From the Studio to the Classroom – Contemporary Ceramics
Join an insightful exploration of the shifts in ceramic practices related to approaches to the teaching and learning of this historic medium. This conversation will feature key academic leaders, and is presented in conjunction with our current exhibition A Shared Journey: The Barkan Contemporary Ceramic Collection. This program will highlight how the trajectory of modern and contemporary ceramics led to the establishment of academic programs in the medium in institutions across the United States.
Speakers include Lesley Baker, Department Head and Graduate Program Director of RISD’s Ceramics Department, Dr. Ezra Shales, Professor, History of Art Department at Massachusetts College of Art + Design, and Dr. Elizabeth Williams, David & Peggy Rockefeller Curator of Decorative Arts. The discussion will be moderated by Dr. Eric Anderson, Department Head of RISD’s Theory + History of Art + Design Department.
Free. Registration requested for this in-person program.
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This annual program is supported by the Paul Somerson Fund for Decorative Arts and Design in honor of the late collector.
Eric Anderson is Professor of the history of modern design at RISD, where he has taught since 2012. Research interests include interiors and domesticity, design exhibitions and media, psychological theories in design, and the global history of modernism. Publications have appeared in journals including West 86th, Centropa, Journal of Design History, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Austrian History Yearbook, German History, and Burlington Magazine, and in books including On Edge: Interior Provocations, Design Dialogue: Jews, Culture and Viennese Modernism, Making Home: The Arts and Crafts Movement and the Reform of Everyday Life, Klimt und der Ringstrasse, and Performance, Fashion, and the Modern Interior. As Fulbright-Freud Visiting Lecturer of Psychoanalysis in Vienna he conducted research toward a book project titled The Chromatic Unconscious: Design and the Education of Sigmund Freud in Vienna’s Age of Color. A new book project, Ulm in the World, looks at the politics and pedagogy of Third World development at the Ulm School of Design in 1960s West Germany.
Lesley Baker is a ceramic artist, sculptor and educator. Before joining the faculty at RISD, she taught at the Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis, IN; UC Berkeley; and the California College of the Arts. She has an undergraduate degree in Architecture from Texas A&M University and an MFA in Ceramics from RISD. Her current work explores the resilience and power of nature by depicting adaptations of animals, idealized depictions in patterns and reuse of natural materials.
Ezra Shales, Professor in the History of Art at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, is the author of The Shape of Craft (2017) and Made in Newark: Cultivating Industrial Arts and Civic Identity in the Progressive Era (2010) and has contributed to exhibition catalogs for artists Polly Apfelbaum, Neil Brownsword, Beth Cavener, Kim Dickey, and Shari Mendelson. His newest book Pitchers of American Life: Art Within Reach condenses forty years of flea market learning and ten dedicated to teaching ceramic history at Alfred, the New York State College of Ceramics, with the existential tailspins of being a devotee to material culture in an era of hyper affluence. His vision of design/craft/art intersecting is at times controversial and a deliberately hopeful strategy to see categories move beyond inherited limitations. His essay on Voulkos's teapot asks if we can comprehend both abstraction and social history in one go without apprehension.