Garth Johnson - Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist
School of Art, Art History & Design
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02/16/2021
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Garth Johnson - Ceramics
Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist
2/10/2021
Writer, curator and educator Garth Johnson is the Paul Phillips and
Sharon Sullivan Curator of Ceramics at the Everson Museum of Art, where he
oversees their world-renowned Ceramics collection. Johnson received his
B.F.A. from University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and his M.F.A. from Alfred
University. Before moving to Syracuse, Garth served as the Curator of
Ceramics at the ASU Art Museum Ceramics Research Center and Curator of
Artistic Programs at The Clay Studio in Philadelphia and spent seven years as
a Professor at College of the Redwoods in Eureka, California. Johnson is a
self-described craft activist who explores craft’s influence and relevance
in the 21st century. His research interests range from 1960s and 70s
artist-led movements in the field of ceramics to the intersection of clay,
video, and performance. His recent exhibitions at the Everson include The
Floating Bridge: Postmodern and Contemporary Japanese Ceramics, Renegades &
Reformers: American Art Pottery, and Earth Piece: Conceptual and Performative
Works in Clay. His writing has been published nationally and internationally,
with recent contribution to the books Repositioning Paolo Soleri: The City is
Nature and Victor Cicansky: The Gardener’s Universe.
Searchable Transcript
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- [00:00:02.280]Peter Pinnell: As I said, good evening everyone, my name is Pete Pinnell and i'm a professor in the School of Art, Art History and Design.
- [00:00:09.360]Peter Pinnell: i'm here to introduce Gail Kendall who will, in turn, introduce our speaker for this evening. Gail is an emeritus professor of this school and taught here from 1987 until her retirement in 2011.
- [00:00:22.440]Peter Pinnell: She was also the one who worked closest with Garth Johnson when he was a student here. Gail introduced Garth to me when I arrived at UNL in 1995.
- [00:00:32.240]Peter Pinnell: telling me that she had one student quote, who is a star unquote and she was speaking of Garth. It's my pleasure to introduce my colleague Gail Kendall.
- [00:00:42.560]Gail M Kendall: Thanks Pete.
- [00:00:45.200]Gail M Kendall: When Garth Johnson arrived in Lincoln to embark on his undergraduate career, he did three things: opened a shop on O street that sold used CDs and 50s furniture, he was ahead of his time.
- [00:00:59.120]Gail M Kendall: The shop was called Zero Street after a phrase by Allen Ginsberg poem Auto Poesy to Nebraska.
- [00:01:06.680]Gail M Kendall: Next, he secured a slot on KZUM's schedule and produced a radio program throughout his time in Nebraska.
- [00:01:14.760]Gail M Kendall: Before finishing a year in ceramics, He founded the pottery Liberation Front and created an early zine called Clayboy.
- [00:01:23.440]Gail M Kendall: garth was a seeker, strove to stand out while never acting out. His subtle wit, his sense of irony, rare in one so young.
- [00:01:32.800]Gail M Kendall: Along with his enthusiasm and goodwill insured, he would be surprised by his mentors and teachers. He worked with Eddie [Dominguez], Pete and me reading out of each of us the best we had to offer.
- [00:01:45.040]Gail M Kendall: Garth's career as an artist and influencer has been one that embodies thinking outside the box. The merriam Webster dictionary defines an outlier thustly. A person or thing that is a typical within a particular group, class or category, please join me in welcoming Garth Johnson.
- [00:02:11.400]Garth W Johnson: Gail, Thank you so much.
- [00:02:14.120]Garth W Johnson: it's amazing to be on a virtual stage and it's amazing that we're connecting with so many people who.
- [00:02:24.600]Garth W Johnson: who I know I recognize a lot of faces and a lot of mentors in the audience.
- [00:02:30.120]Garth W Johnson: Karen Kunz, I took almost as many printmaking classes with you, as I did with...
- [00:02:37.120]Garth W Johnson: The ceramics faculty. I think George woolf from the English department might be on, and I will try to...
- [00:02:46.320]Garth W Johnson: keep my, be able to...
- [00:02:49.120]Garth W Johnson: Speak fluidly here.
- [00:02:52.320]Garth W Johnson: Other amazing obsessives and people that I knew from Lincoln and the music scene are here and my mother, I do make it back to nebraska when the pandemic isn't going on, and I look forward to my next visit.
- [00:03:04.880]Garth W Johnson: A lot has changed since my last official visit to University of Nebraska so I was brought in in 2015,
- [00:03:13.320]Garth W Johnson: and got the opportunity to do a public lecture and I talked about the winding strange career that brought me here.
- [00:03:23.480]Garth W Johnson: i've been a record store owner.
- [00:03:26.760]Garth W Johnson: i've worked for an architecture firm as a designer. I've been an educator and tenured professor in the California Community college system and I left that tenure job...
- [00:03:38.720]Garth W Johnson: to on curating and throw in my lot as a museum curator.
- [00:03:47.480]Garth W Johnson: I am now at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York, otherwise known as Ceramic Mount Olympus and if you don't believe me, maybe you'll believe this guy so i'm going to welcome a guest.
- [00:04:13.440]Garth W Johnson: So i'm going to welcome a guest and let them tell you a little bit of something about...
- [00:04:19.920]Garth W Johnson: The Everson Museum of Art.
