For much of human history, the ancient medium of ceramics may have been associated, as much as anything, with Ming vases, women’s work, decorative arts, and humble utilitarian objects. Yet the art form has experienced an incredible resurgence in recent decades. A new generation of artists is exploring innovative takes on the art form, and museums around the world are highlighting these novel approaches.
Ceramics as a form of craft goes back centuries, with Chinese pottery dating as far back as the Paleolithic era. The ancient Greeks are known as much for their pottery as for their sculpture and architecture. Today, collectors go gaga for ancient Chinese vases and the like: In 2014, Shanghai buyer Liu Yiqian shelled out a record $36 million for a so-called chicken cup from the Ming Dynasty that was called a holy grail—despite being just 3 inches in diameter.
When the Dutch East India Company brought Chinese treasures to Western shores in the 17th century, makers like Meissen in Germany and Sèvres in France rose up to serve the European market.
While ceramics have remained a cornerstone in the sector more commonly deemed craft, artists in the fine-art realm have paid increasing attention to it, starting in the mid-20th century. Hugely influential was Greek-American artist Peter Voulkos (1924-2002), who established ceramics departments at both the Los Angeles County Art Institute (now the Otis College of Art and Design) and the University of California at Berkeley. He taught major figures from the next generation, including Ken Price (1935-2012), a retrospective of whose work toured major American museums starting in 2013, and Ron Nagle (b. 1939), who earned a berth in the 2013 Venice Biennale. Also beloved from their generation is Betty Woodman (1930-2018); she was the subject of the first show for a living woman artist at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, in 2006.
International museums have also recently mounted major group shows devoted to the medium. London’s Hayward Gallery organized the 2022-23 exhibition “Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art,” which included Price and Woodman along with a new generation, such as Woody De Othello and Brie Ruais. “Funk You Too! Humor and Irreverence in Ceramic Sculpture” at New York’s Museum of Arts2 and Design (2023) united artists from the West Coast 1960s Funk generation with artists carrying on their subversive spirit, including Viola Frey from the former and, from the latter, Genesis Belanger and Ruby Neri. And from 2021-2023, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), in North Adams, showed “Ceramics in the Expanded Field,” featuring artists such as Francesca DiMattio, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, and Kahlil Robert Irving.
“The major turn toward ceramics in the past two decades is in great part due to a change in reception—by curators, museums, art historians, and art audiences,” said Susan Cross, curator of the MASS MoCA show, in an email. “Although artists have worked in clay for hundreds of years—for millennia actually—in the modern era (in the West), ceramics have been traditionally siloed as craft and undervalued. Ingrid Schaffer and Jenelle Porter’s 2009 exhibition ‘Dirt on Delight’ at the ICA, Philadelphia marked a shift. Featuring ceramic works by several generations of artists in a contemporary museum was called groundbreaking by [New York Times critic] Roberta Smith.
“Far from being siloed, clay is now integrated into practices that include video, painting, printmaking, etc.” she added. “Yet as the world is becoming more and more abstract, more digital, I also think the immediacy, the tactility of clay seems particularly appealing. It is simultaneously strong and fragile, contemporary and primordial, familiar and also so much about transformation.”
Some of the most interesting artists of our day are working in ceramics, expressing ideas about craft, high vs. low art, identity, and art history through this form. Here’s a far-from-comprehensive, alphabetically arranged roundup of some of the most acclaimed practitioners of the medium today, all born since 1970 and earning attention for their work in the press, in galleries, and at major museum exhibitions around the globe.
Jessica Stoller
Womanhood and women’s bodies come in for scrutiny in the work of Jessica Stoller, who mines the concept of the grotesque as a way to challenge the patriarchy, while also engaging in the aesthetic of the Rococo in their embrace of ornament, as Katie White pointed out for Artnet News following a studio visit timed to Stoller’s most recent solo outing at New York gallery P·P·O·W.
Political and social concerns are high on the artist’s agenda. “My whole adult life has been reeducating myself,” Stoller told White. “When Roe was overturned it put me on this trajectory of wanting to know more about where this deep-seated misogyny and othering come from.”
Stoller, based in West New York, New Jersey, will be in a group show this year at Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, Michigan, and has appeared in solo and group exhibitions at top New York galleries like P·P·O·W, Anton Kern, and Sargent’s Daughters, as well as Vielmetter in Los Angeles and Brigitte Mulholland in Paris, and institutions such as Fondation Carmignac, Hyères, France. She earned a BFA at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan, and an MFA at the Cranbrook Academy of Design, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Her work resides in two collections in Wisconsin: that of the Kohler Company, in Kohler, and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, in Sheboygan.