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Current Exhibitions
Architecture and Ceramics: Material, Structure, Vision
Galleries M and A
May 9 – June 29
Guest-curated by University of Minnesota Professor Robert Silberman, Architecture and Ceramics will explore relationships among clay and design, buildings and ideas through functional and non-functional works in clay as well as architectural drawings.
A reception for the artists will be held May 9, 6 – 8 pm.
Gallery M will feature work by Dan Anderson (Illinois), Lidya Buzio (New York), Nora Naranjo-Morse (New Mexico), and Robert Winokur (Pennsylvania). Gallery A will house an exhibition featuring vessels by William Daley (Pennsylvania), as well as architectural drawings from a collaborative project between Bill and his son Thomas Daley (Pennsylvania), an architect. These drawings document the project they created for the opening of the new museum Clayarch in Gimhae, Korea, which is devoted to architectural ceramics.
In Professor Silberman's words: “Architecture and vessel-making share a central concern with structure and the enclosure of space…. In both architecture and ceramics the physical is essential, but not all: it is the visual appearance and the activities served, as much as any shared physicality, that defines the significance of buildings and ceramic vessels. The kinship between architecture and ceramics is ultimately a matter of their shared connection with human use and human life.” Silberman also plans to include photographs of historical pots in the shapes of buildings, from China and England.
While Anderson has made pots in many forms, his best-known—and those featured in this exhibition—are vessels and teapots that refer to industrial structures such as factories, oil storage tanks and water towers. These wood fired pots appear as memorials to industrial architecture, with their subtle, aged surfaces and archaic shapes.
A sculptor of painted surfaces, for twenty-five years Buzio created cityscapes of downtown New York, portrayed on the surfaces of wildly shaped ceramic vessels. Working conceptually, she creates the sculptural form that will best address the landscape that she wishes to paint.
Naranjo-Morse uses the various media in which she works, including clay, to make social comments on the lives of contemporary Native women. She constructs sculptural installations that incorporate forms and ideas from traditional southwestern forms. She also creates figurative work that comments both ironically and humorously on ideas of Native Americans held by western cultures.
Winokur's houses distill the essential elements of domestic architecture into almost abstract geometric forms, but with enough reference points—peaked roof, chimney, windows, doors—to clearly mark them as houses.
Participating artists Winokur and Morse will present slide lectures the evening before the exhibition opens. (Please see page 17 for additional details.)
The architectural project displayed in Gallery A shows the collaboration between the Daleys father and son to design a (hypothetical) new building for Northern Clay Center modeled on one of Bill Daley's pots. Daley's geometric vessels explore the synthesis between interior and exterior, volume and surface, and form and symbol. Their unglazed surfaces accentuate architectural space and rhythm; they appear as ceremonial vessels that refer to sacred space and myth. Tom Daley has an extensive architecture practice, which has focused on designing schools and churches. He and his father have collaborated on sculptural installations in the past.
The Daleys will participate in a conversation about their respective approaches to creative design and problem-solving, and about their collaboration. Bill Daley will also present a workshop for art educators. Both of these events will be on Saturday, following the opening of the exhibition. (Please see page 17 for additional details.)
In addition to the exhibition of pots and sculpture at NCC, Professor Silberman has worked with the University of Minnesota School of Architecture to put together an exhibition of photographs of historical terra cotta from early twentieth-century buildings and decorative ceramics from Persia, along with images of adobe buildings from the Southwest and clay structures from West Africa. This exhibition of photographs will be installed in the HGA Gallery in Rapson Hall, 89 Church Street in Minneapolis, and will open Friday, May 23.
Northern Clay Center will publish a catalogue of the exhibition, with an essay by Professor Silberman. The catalogue and the exhibition are made possible with the generous support of several donors to NCC’s exhibitions program: Continental Clay Company, Frances and George Reid, and the Windgate Foundation.
Dan Anderson (1945, Minnesota) is a native of St. Paul. He received his B.S. in Art Education from the University of Wisconsin – River Falls in 1968 and his M.F.A. from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan in 1970. He headed the ceramic program at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville from 1976 until his retirement in August 2002. Anderson has lectured and demonstrated at over 150 venues in the past four decades, including Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Penland School, Anderson Ranch, Watershed and Arrowmont School. He has received numerous awards, from the National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council, the Ford Foundation, and others. Anderson's work is represented in major galleries across the United States, and in numerous private and permanent collections. He has been wood firing for over thirty years, now in his “mounds” anagama wood kiln, which he fires at his rural Edwardsville studio twice a year.
Lidya Buzio (1948, Uruguay) has lived and worked in New York for the past 30 years, creating ceramic sculptures and hanging wood assemblages that twist and juxtapose the structures and light of New York City on their surfaces and in their forms. Now, after several years of living in the countryside, Buzio's landscapes reflect the water and sky of the North Fork of Long Island. She studied ceramics in Montevideo with the Torres-García family, particularly José Collell, where she developed her distinctive techniques for creating clay sculpture from earthenware slabs formed into shapes made from curved patterns. She has shown her work extensively in this country and internationally; her work is in collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Smithsonian National Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Nelson-Atkins; Everson; Victoria & Albert, London; Taiwan National Museum; and many other museums and private collections.
Thomas Daley (1956, New York) received a B.A. in 1981 from Temple University in Philadelphia. He has been a practicing architect in Philadelphia since then, with an emphasis on schools and churches. Daley's buildings have received awards from the Philadelphia Chapter of the AIA; he has been active in professional societies and in informal educational work.
William Daley (1925, New York) is known not only for his extraordinary ceramic work, but also for a vibrant teaching career; he was awarded the College Art Association of America Distinguished Teaching of Art Award in 1991. Part of the generation to benefit from the G.I. Bill, Daley received his B.S. from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1950, and his M.A. in art education from Columbia University in 1951, after which he taught at the Philadelphia College of Art and Design for more than thirty years. He has received many awards for his art and his teaching, including from the National Endowment for the Arts, American Craft Council, College Art Association, James Renwick Alliance, and Maine College of Art. He was named a Regis Master by NCC in 1997. His list of exhibitions, both solo and group, is extensive, including a traveling retrospective and catalogue in 1993; his work is in major museum and private collections both in the US and abroad.
Nora Naranjo-Morse (1953, New Mexico) is a Tewa Pueblo Indian from Santa Clara Pueblo, whose extended family includes many notable artists and scholars. She is a sculptor, writer and producer of films that look at the continuing social changes within Pueblo culture. Naranjo-Morse is best known for her work in clay. While her forms convey an aesthetic that is non-traditional, the content of her work is always rooted in issues that concern her community. Her work often reflects the tensions of producing art for a Western art market that consistently praises its innovative approach while, at the same, marginalizes it as "native" art. In 2007, she completed a major commission on the grounds of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., which includes five sculptures made of clay and other materials intended to erode over time.
Robert Winokur (1933, New York) received an M.F.A. from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, and a B.F.A. from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania. He was professor of ceramics at Tyler from 1966 to 2005. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and in 2002 was named to the American Crafts Council College of Fellows. His work has been exhibited in many group and individual exhibitions across the country, and is in private and museum collections both in this country and abroad, including Switzerland, China, the Netherlands, and Hungary.
Pictured above:
William Daley, Nuptial Vesica, earthenware; Dan Anderson, Purina Chows Tea Set, 2007, soda-fired stoneware with ceramic decals, 11" x 10" x 8"; Robert Winokur, The Other Side of the House, 2001, salt-glazed brick clay, 11" x 23" x 13" (in three elements).