Entrance to NEHMA’s “Unearthed,” with Viola Frey’s “Standing Woman (Woman with Hands Over Heart).” Image credit: Brandi Chase

The growing number of pottery studios in Salt Lake and Utah counties suggests an uptick in ceramics interest in the area. Sadly, an accompanying expansion in venues to enjoy and discover the very best the medium has to offer has yet to manifest—at least not in these locales. Meanwhile, a passion for pottery has been raging for more than a half century just a few hours away in Cache County—with no sign of abating. Unearthed: The NEHMA Ceramics Collection & The Woman Behind It, the ceramics retrospective at Utah State’s Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art (NEHMA) encompassing 300 works and spanning 100 years of ceramics’ history in the American West, will make that assertion clear.

A giantess—one of Viola Frey’s monumental ceramic sculptures—awaits your arrival. Poised at the exhibition’s entrance, exuberantly hued and aptly titled “Standing Woman (Woman with Hands Over Heart)” (1994), she welcomes you with a tear of joy in her eye. Katie Lee Koven,  Executive Director & Chief Curator of NEHMA, sees this giantess as an embodiment of Nora Eccles Harrison, the museum’s namesake, whose future-minded philanthropy made this retrospective possible. Harrison, who preferred to be called “Noni,” was herself a ceramics enthusiast, student, and teacher and had a profound influence on ceramics in the American West. From the ’50s to the ’70s, Noni was a vital part of the innovative Bay Area ceramics scene where then (as now) potters shared facilities and resources and worked together to load and fire the kilns to produce their work. To Noni, clay’s appeal lay as much in the community it fostered as it did in its practices and artifacts.

In 1982, the Nora Eccles Treadwell Foundation gifted the funds for the eponymous museum in her hometown university, Utah State, donated 400 ceramic vessels, and established an endowment to provide for annual purchases of ceramics. Noni’s beneficence also extended to the nearby Cain College of Fine Arts with the establishment of a graduate fellowship and an undergraduate scholarship in ceramics. In the 40 years since, thanks to the wise choices of museum directors, curators, and the guidance of esteemed ceramics professor John Neely, who joined Utah State just two years after the museum’s founding, the collection now comprises 1500 works from prestigious Western American artists and a cadre of national and international teachers, who have transited the region in general and Utah State in particular.

Installation view of Unearthed at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art. Image credit: Shawn Rossiter

Rudy Autio, “Aurora,” 1998, stoneware, 4 x 24.5 x 24.5 in. Image courtesy of Nora Eccles Museum of Art, Utah State University

Santana Martinez and Maria Martinez, “Plate,” earthenware, 1.5 x 13.125 x 13.125 in. Image courtesy of Nora Eccles Museum of Art, Utah State University

Many Utah State alumni—diverse in their output and currently working and influencing the field today—are part of this prestigious collection. Forrest Lesch-Middleton’s “Vessel” (2006) and Ruti Audio’s “Aurora” (1998) stand alongside the likes of Jackson Shaner, Patti Warashina, Peter Voulkos, Frey, Antonio Prieto and many, many other greats in this exhibition. While the alumni’s success owes a great deal to the leadership of Neely and his colleagues Dan Murphy and Todd Hayes—all of whose works appear in this exhibition—no one should underestimate the impact Noni’s gifts had on these students and through them on ceramics in the American West and beyond. While Neely’s innovative yet traditional approach to the practice, as well as that of his team, take pride of place in Utah State’s ceramics tradition, the graduate fellowship and undergraduate fellowships certainly bolstered the program early on. Yet most profoundly, Noni’s investment in ceramics at NEHMA through the facility, the endowment, and the educational ethos she instilled there enabled decades of Utah State ceramicists’ access to a preeminent and expanding collection of examples to inform and inspire them. In fact, the second floor of the exhibition houses what curator Billie Sessions calls the “Study Collection,” where decades of ceramics instructors have curated and taught from works they have selected to suit their students’ interests and needs. To the burgeoning ceramics community due south take note: you too can, and should, avail yourself of this resource.

Installation view of Unearthed at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art. Image credit: Shawn Rossiter

The restropective’s title, Unearthed, captures the consequence of the curatorial team’s aim to select pieces from the museum’s collection that reflect the range of possibilities within the medium, sorting them according to clay body and firing type and then grouping them biennially to demonstrate who was working within that era and how their explorations influenced the clay community of the time. This criteria “unearthed” lesser known artists from the clay community—women and Native Americans predominantly—and placed their works in conversation with those more acclaimed. The arrangement invites us to eavesdrop—so to speak—on the conversations each era’s representative vessels evince. The accompanying wall text eases into discussions already in progress.

In the period leading up to and including the 1920s, ceramicists in the West crafted wares in production potteries under the ideals of proficiency and consistency found in the Arts and Crafts movement. While Native American makers shared their methods, principles and material resources with the tourists and artists who visited their communities, their influence was, until recently, unacknowledged. Compare, for example, the tapered foot and inward oriented rim that define both “Olla” (circa 1900), by an unknown Zia Pueblo potter, and Paul Bonifas’ subsequent “Tureen” (circa 1947).

In the 1930s and ’40s university-based craft programs placed craftspeople alongside “fine” artists and trained them in every aspect of creation. In this context, production gave way to individual works of modernist art and the line between craftsperson and artist blurred. University-trained and newly elevated in their estimation of their medium, ceramicists of the ’50s and ’60s began to experiment with the material—high fire stoneware being a favorite at the time—and test the distinction between vessel makers (“potters”) and acolytes of abstract expressionism (“ceramicists”), with Peter Voulkos at the center of the debate. The curators’ placement of Harrison McIntosh’s “Bottle” (1975) next to Mary Tuthill Lindheim’s “#163 (Tall Abstract Jar)” (1966) demonstrates the parley between traditional craft and fine art. All the while, María Montoya Martinez and her family continued to make the globally sought earthenware, trench-fired, black on black pottery they had been making since the 1920s. (Incidentally, the exhibition plays a16mm film Noni’s first husband Walter Treadwell captured of Maria’s process in 1952.)

Whether as potter or ceramicist, clay communities in the 1970s and ’80s continued to push the limits of the material and experiment with factory production techniques and firing conditions, and erode the distinction between vessel and sculpture—see David Zweifel’s “Teapot set #68” (1988), for instance. Stoneware surfaces, like Robert Sperry’s “Platter” (1987), expressed the organic texture and patterns made on a rotating wheel and frozen in the chaos of the kiln. Porcelain’s satin surface made an ideal canvas for humorous and political messages. When the 1990s rolled around, ceramicists of the American West only benefited from the previous generations’ experimentation and irreverence and with the advent of the internet had access to the possibilities every tradition, every culture, and every era had to offer.

David Zweifel, “Teapot set #68 (cactus),” 1988, earthenware, 17 x 11.2 x 4.5 in. Image courtesy of Nora Eccles Museum of Art, Utah State University

Unearthed: The NEHMA Ceramics Collection & The Woman Behind It, Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Logan, through Apr. 20

Unless otherwise indicated, all images courtesy of Nora Eccles Museum of Art, Utah State University

Brandi Chase

Brandi Chase is poet, student, teacher and maker of pots (most often, but one never knows). She loves red lipstick.