- [00:04:27.120]Garth W Johnson: An Artist transports the energies, the elements of the world without to create the world.
- [00:04:56.120]Garth W Johnson: To his work, the artist explores the unique self, the unique soul. The Artist confronts the mythological muse, struggling with life's primordial forces to evoke the transcendent, the refined, the sublime, and the beautiful.
- [00:05:10.160]Garth W Johnson: Only one talent pieces of command of craft a second nature to the discovery emerged yet remain open to the accidental.
- [00:05:18.840]And the unknown. ♪
- [00:05:26.960]Garth W Johnson: Okay, so that, for anyone who didn't recognize was none other than Orson Welles.
- [00:05:33.440]Garth W Johnson: And you could do worse than having Orson Welles play you on for a lecture.
- [00:05:38.080]Garth W Johnson: So this was part of a documentary a 30 minute documentary that was created for the Emerson museum of art back in 1979 to accompany an exhibition called a century of Ceramics in the United States.
- [00:05:50.720]Garth W Johnson: And that's going to be part of what I talk about. I figured that since I did so much talking about myself during the last time that I was there I would take the opportunity with this big stage to brag about the place where....
- [00:06:05.160]Garth W Johnson: I currently find employment, the Everson Museum of Art and it's a place that should be known by all of you in this audience and i'm going to give you the reasons why you should know the Everson, follow the Everson and hold it dear to your heart.
- [00:06:22.920]Garth W Johnson: And then hopefully it'll be honoring the intentions of how Gail and Pete so graciously introduced introduced me.
- [00:06:30.320]Garth W Johnson: And i'll talk about some of the things that i'm working on plus one big outside of the box initiative that may actually earn me the title of outlier if it doesn't kill me first.
- [00:06:42.000]Garth W Johnson: So I want to welcome everybody to come visit me at the Everson, if you just point your car East on i80 and then eventually switched to i90 you'll wind up in beautiful Syracuse, New York.
- [00:06:57.520]Garth W Johnson: This is the Everson Museum of Art, the first reason why you should come visit the person is that this is an architectural landmark. The building was created in 1968 by...
- [00:07:11.960]Garth W Johnson: None other than I.M. Pei, creator of Wells Fargo Bank in beautiful downtown Lincoln, Nebraska.
- [00:07:21.080]Garth W Johnson: So this is of course the building that he is known for other than the Louvre Pyramid and the rock and roll hall of fame and the wells fargo building.
- [00:07:30.520]Garth W Johnson: But it's an incredible architectural statement. He was hired in 1968 early in his career to create this building out of cast concrete. It can be lumped I guess into the category of brutalist art but it's an incredible space and one of the prime... Let me share for a second here.
- [00:07:53.120]Garth W Johnson: One of the prime things that's incredible about the space is related to what's great about an incredible pot, and that is the exterior and the function...
- [00:08:05.000]Garth W Johnson: mirror the Interior and I.M. Pei likes to think about the Emerson museum of art as a sculpture to contain sculptures, a sculpture to contain art.
- [00:08:17.640]Garth W Johnson: We have four large galleries that are on the top part of the building, all of them linked by bridges that connect them.
- [00:08:25.440]Garth W Johnson: And those four galleries, are the volumes that cantilever out into space. Very recently, I tried to concoct a scheme whereby...
- [00:08:37.760]Garth W Johnson: I would bring the sculptor Viola Fries biggest career masterpiece to the Everson, which is a series of like 18, 12-foot sculptures.
- [00:08:49.520]Garth W Johnson: And it was so heavy that our engineer wouldn't allow it to exist in these cantilevered spaces. so I.M. Pei has foiled me once, but i'm going to find other ways to use the space.
- [00:09:03.560]Garth W Johnson: The Everson before it was the Everson, was the Syracuse Museum of Art. So during some of the lecture today I will be interchanging talking about the Syracuse.
- [00:09:14.160]Garth W Johnson: museum of art, which was up until 1968 when the Everson building opened and then it was the Everson and after that. but if i'm talking about the Everson in the 1920s...
- [00:09:27.280]Garth W Johnson: What i'm referring to is the Syracuse museum of fine art. Here's a picture of the beautiful Plaza outside of the Everson, and this is something that we activate constantly every night we show films on the...
- [00:09:42.920]Garth W Johnson: and videos by artists on the side of the building and this has become one of the focal points of a resurgent downtown Syracuse. This is of course, a more accurate picture of what the Everson looks like right now. You can see our beautiful Henry Moore sculpture.
- [00:10:01.160]Garth W Johnson: Which is covered in a frosting like coating of snow through our long, long Syracuse winters when it's great to hole up and look at some art.
- [00:10:13.280]Garth W Johnson: And we actually see our highest attendance through the winter, because people know that they can come and see meaningful arts during that part of the year.
- [00:10:23.120]Garth W Johnson: And here's a picture of the inside of the Everson, including some of the artwork on display and...
- [00:10:32.480]Garth W Johnson: I want everyone to consider that this spiral staircase that I.M. Pei created, was created in a pre-digital era. All of it worked out with mathematics and slide rules and...
- [00:10:46.120]Garth W Johnson: busy a curve. You can see the beautiful coffered ceiling on the top, but one of the things that's the most distinctive about the Everson that sets sets it aside from other brutalist buildings...
