Recommended Databases
SMFA Print Periodicals
- Ceramics monthlyPrint issues available at the SMFA Library
SMFA Online Periodicals
- Ceramics technicalOnline issues
- Ceramics internationalOnline issues
- Glass and ceramicsOnline issues
- Advances in applied ceramicsOnline issues
- Studio potterOnline issues
- Journal of the American Ceramic SocietyOnline issues
- Ceramics monthlyOnline issues
Want to browse the stacks? Look at these call numbers
| NK3710 - 4670 | Ceramics |
| NK4210 | Individual potters |
| NK4670 | Tiles |
| TT919.5 – 924 | Pottery craft |
Books about Ceramics
AfterGlow by
This publication, the result of a Scandinavian collaborative project undertaken by 13 ceramic artists, offers insights into the important industrial and design histories of northern Europe, as well as into today's use of porcelain as an artistic medium.
Call Number: SMFA: NK4513 .A38 2022
The Art of Kintsugi by
Beauty in imperfection! Learn the ancient Japanese art of kintsugi and understand why, in the way of kintsugi artists, broken is better than new. This is your guide to putting the pieces back together to restore broken plates, vases, and other ceramics and glass items to be even better than before. Starting with repairing a simple dent or crack, you'll gain the skills to reconstruct goblets, vases, plates, spherical objects, and statues. Transform your broken pieces and heirlooms or create new works of art and wearable art with this method. Explore kintsugi's fascinating origins in 1400s Japan, its history, and its philosophy, along with ways to push the boundaries for your creations today. As you repair ceramic and glass objects--kintsugi works both for precious and thrift-store-level items--you'll learn the traditional methods as well as modern methods not taught elsewhere. You'll soon appreciate why kintsugi is the only Japanese art form that has taken a spiritual philosophy as its very purpose.
Call Number: NK4233 .K58 2020
Clay Pop by
Clay Pop documents the reinvention of ceramic sculpture by a new generation of artists. A medium that has often been characterized as more craft than art, clay is now an exciting platform for formal and conceptual innovation. Traditionally diverged from engagement with popular culture, clay is now adding a new dimension to Pop Art. Paralleling current concerns in painting, many of the thirty-eight artists featured in Clay Pop are also exploring issues of gender, race, and identity, using clay in novel ways to engage with social issues. Artists are employing the medium to create a personal narrative, pushing clay beyond the confines of craft and design. Much of the new work is exuberant and figurative, expanding on how the medium of clay has been traditionally used. Glazes are especially colorful, reflecting a range of influences that encompass vernacular commercial imagery and artistic sources from African American assemblage to Walt Disney. Funk art from 1970s Northern California is a source, as is the work of Pop artists like Claes Oldenburg. Some of the artists also draw on artistic influences from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Sections on each of the forty featured artists include a profile on their ceramic practice, images of their work, and a biography. The introduction describes the artists' interconnected community while two longer essays place the work, mostly created in the past five years, in the context of the histories of Pop Art and ceramics.
Call Number: SMFA: NK3712.N49 J443 2023
Erwin Wurm by
* The newest series of works by renowned artist Erwin Wurm* First book about Wurm's ceramic oeuvreGestural sculptures formed in ceramics are the focus of Erwin Wurm: Dissolution. Wurm's anthropomorphic ceramic sculptures, their forms oscillating between the ephemeral and the physical, are characterized by performative gestures. They affirm the inherent plasticity of the material clay, recalling the potency of bozzetti, in which artists from the Renaissance onwards were able to give direct expression to their innermost creative ideas. In Dissolution (2018-2020), Wurm sets out in search of a creative process that cannot be completely controlled. "Dissolution" has connotations of disintegration, decay, decomposition, and vanishing boundaries. The sculptures -- with their protruding fingers, hands, lips, mouths, breasts, bellies, noses, and ears -- force their way out of a clay mass. Text in English and German.
Call Number: SMFA: N6811.5.W87 A4 2021
Form and Relation by
""Form and Relation: Contemporary Native Ceramics" was published to coincide with an exhibition of the same title held at the Hood Museum of Art from March 14 through August 9, 2020. A loan exhibition supported the Diversifying Art Museum Leadership Initiative from the Walton Family Foundation and the Ford Foundation, Form and Relation will showcase the versatility of ceramics and the many forms it takes through the hands of six Indigenous artists from various regions within what is now the United States. Featuring the innovative and critical works of Anita Fields, Courtney Leonard, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Ruben Olguin, Rose Simpson, and Roxanne Swentzell, Form and Relation aims to shift expectations, introduce new forms, and demonstrate how ceramics are capable of holding the complexity of concepts like community, identity, gender, land, extraction, language, and responsibility"-- Provided by publisher.
Call Number: SMFA Library: NK4028.3.A4 F67 2020
Funk You Too! by
The first book to connect the history of Funk Art to contemporary ceramic practice. Funk You Too! arrives at a moment when clay has unprecedented currency in the art world as a sculptural medium. It is the first book to connect the history of Funk Art to contemporary ceramic practice through an exploration of the enduring role of humor in clay image-making. The founding generation of Funk artists used forms of subversion to deflate the power of the aesthetic hierarchy that dismissed ceramics as hobby art. Today, in the hands of a younger, more diverse cohort, the irreverent approach is a powerful tool of critique and personal expression and the "spoonful of sugar" to help discuss sociopolitical concerns of our time. Showcasing over fifty works from a 2023 exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, this catalog addresses the historical context for the emergence of ceramic sculpture in 1960s Funk Art and applies a critical lens to work by its contemporary successors. The exhibition's curator, Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy, conceptually frames the exhibition's emphasis on humor as a tool for tackling personal and political themes. Garth Johnson contributes an essay on the impulse for humor in American ceramics that lead to Funk ceramics. The catalog also features biographies of the artists, color images, and a select bibliography.
