For several years I've been complaining that ceramic artists like Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada have had more than their fair share of exhibitions and monographs but that Peter Voulkos, an artist of greater importance than the two of them put together, has been almost completely neglected. It's been at least 20 years since a major retrospective of his work has been mounted in the United States and the number of monographs on him are shockingly thin. That has begun to change with the recent exhibition of Voulkos: The Breakthrough Years at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. The exhibition focuses on the most influential years of Voulkos's work, 1953 to 1968, years in which Voulkos's experiments with clay convulsed the ceramic world. Leach and Hamada will always be important for their contribution to the birth of the studio pottery movement, but Voulkos took clay in a totally different direction and made it an accepted medium for artistic expression. If you're in New York, you can still see the exhibition until March 15. After that it will move to the Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC from April 7 through August 20. A major monograph has also been produced, Voulkos: The Breakthrough Years. For more information go to the following website: http://madmuseum.org/exhibition/voulkos.
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