As a young artist, I was eager to understand the history of clay. With the exception of a few Greek vases, ceramic objects were completely absent from the art history courses that shaped my identity as an artist. Reading the work of early feminist art historians, I was hopeful that clay would be more valued as an artistic medium. However, while these historians in the 1960s and ’70s did reinstate female artists in the story of art, they did not make room for media beyond oil painting, bronze and stone sculpture, and occasionally, prints. I was hungry for information about the role of women in the production of ceramic objects around the world but found little written on the subject. By the late 1980s, my frustration again gave way to hope. The feminist critique now extended to the structure of art history and its embedded hierarchies of gender and materials. Methods of creation typically associated with women took on new life in academic studios. I noticed classmates who identified themselves as painters taking up knitting, tatting, and china painting without shame. 

Contemporary ceramics has a somewhat sordid relationship to its own history. Some makers embrace the utilitarian aspects of clay while others stress the context of fine art. Straddling the lines between art and craft, between utilitarian object and pure artistic expression, ceramists wrestle with clay’s history. Dating from as early as 10,000 BC, shards that were once clay figures, pots, and tiles connect our lives to those from the distant past. As a student of ceramics, I learned that potters were slaves in some cultures, and revered artists in others. I observed contemporaries who chose to live isolated lives far from critical discussions, and saw others climbing the stairway to art stardom all the while denying any connection between their ceramic work and mere pots. Like many classmates in the ceramics studio, I concluded that hand building was a primitive technique, and throwing on the wheel was advanced. However, it seemed that if the hand building was employed to create sculpture or a vessel, rather than a pot, and if a man did the work, the hand-built ceramic object might be labeled fine art. During my formative years, I found the language surrounding ceramics to be a minefield. Each word carried the baggage of a lesser art struggling to redefine itself. As a teacher, I need to fill in the enormous gaps remaining in the oral histories of the medium passed down by my teachers.

Moira Vincentelli’s first book, Women and Ceramics: Gendered Vessels, was a most welcome gift. Her second, Women Potters: Transforming Traditions, was icing on the cake. Vincentelli makes connections between cultures, gender politics, and the history of clay with the keen insights of a trained art historian. Her international approach cuts across conventions and allows those of us in the field to explore our medium with deeper understanding. When Laurel Bradley, Carleton College’s director of exhibitions, asked me to suggest an exhibition that might dovetail with my teaching goals, Vincentelli’s texts immediately came to mind. World Ceramics: Transforming Women’s Traditions brings together objects from many places around the world where hand-built clay objects embody both tradition and innovation. 

An exhibition is much different than a text. Three-dimensional objects command space and share secrets that cannot be revealed in pictures. However, they can also be heavy, fragile, and difficult to locate. World Ceramics highlights vessels, figurines, and ceremonial objects pulled from private and museum collections from several continents. One might question the laborious efforts required to bring these objects to Carleton College and the Northern Clay Center. I say that it is worth every effort. For those who have inhaled the smoky residue of a vessel fired in an open pit or who automatically appreciate the weight of a pot held in hand, the necessity of actual objects is clear. Scale is obscured in photographs. Intimate objects and monumental pieces can appear the same size in a text, completely negating their relationship to the human body. Two-dimensional images cannot capture the subtle variations of surface or the marks left by makers. Treatment of interior spaces is often determined by the purpose of an object. The relationship of interior and exterior space is critical to understanding the work and the culture from which it came. Tangible pieces render visible the connections between objects and people from around the world. 

At the risk of sounding like a clay evangelist, I have learned most of what I know about being human from clay. As our world becomes more digitized and technologically based, witnessing the evidence of human creation is ever more important. I am humbled by the opportunity to walk among the work of potters from across the globe, to see makers’ fingerprints fired into clay, and to share with my students and my community the knowledge held in these objects. World Ceramics: Transforming Women’s Traditions represents the culminating efforts of too many people to name individually. I am grateful to Moira for her remarkable books, to Laurel for her patience and humor in assembling this amazing collection of objects, and to all involved at the Northern Clay Center and Carleton College for their willingness to partner in this endeavor.