- [00:10:58.400]Garth W Johnson: Is that I.M. Pei has always had a sense of place and in an era before, it was...
- [00:11:05.000]Garth W Johnson: popular and trendy to do so, he selected a local pink Granite aggregate that was mixed into the concrete mixture for the building.
- [00:11:14.160]Garth W Johnson: In the whole building was cast using wooden concrete molds and then some poor bastard had to set up these 45 degree jigs and they use a...
- [00:11:27.760]Garth W Johnson: Bush hammer, a pneumatic Bush hammer one line at a time to reveal the pink Granite inside of the aggregate.
- [00:11:36.920]Garth W Johnson: So the whole Everson building is covered in this amazing texture that reveals the warm pink Granite aggregate underneath. but all of it was done in an incredibly tactile way.
- [00:11:47.880]Garth W Johnson: It took a great deal of effort to be able to reveal that texture. So I like to refer to the everson as artisanal brutalism and i'm going to talk a little bit about some of the high Labor pieces inside of the Museum in just a moment.
- [00:12:05.560]Garth W Johnson: The second reason why you should be interested in the Everson, are some of the pioneering activities, the Everson, in fact, has an exhibition up right now that's a little bit of a victory lap in our 52nd year that looks back at our history of collecting and our legacy of...
- [00:12:23.720]Garth W Johnson: pioneering different programming, so the person was the first Museum in the United States to have a docent program and sorry sheldon museum of art...
- [00:12:35.600]Garth W Johnson: The Everson was arguably the first Museum in the United States to declare that they only collected American art and that was in 1911, and so our collection outside of ceramics is built on the United States.
- [00:12:50.520]Garth W Johnson: We were the first museum to host an exhibition by Joan michell. We put on Yoko Ono's debut museum exhibition with John Lennon as her guest artist and we'll talk about that near to the end of my lecture.
- [00:13:06.200]Garth W Johnson: We put on the first Maryland mentor exhibition. We were the first museum to acquire pieces by ceramic artists like Grayson Perry. We have a 1989 piece from Grayson Perry in our collection.
- [00:13:20.320]Garth W Johnson: The Everson was also pioneering when it came to our work in the field of video, so I think the the portable video camera with a portable Pack...
- [00:13:32.960]Garth W Johnson: Maybe they launched on the market around 1967, the Everson opened in 1968.
- [00:13:42.920]Garth W Johnson: And we hired a permanent full time curator of video in 1971 and I don't think that MOMA acquired their first video for their permanent collection until 1979 or around 1980.
- [00:14:00.320]Garth W Johnson: The Everson hosted early incredible performance pieces and video pieces by artists like Nam June paik, and this is, of course, Nam June pikes performance with Charlotte mormon...
- [00:14:12.560]Garth W Johnson: On his video cello and that was performed in the piece, that the photo that you're seeing is at the Everson museum of art.
- [00:14:22.840]Garth W Johnson: But i'm not here to talk about video, i'm not here to talk about the building, i'm here to talk about the Everson legacy of ceramics and it's interesting. i'm 47 years old, and I was well-educated by gail Kendall and Pete Pinnell, and...
- [00:14:43.040]Garth W Johnson: I certainly knew about the Everson and learned about some of the treasures that were contained inside of the Everson in my college experience.
- [00:14:53.600]Garth W Johnson: i've got to say that right around the time that I was learning about the Everson, our longtime director Ron Cookta a retired move to New York City and the leadership that followed Ron Cookta as the director of the Everson.
- [00:15:09.080]Garth W Johnson: weren't on board with ceramics in the way that previous leadership had been although there were periodic efforts to revive ceramics and to use the collection, there was never a sustained connection with ceramics from the MID 90s onward or the late 90s onward. So a whole generation of...
- [00:15:32.880]Garth W Johnson: Artists and connoisseurs, who are younger than I am, really don't know about the treasures that are lurking inside of the Everson.
- [00:15:42.440]Garth W Johnson: And I have to say I don't know that it was in my introduction, the one failing that Gail and Pete had with my introduction, is that they did not give my title.
- [00:15:50.760]Garth W Johnson: So i'm the Paul Philips insurance Sullivan curator of ceramics at the Everson, thanks to a $5 million donation from an incredible Syracuse couple.
- [00:16:00.440]Garth W Johnson: My position at the Everson is endowed in perpetuity and i'm going to introduce you to Paul and Sharon virtually later on in this conversation so...
- [00:16:13.200]Garth W Johnson: let's move on, these are all of course pieces by Adelaide allsopp Robin Oh, and she is the bedrock upon the Everson and our ceramics collection.
- [00:16:24.960]Garth W Johnson: Actually, on the left hand side of this slide you'll see a tall pot, that is black and white, this is Adelaide Robin knows funerary urn, her sinnerary urn.
- [00:16:37.280]Garth W Johnson: So she created it for her ashes, and those of her husband and she passed away in 1929 and she referred to her current cremation as her last firing.
- [00:16:48.920]Garth W Johnson: And Adelaide Robin knows eternal remains are in the permanent collection of the Everson Museum in the urn that you see right there and oddly I feel like she was always a little sort of angel or devil looking over my shoulder and it's a heavy weight for someone...
