Shared Passion: Sara and David Lieberman Collection
of
Contemporary Ceramics and Craft
By Peter Held
When first introduced to Sara and David Lieberman, it wasn’t long before I detected the growing gleam in their eyes and the heightened pitch in their voices while they discussed ceramics and its place in their lives. Passionate, knowledgeable and articulate about their growing collection of post-World War II works, the Liebermans have assembled a significant selection of ceramic art over the course of twenty years. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue document their collecting activities and the vision behind its inspiration. Assembled by heart as well as by eye, their shared passion for ceramic collecting is palpable.
While the Lieberman collection represents numerous prominent figures in the clay world, rich in diversity and innovation, Sara and David are not timid about expanding their horizons. Always adventuresome, international travel expeditions have brought new holdings by British artists Gordon Baldwin, Christie Brown, Claire Curneen and Stephen Dixon, as well as the work of Japanese master ceramist Goro Suzuki. Closer to home, they support many local emerging artists including Nobuhito Nishigawara, Patricia Sannitt and Betsy Rosenmiller. The Lieberman’s have also developed vital links with Native American artists based in the Southwestern United States.
One of the things we developed in Minnesota and hope to continue in Arizona is purchasing and living with work by local artists. It’s a great joy. To live with their work and know them is really an extraordinary experience.
This personal interaction is not only important for the Liebermans but is also an empowering experience for the artists themselves. Nora Naranjo-Morse, a Santa Clara artist from Espanola, New Mexico reflects that many collectors “just buy what other collectors buy.” The Liebermans “are the perfect collectors, making an earnest effort to learn about the work, supporting artists by stepping back to watch their work evolve, open to experimentation and change, not consistency”. And there is the economic benefit of having astute collectors taking the step after initial interest, learning and researching, to purchase the work, affirming the talents of the artists.
The genesis of the Lieberman ceramic collection started with the fortuitous meeting of Sara Lieberman and Warren MacKenzie, while both served on the Advisory Board of Directors of the University of Minnesota Art Museum. MacKenzie had been protégé and one-time apprentice to Bernard Leach (1897-1979), the famed English potter. A major influence to generations of studio potters after WW II, Leach and his associates Shoji Hamada and Soetsu Yanagi, promulgated the values of Oriental aesthetics and mingei folk ideals to the United States. MacKenzie—through his teaching at the University of Minnesota and mentoring a host of potters in his environs— is one of America’s masters of the functional pot. The Liebermans started visiting his studio in Stillwater, Minnesota, on a regular basis and acquired numerous pieces of tableware including plates, bowls, mugs and pitchers, enough in number to serve a commune. The MacKenzie vase in this exhibition is a signature work by the artist, one that transmutes the humbleness of the medium in balanced harmony with the user. It is modest yet beautiful, with a perfect sense of proportion.
The beauty to feel, touch, and use functional pottery, there is something about the interaction with our own bodies and being surrounded by the work, that gives us a sensual pleasure through the clay’s tactile qualities.
With the interest developed by their association with MacKenzie, coupled with the Liebermans’ inquisitive nature, their range of knowledge in the ceramic idiom blossomed. In surveying the Lieberman collection, a number of thematic groupings emerge, sparked by encounters with artists, dealers and like-minded collectors. The collection mirrors prevalent trends in the ceramics field--movement towards nonfunctional vessels blurring the boundaries of art and craft, figuration, narration, decoration and a growing awareness of multicultural issues facing our pluralistic society.
Peter Voulkos was a revolutionary pioneer in postwar ceramics, who was impacted by his summer experience at Black Mountain College in 1953, where he was exposed to experimental artists working in the visual and performing arts: potters Karen Karnes, and David Weinrib, potter/poet M. C. Richards, composer John Cage, dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham, and painters Jack Tworkov and Esteban Vicente. The contact with Abstract Expressionism had far-reaching consequences impacting his approach towards clay and that of a generation of students he taught in California. Voulkos’ leadership extended beyond the confines of academia, although his programs were by no means traditional. Along with Rudy Autio, he co-directed the prestigious Archie Bray Foundation, a ceramic residency program founded in 1951 and a springboard for many artists over the last five decades.
Chochmo (plate #?) is a classic stacked form that Voulkos explored
for the last thirty years before his death in 2002. A ceramic collage
fashioned by additions and subtractions, brutally formed and transformed
through the tortuous woodfiring process in an anagama kiln, Voulkos challenges
our preconceived notions of pottery traditions. While his earlier stack
forms were still recognizably wheel-thrown elements “stacked”
one on another, his later works transcended
obvious technique or function.
