditional forms of glazed pottery. Others, such as his "stacks", were non-utilitarian and purely sculptural. During a career that lasted almost half a century, Voulkos made over 200 "stacks", some as much as 2 metres (6 ft 7 in) in height. [4] Writing about the clay movement in 1963, a reviewer in Time said "Peter Voulkos' rough, ragged monuments are powerful weapons against the slick coffee-table pottery that often passes for modern art, and already a generation of fierce West Coast individualists has joined him at the barricades." [5]
Voulkos profoundly influenced John Mason, Kenneth Price [1] and Paul Soldner. [6] Voulkos turned the Los Angeles County Art Institute into an important center for ceramic art between 1954 and 1959. Moving to the University of California in Berkeley he and sculptors such as Sidney Gordon and Harold Paris developed an influential school of sculpture. His pupils included Kenneth Price, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Arneson, Nancy Selvin and Stan Bitters. [4] The work of Voulkos, Arneson and others typified Californian art in the 1950s and 1960s, and was featured in many exhibitions. [7]
Stephen De Staebler was another influential sculptor working mostly in clay and bronze who has been associated with the California Clay movement. [8] A reviewer said of him that "He practically invented his own art form by beating and buckling tons of clay into awesome mountainous landscapes, but his human sculptures are also very moving." [9] Michael Frimkess is another master of the California clay movement. [10] Frimkess was a student of Peter Voulkos, and adopted the abstract expressionist style of sculpture taught by Voulkos. [11] In 2014, Frimkess received the Career Achievement Award from the Hammer Museum. [12]
Voulkos had huge influence, not just on potters and sculptors but even on painters. [4] Awareness of the movement quickly spread. In 1959 the Guyanese artist Donald Locke obtained a grant to study for a master's degree in fine arts at Edinburgh College of Art, a school in the University of Edinburgh. There he met the artists Dave Cohen, Sheldon Kaganof and Dion Myers, who introduced the ideas of the California Clay Movement to Britain. For many years his work reflected their influence. [13]
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.
Jun Kaneko is a Japanese-born American ceramic artist known for crating 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.
American craft is craft work produced by independent studio artists working with traditional craft materials and processes. Examples include wood, glass, clay (ceramics), textiles, and metal (metalworking). Studio craft works tend to either serve or allude to a functional or utilitarian purpose, although they are just as often handled and exhibited in ways similar to visual art objects.
John Mason was an American artist who did experimental work with ceramics. Mason's work focused on exploring the physical properties of clay and its "extreme plasticity". One of a group of artists who had studied under the pioneering ceramicist Peter Voulkos, he created wall reliefs and expressionistic sculptures, often on a monumental scale.
Robert Carston Arneson was an American sculptor and professor of ceramics in the Art department at University of California, Davis for nearly three decades.
Kenneth Price was an American artist who predominantly created ceramic sculpture. He studied at the Chouinard Art Institute and Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, before receiving his BFA degree from the University of Southern California in 1956. He continued his studies at Chouinard Art Institute in 1957 and received an MFA degree from New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 1959. Kenneth Price studied ceramics with Peter Voulkos at Otis and was awarded a Tamarind Fellowship.
Robert Brady (1946–present) is an American modernist sculptor who works in ceramics and wood. Born in Reno, Nevada, he has made his home in the San Francisco Bay Area for many decades. Brady is a multi-faceted artist who works in ceramics, wood, painting, and illustration, and is best known for his abstract figurative sculptures. Brady came out of the California Clay movement, and the Bay Area Arts scene of the 1950s and 1960s, which includes artists such as Peter Voulkos, Viola Frey, Stephen de Staebler, and Robert Arneson who was his mentor and teacher in college.
Funk art is an American art movement that was a reaction against the nonobjectivity of abstract expressionism. An anti-establishment movement, Funk art brought figuration back as subject matter in painting again rather than limiting itself to the non-figurative, abstract forms that abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko were depicting. The movement's name was derived from the jazz musical term "funky", describing the passionate, sensuous, and quirky. During the 1920s, jazz was thought of as very basic, unsophisticated music, and many people believed Funk was an unrefined style of art as well. The term funk also had negative connotations because the word had an association with a foul odor. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Funk was a popular art form, mainly in California's Bay Area in the United States. Although discussed as a cohesive movement, Funk artists did not feel as if they belonged to a collective art style or group. This is because while its artists shared the same attitudes and created similar works, they were not necessarily working together.