- [00:17:11.120]Garth W Johnson: I think my age, to serve as the fierce guardian of the legacy of a woman, like her, so Adelaide Robin oh i'm guessing that...
- [00:17:20.480]Garth W Johnson: Half of the people watching this are aware of her and her legacy and half probably are not so i'll give you the cliff notes version. Adelaide robinho lived and worked and had her ceramifc career in Syracuse, New York where i'm speaking to you from right now.
- [00:17:42.320]Garth W Johnson: She came up as part of a large family like a lot of women her age, she learned China painting porcelain painting.
- [00:17:51.520]Garth W Johnson: Not just as a dainty art for one's free time but she was not a woman of means and she learned it as a means to support herself so she supported herself and her large family in part by...
- [00:18:05.000]Garth W Johnson: Teaching China painting, which is something that, as a student gail Kendall actually pushed me to do and I learned China painting from a group of amazing older women who China painted every week in a garage in Lincoln.
- [00:18:20.120]Garth W Johnson: Adelaide Robinaeu had a fierce desire, as did many women who shaped the field of ceramics during this time period.
- [00:18:27.680]Garth W Johnson: To be able to control every aspect of what they were making. so in China painting you predict you buy pre made blank pieces of China generally produced by European manufacturers.
- [00:18:39.360]Garth W Johnson: And then you paint your designs on top of the piece of pre-made super white China.
- [00:18:47.120]Garth W Johnson: Adelaide Robinaeu no knew that she wanted to make her own pots and throw her own pots on the potter's wheel.
- [00:18:53.520]Garth W Johnson: In a time that that's just not something that cultured women did, so in 1901 she pinched her first pot, which is now in the collection of the metropolitan museum of art.
- [00:19:05.840]Garth W Johnson: A pretty incredible little piece of proto Funk art. and in the 10 years between the pinching of her first porcelain pot..
- [00:19:14.840]Garth W Johnson: and her masterpiece, the scarab vase, which i'm going to talk about in a moment, and that you see right here with her working on.
- [00:19:22.160]Garth W Johnson: It was only a 10 year period. Gail, Pete, it's now been almost 25 years since you taught me to throw on the potter's wheel and I couldn't come anywhere close to the artistry of Adelaide Robinaeu oh seven or eight short years after she took up the potter's wheel.
- [00:19:40.400]Garth W Johnson: Adelaide Robinaeu was not a modest woman, she was almost a Martha Stewart lifestyle guru of her time.
- [00:19:49.720]Garth W Johnson: She founded a magazine called Keramic Studio, which was the ceramics monthly of its day, it was a center for China painters and ceramic artists to come. And her audience was mainly....
- [00:20:03.520]Garth W Johnson: Conservative China painters, but she was looking to European design and trying to....
- [00:20:10.800]Garth W Johnson: elevate the design discourse among her audience. Syracuse is also known for one other arts and crafts guru who lived here and that's Gustaf Stickley.
- [00:20:21.280]Garth W Johnson: Stickley, of course, had his own magazine called The Craftsman, but Adelaide Robinaeu founded Keramic Studio one full year before Gustav Stickley founded...
- [00:20:30.800]Garth W Johnson: His magazine and Adelaide Robinaeu, I think, kept topping Gustaf stickley in many, many ways, but, of course, being a strong woman does not get the the acclaim that someone like Gustaf Stickley got. Anyway, this quote... "Syracuse has at least two boasts.
- [00:20:53.720]Garth W Johnson: "There is the salt, which gives it gives it its savor and then there are the Robinaeu porcelains!"
- [00:21:00.800]Garth W Johnson: So throughout her career she made a range of porcelains, many of them beautiful crystal in modest forms that were meant for people's homes, but she also spent great amounts of time carving her surfaces and...
- [00:21:19.760]Garth W Johnson: doting on the forms that she made. So lots of people on this call actually know the scarab vase and, by the way.
- [00:21:26.800]Garth W Johnson: We just produced a line at the Everson of enamelled scarab vase pins and they are marvels. I'm going to send some to the ceramics department to spread around. Gail I need to get one to you.
- [00:21:39.640]Garth W Johnson: I mean, I actually zoom out here, so that I can zoom into the scarab vase. All right, what is special about the scare vase? what makes this the most famous pot to ever be created in the United States, a few things. So first of all.
- [00:22:01.400]Garth W Johnson: it's porcelain. Porcelain was not a material that any artist could just walk into a ceramic supply store and purchase.
- [00:22:10.240]Garth W Johnson: Adelaide Robinaeu had to write to a French artist named Taxile Doat who provided, very generously, his formula for porcelain.
- [00:22:20.200]Garth W Johnson: Adelaide Robinaeu translated that into materials that she could acquire in the United States. She mixed it by hand; fine-tuned the formula.
- [00:22:31.720]Garth W Johnson: And porcelain's a very finicky material to be able to throw with on the potter's wheel. The scarab vase is about 18 inches tall, it has a separate lid, it has a separate...
- [00:22:45.280]Garth W Johnson: base that it rests on but this whole thing is hand carved. So Adelaide Robinaeu threw it on the potter's wheel. It's at least three quarters of an inch thick.
- [00:22:57.800]Garth W Johnson: And then, all of the carving that you see here is elaborate carving that happened when the scarab vase was bone dry.
