The Mud-Pie Dilemma
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The universal dream of doing work you love and earning a living at it forms the heart of this new edition of a book that has become a favorite of many potters. This fresh account updates by 25 years the classic story of Tom and Elaine Coleman and their struggles to create a successful, loving marriage and family while master potter Tom seeks to realize his extraordinary potential as a ceramic artist. The first edition of this book ended with them achieving high artistic and critical success, and low financial rewards. This new edition extends their story from 1977 to 2002, from a farmhouse and studio in Canby, Oregon, to a house with a swimming pool and studio in the desert outside Las Vegas, Nevada. A new chapter documents how their lives and work have changed and grown over a quarter-century, and 75 new photographs show the dazzling results. Tom's work achieves new heights of artistry and recognition, and Elaine emerges as a notable artist in her own right. The Mud-Pie Dilemma also provides inside information about the craft and art of working in clay--including recipes and tips for 40 of Tom's much-praised glazes.
Warren Mackenzie
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"This book is a journey through the life and work of a great American craftsman, an account of his vision and struggle. Warren MacKenzie has spent his life extending a craft tradition that draws inspiration from the great potter Bernard Leach in Britain, the mingei movement of postwar Japan, and traditional American crafts. His work - exhibited in major museums across the United States and featured in art publications throughout the world - represents a successful pioneering effort to establish contemporary craft as a form of expression equal to any of the fine arts." "Through the lucid prose of David Lewis and the stunning photography of Peter Lee we enter into the inner sanctum of the artist's life. We are there during the inspirational years of his apprenticeship with Bernard Leach in Cornwall. We are there in his workshop in Minnesota, watching as he brings a ball of clay to life, spins a shapeless wet mass into a glistening tower of a vase. We are there in his home as the artist succinctly places pottery - and indeed, the whole array of hand-made objects - into a new and meaningful context for the nineties."--Jacket.
American Ceramics
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"In American Ceramics: 1876 to the present, the noted ceramics authority Garth Clark gives us the most richly illustrated, up-to-the minute, and comprehensive publication on the history and triumph of our most tactile art. With a text that elegantly marries cultural history to critical analysis, Clark reveals, decade by decade, how American ceramics emerged from an incipient art-pottery movement in the late nineteenth century to its position of international preeminence in the last thirty-five years. Clark's cogent narrative and aesthetic insights are illuminated by more than one hundred color and 140 black-and-white reproductions, which enable us to see afresh the full range of imagery and forms--pottery, sculpture, events, and environments--that American artists have created with clay during the past one hundred eleven years. We are informed of the divers achievements of more than two hundred artists, from the pioneering potters Mary Louise McLaughlin, Maria Longworth Nichols, and, later, Adelaide Alsop Robineau, and the maverick George Ohr to such contemporary figures as Peter Voulkos, Robert Arneson, Kenneth Price, Jim Melchert, Betty Woodman, Viola Frey, Beatrice Wood, and Adrian Saxe. This encyclopedic work concludes with an extensive chronology of ceramic milestone, a list of significant exhibitions, and more than 170 biographical essays illustrated with photographs of the artists. The bibliography is the most comprehensive ever compiled on American ceramics and includes 1,200 entries indexed by both subject and artist." -- Publisher's description
Contents
1876 -- 1890 -- 1900 -- 1910 -- 1920 -- 1930 -- 1940 -- 1950 -- 1960 -- 1970 -- 1980.
American Potters
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Introduction -- Transformation and inheritance: the traditions and aesthetics of contemporary American ceramics -- American potters; the work of twenty modern masters: Rudy Autio, Val Cushing, William Daley, Richard DeVore, Kenneth Ferguson, Michael Frimkess, John Glick, Karen Karnes, Warren MacKenzie, Ron Nagle, Kenneth Price, Jerry Rothman, Paul Soldner, Rudolf Staffel, Susanne Stephenson, Toshiko Takaezu, Robert Turner, Peter Voulkos, Beatrice Wood, Betty Woodman.
The Invisible Core
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Life and reflections of a woman artist and craftsman who has lived and worked in northern California for more than thirty years.
The Art of Toshiko Takaezu
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Tracing the artistic development of renowned potter Toshiko Takaezu (1922-2011), this masterful study celebrates and analyzes an artist who held a significant place in the post-World War II craft movement in America. Born in Hawaii of Japanese descent in 1922, Takaezu worked actively in clay, fiber, and bronze for over sixty years. Influenced by midcentury modernism, her work transformed from functional vessels to abstract sculptural forms and installations. Over the years, continued to draw on a combination of Eastern and Western techniques and aesthetics, as well as her love of the natural world. In particular, Takaezu's vertical closed forms became a symbol of her work, created through a combination of wheel-throwing and hand-building techniques that allowed her to grow her vessels vertically and eased the circular restrictions of the wheel. In addition to her art, Takaezu was renowned for her teaching, including twenty years at Princeton University. This beautifully illustrated book offers the first scholarly analysis of Takaezu's life work and includes essays by Paul Smith, director emeritus of the American Craft Museum, and Janet Koplos, former senior editor of Art in America. Jack Lenor Larsen, a textile designer, author, collector, and advocate of traditional and contemporary craftsmanship, provides a foreword.
Windward Community College Library