Voulkos & Co. Newsletter: Exhibitions in 2007-2008

Past Exhibitions	Exhibitions in 2007 & 2008	Current Exhibitions
2007 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999 1998	solo: Peter Voulkos: Clay into Bronze. From Clay to Bronze: Selected Works by Peter Voulkos.	group: Masters In Clay. Within Two Hands: The Eye of the Collector. One Piece. The Scholar’s Eye: Contemporary Ceramics from the Garth Clark and Mark Del Vecchio Collection. Picasso to Moore: Modern Sculpture from the Weiner Collection. A Legacy of Art: The Ted and Ruth Nash Collection. Shy Boy, She Devil, and Isis: The Art of Conceptual Craft: Selections from the Wornick Collection. Craft in America: Expanding Traditions. Artists of Invention: A Century of CCA. One of a Kind: The Studio Craft Movement.

Untitled Plate, 1993
Photo: schoppleinstudio.com

Masters In Clay

For their spring and summer season, Grounds for Sculpture presented an exhibition of clayworks called Masters in Clay by seven internationally known artists. Peter Voulkos and Toshiko Takaezu sculptures were on view in the Museum Building and works by Peter Callas, Paul Chaleff, Robert B. Cooke, Takao Okazaki and Rudolph Serra were on display in the Domestic Arts Building. Located in Hamilton Township, New Jersey on the site of the former New Jersey State Fairgrounds, Grounds for Sculpture is a 35-acre public sculpture park and museum that was founded in 1992 by J. Seward Johnson with an emphasis on contemporary sculpture. Voulkos’ works in the show included approximately ten plates that demonstrated the transition in his work from a 1973 gas fired plate with porcelain “pass-throughs” to his early 1980s wood fired plates to the mid-90s wood fired versions culminating in a 2000 wood fired plate along with singular examples of his ice bucket and stack forms. Pictured at left is a 21-inch diameter plate Voulkos made in Norway in 1993 at the “Keramikk-Ringebu” workship held in conjunction with the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer. Wood fired there in Torbjorn Kvasbo’s kiln and in addition to Voulkos’s markings and manipulaton of the form, it also reflects the unique qualities and characteristics of the particular kiln in which it was fired.

Opening May 10th, the exhibition continued through September 28, 2008. The Voulkos works in this show were on loan courtesy of the Charles Cowles Gallery in New York. For more information about the exhibit and the sculpture park, please contact Grounds for Sculpture or telephone 609-586-0616.

Covered Jar, 1956
Photo: schoppleinstudio.com

Within Two Hands: The Eye of the Collector

Opening May 9, 2008, the San Francisco Museum of Craft + Design displayed a selection of works from the Marer Collection of Contemporary Ceramics. entitled Within Two Hands: The Eye of the Collector. Fred Marer was a mathematics professor at Los Angeles City College who began collectiing in the mid-50’s through relationships he formed with artists then studying and teaching at the Los Angles County Art Institute (now the Otis Institute). Comprised of more than 70 pieces from the mid-1950’s, the exhibition included nine works by Peter Voulkos including the twenty-six-and-one-half inch tall Covered Jar pictured at left, his iconic sculpture, Walking Man, a tall, burgundy-colored vase with slip-trailing, a small, pinch-pot-formed tea bowl with low-fire glazes, a lidded container with bird head, a “bullfight” plate, a 1962 bottle and a vase constructed of stacked forms and decorated with Picasso-like faces. Curated by Kirk Delman, collections manager at the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery at Scripps College, Claremont, Califfornia, the show also included objects by Ruth Duckworth, Shoji Hamada, Jun Kaneko, Bernard Leach, Otto Natzler, Kenneth Price, Kazuye Suyematsu, Beatrice Wood and many more artists.

The preview reception was on May 8 from 6 PM to 8 PM and the show was on view through June 29th. Several public programs were designed to accompany the exhibit including a walk-through tour on May 10th with Mary McNaughton, director of the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery and Kirk Delman; a lecture on June 5th by Nancy Selvin, ceramist and adjunct professor at the California College of Arts and two “makeart” workshops for children. Please contact the museum for more information by telephone 415-773-0303 or visit their website.