In discussing the later stacked woodfired forms, Karen Tsujimoto writes, “In Voulko’s hands inert mounds of earth are transmuted into forms of monumental presence in which the timeless rhythms of the universe--its chaos, tragedy, beauty, and energy--seem to be made palpable. Shrouded in colors of seared earth and molten ash that result from the intense woodfiring, the stacks evoke myriad impressions--from remnants of ancient architecture to primordial sedimentation petrified by time, from clay icons to shards of an exploded meteor.”
Another major figure in the collection, Japanese American artist Toshiko Takaezu was also influenced by Buddhist philosophies and has been creating her classic globular forms for nearly three decades. Blending Eastern and Western cultural influences, she enjoys the responsiveness of clay and has developed an intuitive approach to her work, a union formed by her interests in Zen, Abstract Expressionism and the natural world. Organic in form, she combines poured glazes and brushwork application of a muted palette to accentuate these reductive forms. Untitled (Dark Blue, Brown) (plate #?) demonstrates a unity of earth (mottled brown) and sky (blue). Evolving slowly over time, she has made perceptible artistic shifts, expanding her quiet vocabulary to works in bronze, fiber and installations of her larger ceramic forms.
A distinct movement in the 1970s and well into the 80s was the utilization of the vessel format as a canvas. The antithesis of Peter Voulkos’s charred forms are Betty Woodman’s and Andrea Gill’s decorative vessels exploring a variety of historical references in clay, employing the vessel form and acknowledging centuries-old pottery traditions, unencumbered by strict functionalism.
Woodman’s Indian Love Song Pitcher (plate #?) is an archetypal form that the artist developed in the late 1970s, which she still explores, seeking its full potential. She has melded influences, freely appropriating from sources ranging from the Mediterranean pottery traditions of Italy and Greece, to Asian influences (such as T'ang and Oribe). Her ingenious and often sensual shapes are well grounded in the artist’s functional background dating back to her days in Boulder, Colorado. Inspired by Etruscan earthenware, the Lieberman’s pitcher has been thrown and altered, with a loopy handle that echoes the form of the body. Woodman was part of the influential Pattern & Decoration (P & D) movement, which germinated in the1970s and included ceramist Joyce Kozloff and painters Robert Kushner, Miriam Shapiro, and Betty’s husband George Woodman. Luscious in color and voluptuous in form, Woodman has sifted through the annals of art history, not mimicking these cultural references so much as restating them in a unique voice that has evolved over a thirty year career.
Andrea Gill, a skilled painter, also mines historical references and
is equally enthralled by surface decoration. Gill’s Persian
Ornament (plate #?) is an ongoing investigation of decorative patterning
that interplays with illusionary depth, volumetric
contouring and the profile of her vessels. She also recalls, like many
in the P & D movement, Italian, Spanish and Persian cultures. A student
of Ken Ferguson while attending the Kansas City Art Institute, Gill was
part of a core group of students that included her future husband John
Gill, Richard Notkin, Akio Takamori and Kurt Weiser. She has taught in
the ceramics program at Alfred University in New York since 1984.
Bobby Silverman also works within the vessel format. It was during a residency at the European Ceramic Works Centre in The Netherlands that he perfected an ongoing investigation of grouped nesting bowls and vases. In the case of Yellow Platter, 5 Black Bowls, Red (plate #?), a brilliant cadmium yellow basin provides the foundation for stacked bowls and a short, bulbous vase. Silverman takes a formalist stance, placing great emphasis on elegance, refinement and perfection in execution. He has been grouped with other ceramists— Elsa Rady, James Makins, Kim Dickey and Andrew Lord—who employ multiple objects in the staging of still life vignettes.
While Sara and David Lieberman appreciate prehistoric Southwest Native American pottery, the traditional works did not elicit an emotive response, a reaction that drives their passion for collecting. However, when opportunities arose to develop personal relationships with a new generation of indigenous contemporaries, their enthusiasm once again took hold. Anita Fields (Osage), Nora Naranjo-Morse (Santa Clara), Virgil Ortiz (Cochiti), Jacquie Stevens (Winnebago), Roxanne Swentzell (Santa Clara), among others, are strongly represented in the Lieberman collection.
Roxanne Swentzell’s Clown Looking at the World Through New Eyes (plate #?) takes a prominent position in the Lieberman household, its perch on their mantel giving perspective to the daily activities of their lives. Since the 1980s, Swentzell has developed a unique body of figurative work that incorporates her pueblo traditions, histories and worldviews with the drama of the modern world. Darting between the two, she has employed the kosa or clown that appears at ceremonial dances, as a conduit commenting on the poignant and humorous condition of humankind. Resonating with psychological implications, Swentzell’s sculpture integrates centuries-old native traditions with contemporary thought. Rather than feeling encumbered by the past, she seeks multiple perspectives, mining the depths of both human emotion and the primacy of the spiritual world. Her reaffirmation of an ancestral past affords the viewer an opportunity to investigate their own inner selves.
