MY INITIAL EDUCATION IN CERAMICS was designed not only to ignore, but to actively shun early European and American traditions.And yet, today I work in several of them, such as redware and delftware(figs, i, 2).As a student in the 1980s, like many of my BFA classmates at die University of Iowa, I wanted to learn more about the rest of the world than die standard”time-line”view of history I was taught in high school.I enrolled in such courses as Sumptuary Arts of China and Japan, Art of Tribal Cultures, and Art of West Africa.In the pottery studio, die focus was on wood-firing, and on appreciating Chinese imperial porcelain and Japanese wood-fired stoneware, particularly through the writings of Bernard Leach, which we somehow blended with the Abstract Expressionism of Peter Voulkos.The eclectic orientation of my classroom and studio experiences reflected a national trend in the 1980s toward a much-needed expansion of an earlier auricular focus on European and American leaders and thinkers to include other cultures and voices.1 How this played out for us as ceramics students, unfortunately, was that nobody thought to examine the”unexotic”work of America's colonial potters.We additionally disdained the potters of the Industrial Revolution, especially Josiah Wedgwood, whose name was seen as a byword for the impersonal, soul-crushing effects of the factory system.
展开▼