- [00:23:06.080]Garth W Johnson: So, most of the people on this call has had their hands in clay at some point. I want to repeat that she did the carving while the scarab base was bone dry. So she had to work like a careful archaeologist excavating something. She used surgical scalpels, use knitting needles...
- [00:23:25.000]Garth W Johnson: And she could do an area about the size of a nickel in a full day of sitting and working on the scarab vase because she was afraid of what would happen if she carved too hard.
- [00:23:36.120]Garth W Johnson: Which porcelain has a memory and is very apt to crack. One wrong move and Adelaide Robinaeu could have carved through the whole thing; the whole thing could have crumbled.
- [00:23:47.680]Garth W Johnson: What I will tell you, and there is no mold making, there's no trickery here. It's all hand carving and these areas of cartouche are paper thin and i'll talk a little bit more about sort of what's special there.
- [00:24:02.320]Garth W Johnson: it's an incredible piece to behold it's in the Everson's permanent collection and I invite you to make your pilgrimage to Syracuse to stand...
- [00:24:10.760]Garth W Johnson: In front of it and to experience it. This is an experience that very few people get which is seeing the inside of the scarab vase. So you can see the translucency of the porcelain, you can see how paper thin the scarab vase was when Adelaide Robinaeu carved it.
- [00:24:28.840]Garth W Johnson: And you can see another remarkable thing about the scarab vase, which is Adelaide Robinaeu spent 1000 hours carving the scarab vase.
- [00:24:39.560]Garth W Johnson: It was very carefully glazed by hand, it was put in the kiln when it came out of the kiln, there were fairly massive cracks crawling up the side of the square of base. Rather than throwing a fit, rather than junking the scarab vase, Adelaide Robinaeu....
- [00:24:56.320]Garth W Johnson: Used pre-fired porcelain, cow-signed porcelain, carefully repaired those pieces and fired it a number of times to get what you see here. So the side of the scarab vase, the sides are absolutely perfect, but you can see, when you look at the bottom of the scarab base, teensy tiny cracks.
- [00:25:19.040]Garth W Johnson: One of the things that I did with an object study class that I taught at Syracuse University was to get out an endoscope and anyone who's had a recent colonoscopy...
- [00:25:31.160]Garth W Johnson: I apologize to you for any trauma that you might sort of endure here.
- [00:25:36.840]Garth W Johnson: But we actually looked with a lighted scope inside of the scarab vase and we found a couple of interesting things that i've never really heard anybody speak about and I love talking to Robinaeu scholars about this so apologize for the shakiness here. Robinaeu was a self taught potter.
- [00:25:57.000]Garth W Johnson: You can see the relative regularity of her throwing rings in the scarab vase, you can see little iron spots in the bottom, which is interesting to me.
- [00:26:08.120]Garth W Johnson: You can see, I think, pretty definitively that it was thrown in two pieces and it was joined right around here. But if anyone can see these little tiny like white porcelain boogers that sort of dots the inside of the...
- [00:26:23.040]Garth W Johnson: The scarab vase, I think these are parts where Adelaide Robinaeu accidentally barely carved through and they were repaired with wet slip.
- [00:26:35.600]Garth W Johnson: So the close examination of pottery can pay off and I had a great time looking at a couple of pieces over video. We didn't get out the endoscope with the very talented graduate students and some of the undergrads today...
- [00:26:53.040]Garth W Johnson: But this educational mission is something that's near and dear to my heart.
- [00:26:57.720]Garth W Johnson: And you know, from now on I will be continuing to teach ceramic history classes for Syracuse University students.
- [00:27:06.920]Garth W Johnson: Where I will be doing it through actual objects, instead of just endless slides that are being put up and apologies to any of my incredible art history teachers, that may have been on the call here.
- [00:27:19.040]Garth W Johnson: there's a genre of scarab-based porn I think if you look up hashtag scarab-based porn, this is not me, by the way.
- [00:27:28.040]Garth W Johnson: Ben Peterson is the name of this person that i've connected with since, but took his picture of him licking the scarab piece, a little bit.
- [00:27:36.200]Garth W Johnson: Okay, so ceramic reason number one for loving the Everson. Adelaide Robinaeu, by the way she created the scarab vase, while she was teaching at University City in St. Louis.
- [00:27:49.680]Garth W Johnson: All of the other faculty were men, all of the other faculty, received more resources and had more assistance and she was left to translate...
- [00:28:00.000]Garth W Johnson: For one of the French artists who was on the staff there. And she created her masterwork, I think definitively, as a way to push back against some of the discrimination that she faced as a woman, during this time period.
- [00:28:16.280]Garth W Johnson: All right, reason number two for you to love the Everson ceramic-wise also relates to a very strong female presence at the Everson.
- [00:28:24.440]Garth W Johnson: For almost a majority of the Everson and the Syracuse museum of Fine Arts existence, we have had female leadership. And there was a director around the time that Adelaide Robinaeu passed away. An incredible woman named Anna Wetherill Olmsted.
- [00:28:48.440]Garth W Johnson: She was a friend of Adelaide Robinaeu, and she was looking for a way to memorialize Adelaide Robinaeu upon her death in 1929. So she conceived of...
- [00:28:58.680]Garth W Johnson: A ceramic invitational which, in its first year was only open to artists from New York state.