For me, the figure represents Roxanne and other Native American women ceramic artists who look at the world around them and use their traditional skills to reflect their own era.
Another artist drawing from her native heritage is Anita Fields. Her Elements of Being (plate #?) contains three totemic figures with fabric bundles at their feet. Silhouetted against the tawny background, the figures are swathed in a cosmic swirl, simultaneously knowing, recording and communing with the life forces of the universe. “My work is an extension of my intuitive self and represents the search for expressing the essence of my being. My work is narrative, relating stories from the realm of personal experiences. It is about clarifying elusive, intangible moments of time, truth and place. Ideas are informed by memory and recalling instances of certainty; the comforting smell of cedar smoke, sounds heard during the quiet arrival a new day, and moving over the earth on ground I know my grandmothers moved on before me”.
During the 1970s and 80s, many artists used the vessel format to express their personal stories, either as painted narration on the surface or as fully integrated form and design. Rudy Autio has been a major force in the ceramics world since the early 1950s. Drawing from his childhood days in Butte, Montana, Autio plays with frontier imagery in Promises (plate#?), a visual swirl of contorted women, those early-day prostitutes that inhabited the Galena Street red-light district in his hometown. Gamboling about its surface, his incorporation of the female body on the vase form is executed with the surety of a skilled draughtsman and incised deftly into the clay’s surface. Known as “The Matisse of Ceramics”, Autio is a master colorist; his bold, confident brushstrokes in primary colors activate these iconic vases.
Much like Autio’s adaptability to transform drawings to the round, Akio Takamori has also mastered the integration of content, form and image. Mother and Daughter (plate #?) are three-dimensional woodcuts come to life. After developing his signature envelope-shaped vessels in the mid 1980s and into the 90s, his work shifted after a residency at the European Ceramics Work Centre. Most of the seemingly imaginary figures are people he is intimately familiar with, dating back to his childhood memories of growing up in the village of Nobeoka, Japan. Synthesizing the influences of the woodblock printer Shiko Munakata (East), with the contoured dimensional clay drawings of Autio (West, see plate #?), Takamori uses broad calligraphic brushstrokes, creating a patchwork of patterns on the traditional clothing. His bold expressive gestures capture the personalities of this dynamic relationship. Approximately half human scale, the artist is able to convey the complexities of familial associations honed by personal observations, shaping the psychological interplay between the mother and daughter. The mother seems perturbed while the daughter reacts in a universal teenager pout!
Kurt Weiser is a technical virtuoso, mastering material and technique to suit his personal evolution. He has redefined the art of china painting, whose stereotypical associations of plaster mold-filled basements and old-lady painters deter even the most stalwart postmodernist (all of Weiser’s current work is cast porcelain). Vague Trail (plate #?) is influenced by several excursions he made to Thailand, where he was overwhelmed by the lush flora and fauna. His panoramic botanical narratives in the round are gorgeous visual delights, drawing inspiration from painters of the Hudson River School and the German Romantics. A Regents Professor at Arizona State University, Weiser and his potter wife Christy Lasater Weiser have befriended the Liebermans and assisted them by bringing new clay artists to their attention.
Karen Koblitz unfolds a celebratory accounting with Judaica Still Life (plate #?) which has particular meaning for the Liebermans, because they are practitioners of the Jewish faith. Framed by a decorative border (the upper rail taken from the gallery frieze of the Synagogue of Capernaum), its shape is taken from a Ketubah or illustrative marriage contract. Repeating candelabrum and Star of David patterns in the background create a pastel-like setting for the three appliquéd fabrics that are laden with Hebrew symbolism and Seder plates replete with ceremonial food, wine goblets and candlesticks.
For many involved in the ceramic crossroads of the 1960s and 70s, when clay artists wrestled with issues similar to their peers working in other media, there was an inherent struggle in validating ceramic sculpture as fine art. Many art critics and museum curators devalued the clay as art concept, prejudiced by the centuries-old confines of craft traditions. Moving beyond the wheel and brown pot arena, artists such as Robert Arneson, Viola Frey, Howard Kottler and Marilyn Levine created work that had no bearing and scant reverence to the prevailing Leach-Alfred dogma. Stuck in the rhetoric of art versus craft, clay enthusiasts became mired in endless debates and backdoor bantering. Fortunately, those discussions have now been stilled.