Untitled Vase/Stack, 1969-71
Photo: schoppleinstudio.com

The Scholar’s Eye: Contemporary Ceramics from the Garth Clark and Mark Del Vecchio Collection

In the spring of 2007, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, acquired more than 375 objects from a collection assembled over the past twenty-five years by the New York-based gallerists Garth Clark and Mark Del Vecchio. Opening May 18, 2008, a first look at the exhibition, The Scholar’s Eye: Contemporary Ceramics from the Garth Clark and Mark Del Vecchio Collection, featured selected highlights from a portion of their collection which went on view at the MFAH in the Audrey Jones Beck Building. The exhibit was curated by Cindi Strauss, curator of modern and contemporary decorative arts and design at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Strauss wrote, “The Scholar’s Eye illustrates the breadth of the Garth Clark and Mark Del Vecchio collection, introducing Houston audiences to the power and beauty of ceramic art and design. The marvelous diversity found in the field is highlighted by outstanding works to be displayed, dating from the 1940s to today.” Approximately 40 works were on view ranging from functional to abstract forms, from sculptural to narrative themes and encompasses works by both established and emerging artists with a specialty in the ceramic arts, as well as painters and sculptors who have also worked in clay. “The core of the collection comprises American material that traces the aesthetic and technical developments of the past four decades through in-depth representation of artists such as Ralph Bacerra, Marek Cecula, Ken Ferguson, Anne Kraus, Ron Nagle and Richard Notkin. Important works by Laszlo Fekete, George Jeanclos, Kitamura Junko, Geert Lap, Lawson Oyekan, Richard Slee, and Akio Takamori were also represented.” Among the selected objects were an Incense Burner by Kawai Kanjiro, Parisienne Chainsaw Massacre by Adrian Saxe, The Achaians-Xanthos from the Trojan War series by Sir Anthony Caro, a Balustrade Relief Vase by Betty Woodman, a Vessel by Bodil Manz, The Inquisitors by Beth Cavener Stichter and a Vase/Stack by Peter Voulkos.

Pictured at left, this Voulkos Vase/Stack, made with a low-fire clay body and 40-3/4 inches in height, had also been featured in his retrospective exhibition that traveled nationally in 1978 and 1979. Two other works by Voulkos were also be included in the show, an early 1950s Bottle representative of his Archie Bray Foundation period and a 1957 Chalice, or Goblet, made when Voulkos was teaching at the Los Angeles County Art Institute. The show was on view until September 1, 2008. For more information, please contact the museum via telephone 713-639-7300 or visit the museum’s website.

Ice Bucket IB5, 1998
Photo: schoppleinstudio.com

Peter Voulkos: Clay into Bronze

The Chancellor's Committee on Art, Honors and Recognition of the University of California, San Francisco presented an exhibition of Peter Voulkos’ bronzes in the Kalmanovitz Library. Entitled Peter Voulkos: Clay into Bronze these metal sculptures were on display from February 20, 2008 through February 20, 2009. Featured in the library venue were nine works from a series of bronze editions Voulkos began in 1986 and continued through 2001 taking molds from selected clay originals and casting them in bronze at the Artworks Foundry in Berkeley, California. The exhibit was curated by art adviser to the committee, Lynne Baer, with the assistance of the Braunstein Quay Gallery, San Francisco and the estate of Peter Voulkos. Among the selection in this show were his 1959 sculpture entitled Sevillanas and examples of the three basic forms on which he come to focus in his later ceramic work: the plate, the ice bucket and the stack. Among the latter are Little Modesto, Big A and Mimbres. Some of these and other bronzes from the series are pictured in the bronzes section of the Portfolio section of this site. Ice Bucket IB5, pictured at left, is sixteen-and-three-quarters inches high by twenty-two by twenty-one-and-one-half inches.

Please contact the Braunstein Quay Gallery by telephone, 415-278-9850 or visit the gallery website for more information.