- [00:29:04.720]Garth W Johnson: But that included Alfred University, it included New York City and really drew wide talents in New York City.
- [00:29:12.680]Garth W Johnson: There was instantly a clamor nationwide for Anna Olmsted to make this an annual event and to open it up to potters throughout the rest of the country, and so in 1932 the Everson Ceramic nationals was born.
- [00:29:29.120]Garth W Johnson: i'm going to...
- [00:29:31.000]Garth W Johnson: bring up the full screen here again.
- [00:29:34.240]Garth W Johnson: So i'm going to tell you a few important things about the ceramic nationals. They had very modest beginnings, we still have a very plucky local board, it is not populated by...
- [00:29:47.240]Garth W Johnson: millionaire, billionaire collectors.
- [00:29:50.920]Garth W Johnson: And we have incredible artists on our board Carrie Mae Weems lives in Syracuse and serves on the board of the Everson.
- [00:29:58.960]Garth W Johnson: So it's one way that we leverage community, but one of the board members, when the ceramic nationals was conceived owned a casket company, so the image that you see here of the first ceramic national, shows draped forms which are actually...
- [00:30:18.040]Garth W Johnson: crates that caskets came in that the person showed some of these early masterworks on top of so from humble beginnings, the Everson developed the ceramic nationals.
- [00:30:29.600]Garth W Johnson: The Creme de la Creme of artists in the ceramic world fought with each other to enter their best work possible. They were always judged in person, by the jurors and there were regional areas where...
- [00:30:44.760]Garth W Johnson: Regionally the pottery was judged, then they were sent to the Everson for final judging and the most incredible thing about the ceramic nationals....
- [00:30:52.600]Garth W Johnson: is a tribute to Anna Olmsted, and that is that they traveled every year, so the ceramic nationals traveled to between eight and 12 different venues and those weren't just tiny Community venues and Olmsted traveled the ceramic nationals to the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
- [00:31:11.360]Garth W Johnson: The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Deyoung Museum in San Francisco, the Philadelphia Art Museum....
- [00:31:20.800]Garth W Johnson: on and on and on. The school of the Art Institute of Chicago hosted the Ceramic Nationals.
- [00:31:27.760]Garth W Johnson: So I can honestly say that the ceramic nationals did more to raise the profile of ceramics as a...
- [00:31:38.120]Garth W Johnson: Discipline, as an art really than anything else, and the ceramic national started in 1932 and they ended in 1972 as a regular thing.
- [00:31:49.640]Garth W Johnson: Another thing that I forgot to mention is when the Everson acquired its first grouping of Adelaide Robinaeu vessels in 1916, the Everson did so as fine art...
- [00:32:01.760]Garth W Johnson: and not as decorative art, so there were other institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum that collected pottery at that time.
- [00:32:10.160]Garth W Johnson: But never as fine art and I like to say that the art versus craft debate has been settled law at the Everson since 1916 and I stand by that. Here are some images of Ceramic Nationals as they sort of gain in...
- [00:32:26.240]Garth W Johnson: stature. This is the first one actually on the caskets. Here's the fifth Ceramic National. Right around this time the Everson took the ceramic national, international and...
- [00:32:39.120]Garth W Johnson: toured it to Denmark, Norway and, I believe, England. And in doing so, the Everson would acquire pieces for our permanent collection.
- [00:32:51.520]Garth W Johnson: And these were the pieces that were loaned out.
- [00:32:54.600]Garth W Johnson: I want to point out and give a shout out to anna Olmsted and the visionary leadership at the time, ceramics was having big conversations right now about...
- [00:33:04.880]Garth W Johnson: access and race and representation and identity, of course, the Everson could have done even more in this venue. But starting in 1933, with the first national Ceramic National, the Everson gave one of the highest awards to Maria Martinez, the Pueblo potter from North...
- [00:33:30.120]Garth W Johnson: New Mexico.
- [00:33:32.120]Garth W Johnson: At Maria Martinez's insistence, the Everson showed other South Eastern or South Western indigenous Potters.
- [00:33:44.360]Garth W Johnson: We also worked hand in hand with a settlement house for Mexican immigrants in Chicago called Whole House.
- [00:33:50.840]Garth W Johnson: And featured works by the newly arrived Mexican immigrants in some of the ceramic nationals, there were artists like William Artists and African American...
- [00:34:01.360]Garth W Johnson: Artists that was taught by Augustus savage and part of the Harlem Renaissance, but he went to Syracuse university participated in the ceramic nationals, oddly after he went into military service.
- [00:34:15.080]Garth W Johnson: He moved to Chadron, Nebraska and became a long time faculty Member at Chadron State, where, in particular, he mentored a lot of indigenous artists from the Standing Rock Reservation.
- [00:34:29.360]Garth W Johnson: here's some of the ephemera. You can go to the Everson's website www.everson.org and access an incredible library of our digitized materials from the ceramic nationals, so if this is a period that you're interested in.
- [00:34:44.040]Garth W Johnson: Looking through, I am here and the Everson is here to make that possible. The ceramic nationals continued through 1972, where Peter Volkas most famously as the final juror refused to jury the the 500 entries that they got on slides.
- [00:35:06.920]Garth W Johnson: And he and Robert Turner and an artist named Jeff schlanger agreed to suspend the ceramic nationals and they created an invitational instead, but the ceramics nationals were really folded the year following that.