Jun Kaneko and Ken Price spring from similar Southern California origins in the early 1960s, and have, in the course of their respective careers, created objects that have transcended the medium. Kaneko’s Broadway (plate #?) is a study of an asymmetrical form, simple in treatment, with vibrant intersecting ribbons of colored glazes, which activate the surface. Produced at the European Ceramics Works Centre in 1996, this work belongs to the body of work The Dutch Series—Between Light and Shadow. Kaneko has always taken an intuitive approach to his work, slowly absorbing his immediate environment and responding accordingly. The artist has stated “When I hear what the form has to say, I start seeing marks and colors on the surface. To me, a pattern or color repeated makes some kind of visual order. Even if I desire to use a line, an endless combination of arrangements of lines is possible. The spaces between the marks contribute a great deal to the tonality of the finished work”.
Ken Price’s Untitled (plate #?) is harder edged than the more recent biomorphic shapes for which he is known. Surfaces are layered in multiple colored acrylic paints and then scraped to expose the underlayment, creating depth to the work. Voids in the form invite the viewer to peer in the recesses, adding a sense of mystery. Raised in Southern California, Price was part of the coterie that surrounded Voulkos at the Los Angeles Art Institute, later renamed Otis College of Art and Design (Jerry Rothman, John Mason and Michael Frimkess were part of this group). An original voice working in clay, he has been readily accepted in the mainstream art world.
Whereas Price disguises the natural qualities of clay, the French Canadian artist Jean-Pierre Laroque celebrates materiality. Checkerboard Horse #5 (plate #?) is an iconic monochromatic sculpture commanding the viewer’s attention. But popular imagery presents a dilemma for the artist. “I have begun to wonder if the very prejudice against horse art has not become something against which to work. In the beginning the horse was more like painting an icon, like a Jasper Johns flag painting, or making an etching of a screwdriver or a Susan Rotherberg painting of horses in the 80s. Any subject is loaded; painting an apple is not the same as painting a crucifixion but while I’m aware of the baggage, I don’t particularly care about horses”.
Michael Lucero is a highly regarded artist who the Liebermans have collected in depth, acquiring five major works. Stout (plate #?) is similar in material use to the artist’s Reclamation series that was developed in the mid 1990s and integrated found objects, imbedding past histories with narrative ramifications. Lucero is a transcultural nomadic traveler, picking through artifacts of social detritus. “For me, the idea of reclamation seemed to come at a time when found objects interested me more and more. I frequent thrift shops, antique shops, antique malls, and antique fairs. This habit of mine might be considered my way of attempting a social study of American culture, of other cultures, of this conglomerate of all sorts of things from different times and different places. Different worlds collide in these places, and that really interests me”.
Lucero’s work, mixing personal iconography and historical reference, fortified with an inquiring intellect and a fascination for storytelling, summarizes the breadth of the Lieberman’s ceramics collection. By assembling a collection rich in surface and diverse in form, Sara and David Lieberman have reflected the extraordinary evolution of ceramic art in our times. Their shared passion for the expressive potential of the ceramic medium has created a legacy to be admired by future generations of clay enthusiasts. By promising the collection to a public institution, they have guaranteed that students, artists, collectors and general audiences will be afforded an opportunity to study, reflect, appreciate and enjoy.
Notes:
i Quotes in italics between paragraphs are from video interviews with Sara and David Lieberman taken in July 2002. The interviewer was Heather Lineberry, Senior Curator at the Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, Arizona.
ii Phone interview with the artist and author in November 2002.
iii Karen Tsujimoto, curator at The Oakland Museum, Oakland, California, in her chapter “Peter Voulkos: The Wood-fired Work” in The Art of Peter Voulkos (Tokyo: Kodansha International in cooperation with The Oakland Museum, 1995), p 118-119. Rose Slivka was also a contributing author to this book and retrospective exhibition by the same title.
iv Mark Del Vecchio in his chapter “The Multiple Vessel,” in Postmodern Ceramics (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2001).
v Excerpted from artist statement, 1998.
vi Jun Kaneko and Xavier Toubes, The Dutch Series—Between Light and Shadow, European Ceramics Works Centre, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands, 1996. p 12, Akio Takamori and Bobby Silverman were also participants in this residency program which altered the direction of their respective work.
vii The artist reflects on his work in the exhibition catalogue Jean-Pierre LaRoque, June 4-29, 2002, Garth Clark Gallery, New York, p 21.
viii vExcerpted from an interview between Mark Richard Leach, exhibition curator, and the artist in the chapter, “A Conversation with Michael Lucero” in Michael Lucero Sculpture 1976-1995 (New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with Mint Museum of Art, 1996), p 33. Dr. Barbara J. Bloemink was exhibition co-curator and essayist.
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