One Piece

On May 24 2008, the The Penryn Art Gallery, Penryn, California opened with an exhibition, One Piece, featuring “one piece” each by 25 artists who have conducted workshops at the Penryn Workshop in the past including Rudy Autio, John Balistreri, Tom Collins, Dave Dontigny, Glen Grishkoff, Catharine Hiersoux, Chuck Hindes, Susannah Israel, Kathy Koop, Marilyn Levine, Warren MacKenzie, Janet Mansfield, Paul McCoy, Ron Meyers, Rodney Mott, Brian Ransom, Don Reitz, Terry Shephard, Annette Skinner, Eric Stephenson, Jim Stephenson, Paul Soldner, Peter Voulkos, Nina Ward and Tom Zwierlein. Many of the works in the exhibit were made at the site; visitors could also tour the kiln facilities, foundry and artists' workshops. Penryn is located off Highway 80 between San Francisco and Lake Tahoe near the landmark Griffith Quarry. For more information, please contact the gallery via telephone 916-663-2815 or visit the gallery’s website.

Pottery I, 1958

Picasso to Moore: Modern Sculpture from the Weiner Collection

The Palm Springs Art Museum, California, presented a survey exhibition of sculpture entitled Picasso to Moore: Modern Sculpture from the Weiner Collection that opened November 7, 2007 and ran through mid-October 2008. This show brought together and highlighted thirty-four sculptures, which had not been exhibited together as a group for over thirty years, from the collection of Ted and Lucille Weiner who began collecting modern art in 1949 and which was later inherited by their daughter Gwendolyn Weiner. The show also celebrated the forty-year association between the Weiner family and the Palm Springs Art Museum which has been the recipient of long-term loans from the collection since 1969. Curated by the museum’s executive director Steven Nash and chief curator Katherine Plake Hough, the show included an iconic stone head by Amadeo Modigliani, ceramics and bronze works by Pablo Picasso, metal sculpture by Alexander Calder and bronzes by Jean Arp, Edgar Degas, Dimitri Hadzi, Jacques Lipchitz, Gerhard Marcks, Marino Marini, Henry Moore, Isamu Noguchi, Germaine Richier, Peter Voulkos, Ossip Zadkine and Jack Zajac. Voulkos was represented by two of his ceramic sculptures from 1958 and 1959, Pottery I and Pottery II. Although titled as pottery, these works were made when Voulkos was breaking away from making wheelthrown, classically formed vases, using clay as a medium for sculpture and experimenting with relationships between abstract forms and color. Pottery I, pictured at left, is assembled from sections of stoneware, painted with white slip, black iron and cobalt slips and measures nineteen-and-one-half inches in height.

Please contact the Palm Springs Art Museum by telephone, 760-325-7186 or visit the museum’s website for more information.

Untitled, 1975
Photo: Sam Jornlin

Craft in America: Expanding Traditions.

Featuring more than 200 works in handcrafted furniture, ceramics, fiber and textiles, basketry, glass, wood, jewelry and metal and spanning a period of nearly two hundred years beginning with the Industrial Revolution, this historical survey was organized by Craft in America, Inc. a Los Angeles-based non-profit organization with a mission to promote and advance original handcrafted work, through educational programs in all media. It travel ed nationally to seven venues and was accompanied by a book entitled Craft in America: Celebrating Two Centuries of Artists and Objects by writers, Jo Lauria and Steve Fenton. The exhibition represented a broad base of craft-makers including traditional craft makers, designer craftsmen of the Arts & Crafts Movement, the artists of the WPA programs of the 1930s, post World-War II studio craft pioneers and contemporary studio craft artists. Peter Voulkos was represented by two works, a Lidded Jar made circa 1952-53 from the Cranbrook Museum collection in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and a 1975 Untitled stack vase, pictured at left, from the Fred Marer Collection of Art at the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery of Art, Scripps College in Claremont, California. This stoneware stack incorporates Voulkos’ “porcelain pass-throughs” and is 39 inches in height. In conjunction with the exhibition, a series of three episodes called consecutively Memory, Landscape, and Community was produced which premiered on the public broadcasting system, PBS, in May 2007. To learn more, please visit their website or telephone 310.659.9022.

