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
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
For a Manifesto of the New Ceramics by
This volume comprises a manifesto on contemporary ceramic production arising from a series of six talks on 20th-century ceramics given at Fondazione ICA Milano in 2022, which aimed to depict a panorama of the medium through the work of 23 artists.
Call Number: SMFA: NK4103 .P47 2022
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
Radical Clay by
A diverse selection of contemporary ceramic work by Japanese women, featuring stunning pieces from virtuosic artists Since World War II, women artists from Japan have made influential contributions to ceramics that have been inadequately acknowledged. This catalogue focuses on thirty-six ceramists who have produced original and technically innovative pieces over the past fifty years while working outside the male-dominated, traditional Japanese studio practice and its countermovements. Both established and emerging artists with diverse styles are presented together to showcase their collective achievements and impact. After embarking on their careers decades ago, Mishima Kimiyo (b. 1932), Tsuboi Asuka (b. 1932), and Ogawa Machiko (b. 1946) continue to produce groundbreaking sculpture that pushes the limits of the clay as a medium. Among the younger artists featured are Konno Tomoko (b. 1965) and Aoki Katsuyo (b. 1972), whose works explore themes ranging from bodily distortion to fantastical decoration. Many of these creators have resisted gendered expectations, whether by approaching traditionally "feminine" subjects like flowers in unconventional ways or by working in so-called masculine modes, including on large scales. All of the selected pieces are from the exemplary private collection of Carol and Jeffrey Horvitz, who have advocated strongly to bring these artists to global attention. Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago Exhibition Schedule: Art Institute of Chicago (December 16, 2023-June 3, 2024) John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida (July 27, 2024-May 11, 2025) Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (June 13-August 31, 2025)
Call Number: SMFA: NK4167.7 .R33 2023
Raven Halfmoon: Flags of Our Mothers by
The first monograph on Raven Halfmoon's dramatic, monumental sculptures exploring Caddo Nation heritage and feminism Born and raised in Norman, Oklahoma, Raven Halfmoon (born 1991) learned traditional ceramic techniques as a teenager from a Caddo elder. Her celebrated practice spans torso-scaled to colossal stoneware sculptures, with some soaring up to nine feet and weighing over 1,000 pounds. These dramatic totemic works reference stories of the Caddo, the feminist lineage of indigenous artmaking and the complexities of her lived experience. Produced in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name, co-organized by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Flags of Our Mothers presents work made over the last five years, including some of the artist's largest sculptures to date. Fully illustrated with texts by the co-curators and a new commissioned poem by Kinsale Drake, this publication marks Halfmoon's first museum catalog.
Call Number: SMFA: NB237.H237 A4 2023
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
Toshiko Takaezu by
An expansive look at the multifaceted American artist Toshiko Takaezu within the history of postwar artmaking Toshiko Takaezu (1922-2011) was an American artist whose multidisciplinary work in ceramics, painting, sculpture, weaving, and installation innovatively drew from the natural world, combining expressionist energies with influences from East Asia. The closed ceramic forms for which she is best known are effectively abstract paintings in the round. Her reputation as a ceramic artist, however, has obscured the breadth of her output in other mediums and her role within the larger art movements of the twentieth century. This book provides the first retrospective assessment of Takaezu's art and life, representing her diverse oeuvre, which spanned six decades, and her hybrid identity as an Asian American woman, artist, and teacher. This ambitious volume features essays exploring Takaezu's biography, her background as a Hawai'i-born artist of Okinawan heritage, the relationship between her abstract work and that of her contemporaries, the role of cultural exchange in her art, her impact as an educator, and more. Beautifully illustrated with nearly 300 images of artworks and archival photographs, and including an updated chronology, exhibition history, and recollections from the artist's former apprentices, the book offers a compelling and comprehensive account of this singular artist's career. Published in association with The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum Exhibition Schedule: The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York (March 20-July 28, 2024) Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI (September 11, 2024-January 12, 2025) Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (March 2-May 18, 2025) Chazen Museum of Art (September 8-December 23, 2025) Honolulu Museum of Art (February 13-July 26, 2026)
Call Number: SMFA: NK4210.T26 A4 2024
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
