Where clay gets a chance to make a big impression
Ceramist Tony Marsh has been thinking big. As a professor in the art department at Cal State Long Beach, Marsh directs the school's ceramics program. With kilns capable of firing mammoth-scale works and an exhibition area that replicates a commercial gallery, it has become a magnet for students and artists who want to work in new, experimental and often large ways in clay.
So when the Scripps College Ceramic Annual chose Marsh as guest curator for the 61st showing this year, he turned to six young or mid-career ceramists, all of whom have either studied, taught or currently teach at Cal State Long Beach.
With no thematic guidelines in mind "except that the work be large and ambitious," Marsh selected David Hicks, Nina Jun, Hwa-Jin Lee, Kristen Morgin, Vince Palacios and Sun-Koo Yuh. They produced all of the show's pieces at Long Beach.
"What unifies these artists is their enormous energy and resourcefulness," Marsh says. "They also share an almost devotional internal belief in what they are doing, even though there may be no external rewards, such as a market for such large-scale work, at the end of the rainbow."
Mary MacNaughton, who directs Scripps' Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, where the exhibition is on view, says "each artist in this year's annual pushes the limits of working in clay in interesting ways."
Since 1945, the show, which is billed as the oldest running annual ceramics exhibition in the United States, has chronicled ceramics' evolution.
Though it has featured artists from around the world, it has not ignored California art history -- especially during the early 1950s, when artists such as Peter Voulkos, Paul Soldner, John Mason and Susan Peterson led a Southern California-based revolution in clay that expanded ceramics from a crafts medium into the realm of fine art and sculpture. All have exhibited in different annuals.
Since its inception, the Scripps ceramic annual has been an "artist's choice" exhibition, meaning that prominent ceramists have served as the shows' curators.
Soldner, who taught for many years at Scripps College, chose the artists from 1959 until his retirement in 1991. In 1996, MacNaughton began inviting a different guest curator each year.
"We're interested in presenting a distinctive point of view in the field of ceramics each year," she says, "and Tony brought that to us in his proposal."
