Recent Acquisitions
December 2024 – January 2025
We welcome you to view our recent acquisitions currently on view in the gallery and online.
To learn more, click here.
RECENTLY CLOSED EXHIBITION
Swirling Vortex: Sand and Waves
Sakiyama Takayuki
November 7 – mid-December 2024
We are excited to present Swirling Vortex: Sand and Waves, Sakiyama Takayuki’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery. Sakiyama continues to explore the meeting of waves and shoreline, drawing inspiration from the rugged coastal landscape near his studio on the Izu peninsula. His dynamic swirling sculptural forms and their carved linear banding evoking vortexes earned him a special mention from the prestigious Loewe Foundation Craft Prize in 2021. The prize jurors commented that his vessel “both invokes and inverts the seabed.”
Form and surface seamlessly mesh in the sculptural vessels created by Sakiyama Takayuki. His double-walled forms with cascading, undulating, carved ridges blur the boundaries between exterior and interior to a mesmerizing effect. Sakiyama achieves the sense of centrifugal motion in his vessels by first fashioning (from clay slabs) separate exterior and interior rings. He sculpts these with spirally diagonal irregular bands, moving along the exterior walls and continuing onto and around the interior. Then, he attaches a swirling base and an open “collar.” He seamlessly unites the segments with additional carved, overlapping bands until all the surfaces combine to create a veritable churning whirlpool. Sakiyama’s own glistening, sand-infused glaze further enhances the vessel surfaces. Their textures call to mind a rough, grainy beach or a Zen Garden’s raked, combed sands.
Sakiyama studied at Osaka University of the Arts under three modern ceramic masters, all of whom emphasized non-functionality and originality of design. He, however, remains grounded in the challenge of maintaining functionality while creating dynamic sculptural forms.
These powerful, hypnotically carved functional vessels have earned him numerous awards and found permanent homes in museums worldwide including The Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Ceramic Art, Hyōgo Japan; National Museum of Scotland; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and Victoria and Albert Museum, London, among many others. Joan B Mirviss LTD is delighted to again showcase his latest forceful, swirling creations in this sixth exhibition with the gallery.
We look forward to welcoming you soon!
To learn more, click here.
PAST ASIA WEEK NEW YORK AUTUMN 2024 EXHIBITION
Quiet Elegance: The Ceramics of Fukumoto Fuku
September 13 – October 25, 2024
Weekday gallery hours are 11 am-6 pm during AWNY Autumn 2024 & the gallery will be open on Saturday Sept 14
It is a great pleasure to host the third solo show for Fukumoto Fuku during this Asia Week New York Autumn 2024. Quiet Elegance, The Ceramics of Fukumoto Fuku will feature over two dozen of her captivating sculptures and alluring teabowls. The sensuous work in porcelain by Fukumoto continues to enthrall collectors and curators with their soft, radiant, unglazed surfaces punctuated by glistening glazes in tones of blue ranging from the deepest cobalt or teal to powder blue or soft gray.
Starting on the wheel, she masterfully shapes each thinly walled form with organically irregular rims. For her current series of sculptural vessels, she then slices the upper area into sections before the initial bisque firing. She next re-stacks the often undulating pairings, applying gradated, colorful glazes as the “glue” between the segments before the second high-temperature firing. With the final addition of platinum or gold leaf, her finished forms may reference the ephemeral radiance of the sun or a full moon peeking through clouds or mist – a wistful beauty that belies the permanence of these heavenly bodies.
Fukumoto Fuku, who took up ceramics to distinguish herself from her parents— both successful textile artist–– has become celebrated for her remarkably thin, gracefully shaped porcelain sculptures. Although she studied at university under renowned Akiyama Yō, who for his own work, focuses on geologically inspired rough stoneware forms, she found working with the challenges of porcelain more intriguing.
Her work has been exhibited and acquired by major museums in Japan and the US and is currently featured in the traveling exhibition and its related publication, Radical Clay Contemporary Women Artists from Japan. That show, now on view at the Ringling Art Museum in Sarasota, Florida, runs concurrently with our gallery exhibit.
To learn more and view our online catalog, click here.
ZOOM GALLERY TALKS AVAILABLE TO VIEW
Toshiko Takaezu: Her Journey
Recorded on Thursday, September 26, 2024 at 5pm EDT
TOSHIKO TAKAEZU (1922-2011) was a celebrated and innovative Hawaiian-American ceramic artist who combined inspiration from her cultural heritage with Western contemporary art styles to create her unique, dynamic aesthetic. Initially, Takaezu produced utilitarian ceramics that evolved into her signature stacked, totemic standing, closed-vessel forms. She often displayed her powerful, boldly painted works together with her fiber hangings and paintings, artfully designing highly personal installations inviting conversations between the differing media.
During her lifetime, Takaezu was honored with multiple museum exhibitions and today her works can be found in the permanent collections of over 65 international museums including The Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; and the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park.
We hosted this panel discussion with the scholars and curators who produced the current, major retrospective exhibition Toshiko Takaezu; Worlds Within, now traveling the country and authored its accompanying thorough, scholarly publication.
PANELISTS:
Glenn Adamson, scholar and curator
Elisabeth Agro, Nancy M. McNeil Curator of Modern Contemporary Craft and Decorative Arts
Darlene Fukuji, Board Member, Toshiko Takaezu Foundation and grandniece of the artist
Carolyn Herrera-Perez, Curator of Glass and Ceramics, Chazen Museum of Art
Kathryn Goffnett, Associate Curator, Cranbrook Art Museum
Moderated by Joan B Mirviss
To view the recording of this talk, please click here.
Art of the People: Exploring the Mingei Film Archive
Recorded on Thursday, April 18, 2024 at 5pm EDT
Perhaps one of the best-known aspects of Japanese ceramics in the West remains the Mingei folk art movement and its leading proponents, Hamada Shōji and Bernard Leach. Because of their advocacy and publicly facing roles, aided greatly by the medium of film, the timeless qualities of Mingei have figured prominently in the perception of Japanese art in the West throughout the twentieth century. For this unique ZOOM Gallery Talk, filmmaker Marty Gross shares with us his extraordinary mission to restore, record, preserve, and archive the films of and about Mingei from the early twentieth century in his project, The Mingei Film Archive. He will share with us rare footage of prewar Japan and of pottery production in centers such as Tamba and Mashiko. As a potter himself, Marty Gross shares with us how the Mingei Film Archive developed and how his personal journey merged his two great artistic interests to create this remarkable and irreplaceable resource for ceramics and for Japanese art lovers.
Panelist:
Marty Gross, filmmaker and founder of The Mingei Film Archive, based in Toronto, Canada
Moderated by Joan Mirviss
To view the recording of this talk, please click here.