A portion of the schedule for the traveling exhibition included the following venues:
Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock: 13 April-24 June 2007
Contemporary Crafts Museum, Portland, Oregon: 14 July-23 September 2007
Mingei International Museum, San Diego, California: 20 October 2007-27 January 2008
Contemporary Crafts Gallery, Houston, Texas: 22 February-4 May 2008
Cranbrook Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan: 6 June-14 September 2008
National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City: 3 October 2008-18 January 2009
Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, Massachusetts: 27 June-27 September 2009

Solano, 1959
Photo: schoppleinstudio.com

A Legacy of Art: The Ted and Ruth Nash Collection.

On August 25, 2007, the Oakland Museum of California mounted A Legacy of Art: The Ted and Ruth Nash Collection, an incredible display of some 20-21 works from the prized art collection of the late Edmund (Ted) and Ruth Nash and acquired in a recent bequest of 275 artworks to the museum after Mrs. Nash's death in April 2007. The Nashes, who were especially interested in ceramic art, began collecting contemporary California artists after moving to San Francisco from New York in 1955. In addition, Mrs. Nash served as a docent in the natural sciences department of the Oakland Museum. Included in their collection are important works by Robert Arneson, Joan Brown, Roy De Forest, Viola Frey, Ron Nagle, Nathan Oliveira, Richard Shaw, Marilyn Levine, Wayne Thiebaud, Peter Voulkos, William T. Wiley, Tony Berlant and Stephen de Staebler. In this exhibition was Voulkos’ Solano, a 62-inch tall glazed stoneware sculpture made in his Glendale Boulevard studio in Los Angeles in 1959. Pictured at left, Solano comes from the series of large, groundbreaking ceramic sculptures Voulkos made in 1958 through 1960 and is among the last of these large pieces that still remained in private collections prior to the Nashes gifting it to the Oakland Museum.

The show was up in the Art Gallery through December 30, 2007. For more information, please contact the museum via telephone 510-238-2200 or visit the museum’s website.

Isis, 2000
Photo: schoppleinstudio.com

Shy Boy, She Devil, and Isis: The Art of Conceptual Craft: Selections from the Wornick Collection.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston organized an exhibition entitled Shy Boy, She Devil and Isis: The Art of Conceptual Craft, Selections from the Wornick Collection. The show, featured the collection of Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick, included 120 objects by 107 artists from 20 countries and was organized by the following themes that serve to characterize the diversity of the collection -the human figure, ceremony and abstraction, organic abstraction, pattern and ornament and materials and illusionism. Among the artists and works featured in the exhibition, on view in the MFA’s Foster Gallery from September 11, 2007 through January 6, 2008, were ceramics by Peter Voulkos and Jun Kaneko, glass by Dale Chihuly and Bertil Valien, furniture by Wendell Castle and John Cederquist, and wood sculpture by David Ellsworth and Gord Peteran. The name derives from three works in the exhibition: Isis, pictured at left, a 2001 wood fired ceramic stack by Peter Voulkos; She Devil, 2005, by Michael Lucero and Shy Boy, 2005, by Clifford Rainey. In 1985, the Wornicks began assembling a major collection of contemporary decorative arts, primarily by American artists but also including European, Australian, and Asian artists. The collection features sculptural pieces primarily created after 1980 and represents a coming of age of the studio craft movement documenting an era in which artists moved toward the creation of expressive sculptural forms that stand alone as objects of art, without a utilitarian purpose. Ron and Anita Wornick have made a promised gift to the MFA of 250 pieces from their collection, including all of the works in this exhibition.

For more information, please go the museum website or telephone 617.267.9300. To see additional views of Isis in the Quest section of this site, click here.