Call Number: SMFA: NK4008 .F86 2023
Listening to Clay by
The first book to tell the stories of the most revered living Japanese ceramists of the century in their own words, tracing the evolution of modern and contemporary craft and art in Japan, and the artists' considerable influence, which far transcends national borders. This groundbreaking volume is the first to present conversations with the most important living Japanese ceramic artists of the last century, figures whose unparalleled skill and creative brilliance have lent them an influence that far transcends national borders. Despite forging illustrious careers and earning international recognition, these sixteen artists have customarily been subsumed by their work. Ranging in age from sixty-two to ninety-two, they embody the diverse experiences of several generations who have been active and successful from the late 1940s to the present day, a period of massive change. Now, sharing their stories for the first time, they not only describe their unique processes, inspirations, and relationships with clay, but together trace a seismic cultural shift through a field in which centuries-old but highly exclusionary potting traditions opened to new practitioners and kinds of practices; significantly, the book includes both conversations with artists born into pottery-making families, and the first women admitted to the Tokyo University of the Arts. In the process, Listening to Clay tells a larger story about ingenuity and trailblazing that has shaped contemporary art in Japan and around the world.
Call Number: SMFA: NK4200 .N67 2022
Morten løbner Espersen: Triumph and Catastrophe by
Twenty years of abstraction in clay from Denmark's leading ceramicist For Danish ceramicist Morten Løbner Espersen (born 1965), artistic triumph is as much about failing as catastrophe is about finding beauty in the unplanned. Triumph and Catastrophe, the first comprehensive view of Espersen's 20-year exploration of the vessel, offers a good measure of both.
Call Number: SMFA: NK4210.E87 A4 2021
Mur l Murs. Jacques Kaufmann, Ceramic Architecture by
Bricks, one of the earliest materials associated with both housing and the body, are the subject and object of this publication. In terms of human agency, bricks are the basic unit through which the artist introduces his designs in the landscape. Kaufmann uses this simple, yet tough, material to build up an imaginative world that is not linked solely to the bricks as such, but also to the symbolic charge they possess (the concept of transparency, physical and metaphorical walls, and their associated imaginative world). A total of ten works will be exhibited and Kaufmann himself presents each in the book. The introduction is edited by Anne-Claire Schumacher, who discusses Kaufmann's development and his place in the history of ceramic art and in contemporary art as a whole. This is followed by a contribution by Luca Pattaroni, who views the topic from a socio-political perspective. The five main works set in the park of the Ariana Museum and the continuation into the museum's basement are described and commented by the artist.
Call Number: NK4210.K38 A4 2019
Recipes for Conceptual Clay (in the Time of Covid-19)
In Spring 2020 education was transformed, more or less overnight, by the context of pandemic and isolation;
the established means by which we teach, learn and connect underwent a seismic fracture.
In response to these circumstances, Nicole developed a series of experimental and experiential exercises
that open avenues for university students, educators, and curious independent makers to emotionally and
conceptually absorb and reflect the current state of the world through the language of clay.
Each exercise is cast as a culinary recipe, which individuals can adjust or tweak according to the availability
of space, materials, tools and their own particular tastes.
Call Number: TP816.S45 R43 2020
Shapes from Out of Nowhere by
"A comprehensive overview of 20th-century non-representational ceramics from the earliest years of the modernist revolution to the postwar period through to the present, Shapes From Out of Nowhere features an unparalleled gathering of over 150 works from New York City-based collector Robert Ellison. It explores the featured artists' rejection of symmetrical, utilitarian forms in clay in favor of the sculptural and abstract, and challenges the boundaries between function, non-function, design, drawing, painting, sculpture and architecture. Built over a period of 40 years, this singular collection reflects the personal and discerning eye of a collector focused on the exploration of shape and form."-- Provided by publisher.
Call Number: SMFA Library: NK3740.E45 S53 2021
Strange Clay by
Few materials have experienced a similar revaluation in contemporary art as clay has in the past few years. This timely publication accompanies a large-scale exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London, exploring how contemporary artists are using clay and ceramics in inventive and surprising ways, and pushing the boundaries of the medium. Featuring the work of over 20 international artists-from Grayson Perry to Woody De Othello-an introductory essay by curator Cliff Lauson, a text on the history of fine art and ceramics by writer and critic Amy Sherlock, and a round table discussion with artists from the exhibition, this catalogue is a meaningful contribution to the ongoing conversation about the relationship between art and craft.
Call Number: SMFA: NK3930 .S87 2022
Wild Clay by
The ultimate illustrated guide for sourcing, processing and using wild clay. Potters around the world are taking to the local landscape to dig their own wild clay, discover its unique properties, and apply it to their craft. This guide is the ideal starting point for anyone - from novices, improvers and experts to educators and students - who wants to forge a closer bond between their art and their surroundings. Testing and trial and error are key to finding a material's best use, so the authors' tips, drawn from long experience in the US and Japan (but which can be applied to clays anywhere) provide an enviable head-start on this rewarding journey. A clay might be best suited to sculpture and tile bodies, throwing clay bodies, handbuilding and slab bodies, or simply be applied as a glaze or slip. The specific properties of found materials can create a diverse range of effects and surfaces, or, even when not fired, can be adapted for use as colorful pastels or pigments. Beautiful illustrations and helpful technical descriptions explain the formation of various clays; how to locate, collect and assess them; how to test their properties of shrinkage, water absorption, texture and plasticity; the best ways to test-fire them; and how to adapt a clay's characteristics by blending appropriate materials. From prospecting in the field to holding your finished product, there is helpful advice through every stage, and a gallery of work by international potters who have embraced the clays found around them.
Call Number: SMFA: TP808 .L489 2022
