Refined jars painted with regal dragons made in government-controlled kilns held wine or flowers during Joseon court rituals. The Chicago-born son of Korean immigrants, Steven Young Lee first learned Asian ceramic techniques in a Western education system, studying vessels like this one in books and museum collections. His reinterpretation of a ceremonial jar challenges traditional standards of perfection, elevating and exaggerating defects like drips and cracks.
Having perfected the technique of printing detailed scenes onto ceramics, potteries in England’s industrial heartland created products for an expanding consumer base in the United States. Appealing to American interests, they depicted patriotic landscapes and commemorated newsworthy tragedies like the 1835 Great Fire of New York City. The First Amendment plate memorializing newspaper editor Elijah Parish Lovejoy (1802–37) championed the Abolitionist cause for which he was killed.
Courtney M. Leonard’s sculpture is inspired by Indigenous fish baskets and fishing nets. However, her choice of delicate earthenware has rendered the form impractical and vulnerable to breakage. She relates the loss of functionality to diminished traditional food sources, advocating for the consideration of Indigenous knowledge in managing the fragile Atlantic coastal ecosystem. By contrast, the English fruit bowl would have formed the centerpiece of a fashionable dessert service.
The richly-layered surfaces on these stoneware vessels appear similar, but were produced differently. The cylindrical vase is an example of Iga ware, a virtuosic Japanese ceramic tradition requiring numerous multi-day high-temperature firings. Airborne ash in the wood-fired kilns lands on the unglazed clay, creating a variegated surface. Inspired by the textures of Japanese ceramics, Adam Silverman experimented with ways to achieve similar effects with the resources available to him in Los Angeles.
In Korean, the word “geum” means both “crack” and “gold.” In this monumental sculpture, Yeesookyung poetically engages this homonym, using the precious metal to assemble discarded shards of reproduced inlaid celadon wares. Her fascination with fragments came after she witnessed a Korean master potter destroying works he deemed imperfect.
Continuously produced since the thirteenth century, ceramics from the Bizen area in Okayama Prefecture, western Honshu (the largest Japanese island), display beautiful firing marks. The local clay is carefully guarded by potters, who have traditionally enhanced its smooth, dense texture through repeated filtering. The mottled bamboo node-shaped bottle bears a shiny glaze formed naturally through a multi-day firing. The red markings and “sesame seed” spots around the top of Wakimono Hiroyuki demonstrate the material’s receptivity to reactions within the kiln.
An Indigenous man rockets across Diego Romero’s Theater of War in this farcical response to President Donald Trump’s 2017 flirtation with a massive attack on North Korea. Romero, a self-proclaimed “chronicler of the absurdities of human nature,” draws on wide-ranging cultural references, from global pottery traditions to popular films and comic books. His precise, geometric imagery is a tribute to the centuries-old pottery of the Cochiti artist’s Mimbres ancestors.
By the time this eighteenth-century bowl was created, Chinese artisans at the imperial kilns in Jingdezhen had long ago perfected the production of porcelain. This refined example highlights the material’s translucency with incised anhua (hidden decoration), revealed only through transmitted light. Conversely, Mineo Mizuno’s recent work captures the exuberant energy of working clay, retaining the rough edges and striations of its formation.
Makers have transformed the ancient technique of applied, molded, low-relief decoration by developing innovative materials. The Dionysiac figures on the beaker from Pergamon are clearly applied since they lift slightly from the vessel at their edges. British industrial ceramics pioneer Josiah Wedgwood developed an extraordinary palette of stoneware for contrasting appliqués, creating cameo effects popularized by his quintessential white-on-powder-blue ceramics.
The underside of this West Mexican vessel reveals the fanged jaws of a personified sacred cave. This supernatural scene is part of a story of creation that unfolds across the surface, depicting the epic origins of a Mesoamerican birth and water ritual. Artists across many cultures have harnessed the sculptural features of three-dimensional ceramics to tell essential stories. Gerardo Monterrubio covers his robust porcelains with muralistic renderings, using the curves, crevices, and cracks to transition between dream-like scenes.