Big A, 1990
Photo: schoppleinstudio.com

From Clay to Bronze: Selected Works by Peter Voulkos 1951-2001

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, presented a free exhibition entitled From Clay to Bronze: Selected Works by Peter Voulkos 1951-2001 in Galleries 277 and 278 at the Institute from May 19, 2007 to March 2, 2008. This show highlighted the stylistic diversity of Voulkos’s fifty-year career, through objects from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and other collections, including a group of bronze castings taken from his ceramic sculptures. Among the works in the show were Voulkos’ wood fired ceramic stack, Big A, pictured at left, now in the collection of the Institute, a gift of the Decorative Arts Council, by exchange. This thirty-five-inch tall stack was made in Voulkos’ Oakland studio and fired in Peter Callas’ anagama kiln in Belvidere, New Jersey. The Institute also owns several very early Voulkos works from the 1950s including a classically-formed wheel-thrown teapot and a 1957 plate from Voulkos’ early experimental period when he began using low-fire glazes and manipulating thrown shapes.

Please contact the Minneapolis Institute of Arts by telephone, (888) MIA ARTS (642-2787) or visit the Institute’s website for more information.

Artists of Invention: A Century of CCA.

Opening October 13, 2007 and continuing through March 16, 2008, at the Oakland Museum of California was an exhibition entitled Artists of Invention: A Century of CCA a survey of work by 100 faculty and alumni at the California College of the Arts (formerly known as the California College of Arts & Crafts). Organized by CCA alumni, Philip Linhares, Chief Curator of Art, Ted Cohen, exhibition designer and Lee Plested, consultant at the Oakland Museum of Art and with a contemporary section organized by CCA alumni Liz Mulholland, Abner Nolan, Chris Perez, Jessica Silverman, and Bay Area curator Tara McDowell, the show featured more than 120 works -paintings, ceramics, photography, video, sculpture, mixed media, installations, textiles, wood, and works on paper -as well as a contemporary section from the past twenty years. Among the artists included were Trude Guermonprez, Kay Sekimachi, Lia Cook, Richard Diebenkorn, Nathan Oliveira, Manuel Neri, Peter Voulkos, Robert Arneson, Viola Frey, John McCracken, David Ireland, Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Bechtle, Richard McLean, Ralph Goings, Jack Mendenhall, Edith Heath, Jacomena Maybeck, Squeak Carnwath, Raymond Saunders, Marvin Lipofsky, Billy Al Bengston, Garry Knox Bennett, Robert Arneson, Wally Hedrick, John Coplans, Bella Feldman, Gordon Onslow-Ford, Paul Wonner and The Society of Six. While on the G.I. Bill, Voulkos enrolled at CCAC in 1951 and earned his Master of Fine Arts degree the following year. His graduate thesis was on lidded jars. Voulkos’ made his 62-inch-high sculpture Little Big Horn, pictured at left and now in the collection of the Oakland Museum, a scant seven years later in 1959.

The school was founded in 1907 by Frederick Meyer, a German cabinetmaker, as the School of the California Guild of Arts and Crafts. It was known for many years as CCAC (California College of Arts & Crafts). In 2003 the college was renamed California College of the Arts. For more information, please contact the museum via telephone 510-238-2200 or visit the museum’s website.

One of a Kind: The Studio Craft Movement.

Organized by Jane Adlin, Associate Curator in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art, One of a Kind: The Studio Craft Movement featured approximately 50 works from The Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection including furniture, ceramics, glass, metalwork, jewelry, and fiber. One of a Kind featured works by 47 artists, including Robert Arneson, Wharton Esherick, Albert Paley, Ed Rossbach, and Ruth Duckworth, as well as younger artists such as Kyung-hee Hong, Axel Russmeyer, and Bonnie Seeman. Among other artists, Olga de Amaral, Kyohei Fujita, John Cederquist, Bonnie Seeman and Peter Voulkos were also represented, the latter with an over forty-seven-inch tall wood fired stack called Noodle. Made with a kenosei clay body, Noodle is one of three stacks Voulkos constructed during a workshop given at the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, Japan in 1996 where all three were subsequently wood fired sans glaze in the Shigaraki anagama kiln. Dates for this show were December 22, 2006 through December 2, 2007. For more information about this exhibit, please contact the museum by telephone 212.535.7710 or visit their website.

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