Stephen De Staebler was an American sculptor, printmaker, and educator, he was best recognized for his work in clay and bronze. Totemic and fragmented in form, De Staebler's figurative sculptures call forth the many contingencies of the human condition, such as resiliency and fragility, growth and decay, earthly boundedness and the possibility for spiritual transcendence. An important figure in the California Clay Movement, he is credited with "sustaining the figurative tradition in post-World War II decades when the relevance and even possibility of embracing the human figure seemed problematic at best."
Ruby Rose Neri is an American artist based in Los Angeles, California. She was born and raised in California's Bay Area, drawing creative influence from her parents and their friends. Her father is Manuel Neri, a prolific sculptor associated with the Bay Area Figurative Movement, and her mother, Susan Neri, is a graphic designer. Neri is both a painter and a sculptor, and has worked with a wide array of materials including clay, plaster, bronze, steel, fiberglass, glaze, acrylic, oil, and spray paint.[8] Lately, Neri has focused her practice and is primarily making clay sculpture.[7] Her work is based in abstraction and figuration, drawing inspiration from Bay Area Figuration, German Expressionism, graffiti, and folk art. Neri uses horses as a common motif in her work, which serves as a personal symbol of her youth.
Annabeth Rosen is an American sculptor best known for abstract ceramic works, as well as drawings. She is considered part of a second generation of Bay Area ceramic artists after the California Clay Movement, who have challenged ceramic traditions involving expression, form and function and helped spur the medium's acceptance in mainstream contemporary sculpture. Rosen's sculptures range from monumental to tabletop-sized, and emerge out of an accumulative bricolage process combining dozens or hundreds of fabricated parts and clay fragments and discards. Reviewers characterize her art as deliberately raw, both muscular and unapologetic feminine, and highly abstract yet widely referential in its suggestions of humanoid, botanical, aquatic, artificial, even science-fictional qualities. Critic Kay Whitney wrote that her work is "visceral in its impact, violent even, but also sensual and evocative" and "floats between the poles of the comic and the mordant."
Viola Frey was an American artist working in sculpture, painting and drawing, and professor emerita at California College of the Arts. She lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area and was renowned for her larger-than-life, colorfully glazed clay sculptures of men and women, which expanded the traditional boundaries of ceramic sculpture.
Stan Bitters is an American ceramics sculptor whose work was instrumental in shaping the organic modernist movement in the 1960s. His work has achieved international recognition and is a staple in many modern design and art shows, and has been featured in the prestigious California Design series and at the Craft and Folk Art Museum as part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980.
The American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA) is an art museum for ceramic art, located in Pomona, California. Founded in 2003 as a nonprofit organization, the museum exhibits historic and contemporary ceramic artwork from both its permanent collection of 10,000 objects and through temporary rotating exhibitions.
Victor Cicansky, CM, SOM, is a Canadian sculptor known for his witty narrative ceramics and bronze fruits and vegetables. A founder of the Regina Clay Movement, Cicansky combined a "wry sense of style" with a postmodern "aesthetic based on place and personal experience". In recognition of his work, Cicansky was appointed member of the Order of Canada (2009) and the Saskatchewan Order of Merit (1997), and was awarded the Saskatchewan Lieutenant-Governor's Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts (2012), the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal (2012), as well as the Victoria and Albert Award for Ceramic Sculpture. His work is found in the National Gallery of Canada, Gardiner Museum, Burlington Art Centre, Confederation Centre Art Gallery, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, and the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto (Japan).
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.
Michelle Gregor is a San Francisco-based figurative sculptor. She works in mid-fire stoneware ceramic and porcelain.
Michael Frimkess is an American ceramic artist who lives in Venice, California. In the 1950s and 60s, he was a pupil of Peter Voulkos, a prominent figure in the California Clay Movement. Frimkess' pottery is noted for its classical style, employing forms from Greek, Chinese, and Indigenous American antiquity. His wife and collaborator, Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, paints his ceramic pieces often using anachronistic, contemporary images like Minnie Mouse or Condorito. He is also well-known for his innovative wheel-throwing and firing techniques.
Citations
Sources