Installation view of NCECA 2025 Exhibit True and Real at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art. Image by Geoff Wichert.

Since she assumed the role of Executive Director, Laura Allred Hurtado, along with her eight-member staff and accommodating docents, has seen to it that the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art’s six galleries present an unbroken parade of unforgettable exhibitions. While there’s no sign of flagging anywhere in the complex, which continues to sizzle in the face of an almost certain and absurd threat to its future, this season will surely rank among the most extraordinary in its near-century of operation. Right now, four of those six galleries are showing international-grade ceramic art in time for the hosting of Formation, the 59th Annual National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts’ conference. Starting with the new year and including local galleries and collections as well as work brought in by NCECA, this continues to be a banner year for possibly the oldest and certainly the most prevalent medium in art. Every culture has access to clay, and has found ways of working it. Here are a few examples.

They begin in the open-ended Projects Gallery, to which Amanda Smith has brought more of the mixed-media ceramic fables that she featured in the 2020 exhibition Material Issue. These doubly-sophisticated works place two-dimensional, painted dramas in three-dimensional, modeled settings—the different dimensions paralleling the interaction between a pure story, with real characters and events, and a fable, which values realism less than lessons on social hierarchies, truth vs. illusion, and morality, whether personal or political. “Barbarians Look Like Everybody Else,” she writes on the wall among her diverse examples of how hard it can be to separate reality from misrepresentation in the midst of an avalanche of unsorted data. One fable seemingly compares government (the castle), church (temple), and civilian authority (the town) as sources.

Surely the most important qualities of clay have to do with its accessibility. Not many cultures invented the means to paint with brushes and oil on canvas or wooden panels. Between the fall of Rome and the renaissance of Italy, no country in Europe had the capacity to cast life-sized figures in bronze. The stone effigies of Mesopotamia and Egypt reveal the importance of their sitters by the value of the constituents: soft, local rock for scribes and overseers; hard igneous material imported from afar for Pharaoh and Emperor. But clay can be found in ordinary soils, and being soft, can be worked by hand. Even a kiln isn’t necessary: still today indigenous potters pile combustable scraps around their clay and fuse it in an open fire.

Astrid Guerrero, “Gondolier of Portugal.” Image by Geoff Wichert.

So the next room, the Street Gallery, was set aside for Juror Jennifer Ling Datchuk’s Multicultural Fellowship Exhibition, in which artists whose backgrounds include Ghana, Iran, the South Asian and Latina diasporas, Colombia, Vietnamese America, Taiwan, El Salvador, China, India, and a few places the artists chose not to foreground. Both men and women, their credits include experiences in slums, ghettoes, and borderlands around the world. Among them, Garima Tripathi, in “A Daughter’s Chants | Feminist Mandalas,” uses high-fired porcelain not so much for its looks as the sounds it makes as part of rituals she performs, while in “Gondolier of Portugal,” Astrid Guerrero spells out poetry that covers a wall like a mural in relief text. A ceramic inversion or optical illusion appears in Tomo Ingalls “My Tea Party,” in which the classic vessels—a teacup, teapot, and a bowl, are replaced by a village-worth of hands. Paradoxically, her skill lets the hands that conventionally mold the clay be meticulously molded instead: the tools becoming her subjects.

Tomo Ingalls’ “My Tea Party.” Image by Geoff Wichert.

In the Main Gallery, True and Real presents five invited artists and 35 who applied and were juried in. While the accompanying statement modestly focuses on the extensive changes that have confronted humanity in the modern age, we should remember that clay has accompanied humanity from forests and caves all the way to the Moon. Considering that species-long interdependency, CuratorJudith S. Schwartz poses a question: “In the quest to reveal the authentic self, what does it mean to be True and Real?”

For those who can forego the elevator, descending the stairs offers a moving panorama of yet another version of the state of modern arts. While not as purely massive as those of Omaha’s Jun Kaneko, the works here make a more flexible and appropriate use of scale. With a hand as tall as the viewer, finger pointed at the ceiling, Kelly McLaughlin invites the audience to think about “The Feminine Left.” Paolo Porelli’s “Green Regeneration,” standing somewhere between organic robots and vegetable caryatids, could be a vision of kachinas grown wild. Crossing the gallery involves navigating between almost three dozen evocative transmutations of strange and disturbingly non-strange sculptures.

Paolo Porelli’s “Green Regeneration.” Image by Geoff Wichert.

Installation view of Constant Albertson’s “Inter Caetera.” Image by Shawn Rossiter.

Some works here having no actual clay present. Simone Leigh’s film, “Conspiracy,” is a 24-minute, black-and-white, symbolic narrative set in a clay workshop, the substantial output of which does sometimes rival Kaneko’s. The stop-motion animation of Megumi Naitoh’s “Searching for Blue” cleverly demonstrates many of the fundamental techniques responsible for the everyday magic of clay. Sometimes a little curiosity can turn a puzzling work into a punch in the gut: Constant Albertson’s “Inter Caetera”—Latin for “Among Others,” is subtitled “Old Sins Cast a Long Shadow.” It was a Papal Bull by that name that, in 1493, ambiguously gave Spain’s King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella sway over everything below (south) and to the left (west) of the Azores, or about half of the New World.

It’s appropriate for an organization with “education” in its name to include students’ works, and the Juried Student Exhibition, juried by Adrienne Eliades and Nicole Seisler, with work by 22 artists, makes a chronologically appropriate extension of True and Real. Anyone wondering “Where do these kids get their ideas” may be tickled by several of the contributions, such as Lucas Barnum’s “Collisions,” for which convincing basketballs were made of clay and, while still soft, were used to make free throws. The variously damaged balls were then glazed and fired. What a great prompt for a video of the “game”—or an MFA essay. Less light-hearted works include Zoila Carrasco’s “Feeding the Island,” in which a single woman carries a large basket on her head. Then there’s Keleigh McMullen’s “Three Months in the House of a Rapist,” in which the artist brings together a hotel lobby ashtray and a model of a bedroom that ends up peopled by cigarette butts and with a floor of ashes. Another blow to the solar plexus. And nearby, similarly thought-provoking, is Sasha Barrett’s “Ukranian Childhood”—an olive-drab munitions crate holding gray soccer balls complete with serial numbers.

No selection of artworks could be more arbitrary than this one, grounded in illustration of a writer’s impressions rather than anything to do with merit. As a curator said recently, an equal number more could be chosen that are just as good, and again after that. So it arguably doesn’t matter which of the many ceramic art exhibitions now holding forth in Utah someone sees, but there will not soon be another such chance to see what the world, and also the world of art, looks like from the perspective of the clay studio. Be alert, be open-minded, but be there.

Installation view of NCECA 2025 Juried Student Exhibition with Sasha Barrett’s “Ukranian Childhood” in the foreground. Image by Shawn Rossiter.

2025 NCECA Annual: True and Real and 2025 NCECA Juried Student Exhibition, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, through May 31. 2025 NCECA Multicultural Fellowship Exhibition and Amanda Smith: Trust Issues through May 3.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.