- [00:35:23.240]Garth W Johnson: Here's a 1949 ceramic national.
- [00:35:27.000]Garth W Johnson: They had incredible...
- [00:35:30.320]Garth W Johnson: installations for the ceramic nationals. On the right, you can see, all of these floating shelves and even a reflective water feature.
- [00:35:39.600]Garth W Johnson: here's an article about the last ceramic national in 1972. We showed early pieces by Jun Kaneko and acquired them in this.
- [00:35:50.320]Garth W Johnson: john mason showed one of his...
- [00:35:54.440]Garth W Johnson: firebrick sculptures which are a landmark series within ceramic art.
- [00:36:01.880]Garth W Johnson: But moving quickly, I want to introduce you to Ronald Kuchta who stepped into the Everson's leadership role in 1974. Here he is with a piece that gives you another look at the Adelaide Robinaeu...
- [00:36:15.480]Garth W Johnson: urn and sadly Ron Kuchta just passed away.
- [00:36:20.360]Garth W Johnson: Several months ago, actually, but not after one last visit we were able to host him in November, and he came for last visit to the Everson, even though we knew his health was failing, but he was someone who lived and breathed ceramics.
- [00:36:36.680]Garth W Johnson: One of the greatest gifts that was ever given to me, Gail Kendall in her office, had a stack of magazines called American Ceramics. That was a very high-end, thoughtful, critical magazine that Ron Kuchta published after he left the Everson.
- [00:36:54.640]Garth W Johnson: And coming into contact with these magazines changed my life. And it was amazing to get to express my gratitude to Ron Kuchta in person.
- [00:37:04.040]Garth W Johnson: and continuing the ceramic legacy at the Everson is not a light thing for me, because I feel so inpersonally indebted...
- [00:37:13.760]Garth W Johnson: To the things that he did for the field. So one of those things was conceptualizing an exhibition with Margie Hutto who still teaches at Syracuse University.
- [00:37:24.440]Garth W Johnson: Very talented sculptor in her own right and, in addition to her own teaching at Syracuse University, she was the first full time ceramics curator at the Everson.
- [00:37:36.080]Garth W Johnson: So a decision was made to invest money and invest energy into a replacement for the ceramic nationals and that became a series of exhibition called New Works in Clay.
- [00:37:50.920]Garth W Johnson: Margie Hutto existed at the highest levels of the New York art world. She was married to a painter who showed at the Pace Gallery at the time.
- [00:37:59.240]Garth W Johnson: She was a personal friend of the critic Clement Greenberg and she had connections to the New York art world so they got a huge grants, an NEA grants.
- [00:38:11.040]Garth W Johnson: They funded and renovated a studio that was a former can factory here in Syracuse and they invited some of the highest profile artists from the New York art world.
- [00:38:22.920]Garth W Johnson: To come and make a body of work in Syracuse with instruction and materials and assistance and this became an incredible dialogue from...
- [00:38:35.120]Garth W Johnson: You know, high level artists, including the painter Helen Frankenthaler, who has a landmark piece in the Everson.
- [00:38:43.560]Garth W Johnson: Sir Anthony Caro, it was one of the first times that he worked in ceramics and he kept working in clay, for the rest of his life and bought a studio in the Hudson Valley.
- [00:38:53.760]Garth W Johnson: The painter Billy Al Bengston who had a history with ceramics did a project with Syracuse China, a series of functional plates and i'm just going to zip through some of these...
- [00:39:05.480]Garth W Johnson: Images, but David Smith had passed away, but had created works in clay that were showcased here. Larry Coons you know incredible painter.
- [00:39:15.960]Garth W Johnson: This absolutely changed the course of his career and the way that he worked. So here's Margie Hutto with some of her pieces in the can factory that they renovated.
- [00:39:26.400]Garth W Johnson: Here she is more recently with one of the pieces in the Everson's permanent collection and here is the crew at the Can factory, who worked with all of these artists. I think they still have this clay mixer at Syracuse University.
- [00:39:43.440]Garth W Johnson: This is Jules Olitski, the painter, making one of my very favorite pieces in the collection, which you can see on the right, in its final fired form. And you can see it in process on the Left, here's the installed exhibition...
- [00:40:00.360]Garth W Johnson: With many of the pieces.
- [00:40:03.160]Garth W Johnson: here's the crew and that character in the middle, is actually Clement Greenberg in his wool-checkered suit and here you can see him with I think a characteristic...
- [00:40:15.800]Garth W Johnson: drink in his hand as he's checking out the work with Margie in the studio. Helen frankenthaler, oh my God look at this, it had to have been chilly inside of that factory.
- [00:40:27.200]Garth W Johnson: check out her very, very high style hoodie here. The piece on the right is a piece called Mattress where she's working in her color field mode with soaking ceramic stains into...
- [00:40:42.680]Garth W Johnson: The body of the clay. Interestingly Almost none of the artists who worked on this project to use glossy glazes in their process. Here's Larry Poon setting up a room made out of clay that he then you know festooned with all of these.
- [00:41:01.200]Garth W Johnson: sort of grubby pieces of clay and he still works in a similar way, but using paints. Jewel Salecky and, by the way, the Everson has at least one piece...
- [00:41:10.880]Garth W Johnson: Of the work of each of these artists and a big part of my work recently has been communicating with the estates. We recently got the Helen Frankenthaler piece into her catalogue resume.
- [00:41:23.560]Garth W Johnson: Billy Al Benkston working with the Syracuse China company on the DEMO toss set that he created.
- [00:41:31.440]Garth W Johnson: here's another landmark show curated by Judas Schwartz, Nine West Coast sculptors and then the landmark show people actually attended the opening of this show and a symposium...
- [00:41:43.000]Garth W Johnson: That was held that had an address, a keynote address by Clement Greenberg. but the force behind creating a century of ceramics in the United States was a young Garth Clark...
- [00:41:53.640]Garth W Johnson: Who partnered with Margie Hutto. It was widely covered in the art press. It traveled to at least half a dozen different venues. Donald Cuspit it gave it and singled out singled out for specific praise in art in America.
- [00:42:09.680]Garth W Johnson: Here is the installation.
- [00:42:12.240]Garth W Johnson: here's Clement Greenberg speaking at the symposium. A young mustachioed garth Clark speaking at the symposium and, by the way this is hendricks Chapel at...
- [00:42:22.200]Garth W Johnson: Syracuse university where Martin Luther King jr gave several landmark speeches during the civil rights era. Alright so we've got about 15 minutes to catch you up on what the Everson is doing now.
- [00:42:37.600]Garth W Johnson: Pete, I might point you someone has their MIC unmuted right now, and you might put everyone else on mute if you're able to search out that scofflaw whoever you are you're just making...
- [00:42:50.440]Garth W Johnson: Light polite noises right now and...
- [00:42:55.160]Garth W Johnson: he's going to silence that that's okay.
- [00:42:56.840]Garth W Johnson: Alright, so I mentioned that the Everson has a long history of strong female leadership.
- [00:43:02.720]Garth W Johnson: Our current director who stepped on board six years ago is Elizabeth Dunbar.
- [00:43:08.280]Garth W Johnson: Immediately she looked at the museum and ask the question why are we not building our programming around the strengths of the museum, chiefly ceramics.
- [00:43:18.040]Garth W Johnson: She hired an incredible and very capable contemporary curator who knew the video collection and coached himself up very well on the ceramics collection, that's DJ Hillerman, who is now the head of the Savannah College of Art in Design's...
- [00:43:33.960]Garth W Johnson: Entire museum and gallery operation.
- [00:43:40.160]Garth W Johnson: And here are the incredible donors. So she set in motion a chain of events so anyone aspiring to leadership in the museum world would do well to sort of listen to this.
- [00:43:53.240]Garth W Johnson: She reinstituted the strengths of the museum very quickly to donors Paul Phillips and Sharon Sullivan.
- [00:44:01.440]Garth W Johnson: he's a Syracuse doctor now retired.
- [00:44:05.520]Garth W Johnson: stepped up and donated $5 million to renovate the ceramics gallery to endow my position and to endow a future study Center which we're in the process of planning right now...
- [00:44:17.640]Garth W Johnson: where you can view and study, a good chunk of the Everson's collection in the background, you see the Christina cordova sculpture. That was my first sort of flag planted on the mountain top in terms of diversifying the collection and acquiring work by emerging artists of color.
- [00:44:38.560]Garth W Johnson: Christina being absolutely one of them, and the person has recently been in the news, you may have heard about the Everson...
- [00:44:46.880]Garth W Johnson: deciding to deaccession a Jackson pollock painting in our collection, this is a scathing article in The Wall Street Journal.
- [00:44:57.520]Garth W Johnson: That revealingly was written by their theater critic and he says that the Everson was selling its soul, because...
- [00:45:05.080]Garth W Johnson: This Jackson pollock painting, which by the way, it's an early drip painting but it's about an 18 inch tiny painting that was exhibited for about 15 years straight in the museum when they didn't change our permanent collection galleries.
- [00:45:21.720]Garth W Johnson: No one noticed it, I would say that this Jackson pollock painting, which came to the Museum in 1990 doesn't even rank in the top 20 beloved pieces in our collection.
- [00:45:34.640]Garth W Johnson: It is in Jackson pollock's catalog resume but it's never been requested for travel and a traveling show. No scholars have even...
- [00:45:45.000]Garth W Johnson: requested to visit it and I was telling the students earlier today that we have a cookie jar...
- [00:45:50.480]Garth W Johnson: In our collection from 1938 that has been requested for more scholars and has been in way more exhibitions than this Jackson pollock painting.
- [00:45:59.080]Garth W Johnson: In any case, the everson deaccessioned it, it fetch $12 million at christie's last fall and is going into a permanent endowment that will pay out every year...
- [00:46:11.160]Garth W Johnson: So that the Everson can buy works by artists of color and build our contemporary collection for ever, thanks to the deaccession of this one piece.
- [00:46:24.200]Garth W Johnson: There has been blowback but all of it by older white male critics. I would love to have more discussions with this if anybody wants to, but the sale of this painting, which was not a beloved core piece that people travel to is now being harnessed for good.
- [00:46:45.920]Garth W Johnson: Here are a couple of the pieces that recently have come into the collection and will be highlighted in an upcoming exhibition built around an incredible Carrie Mae Weems piece in our collection. This is Courtney Leonard one of the most talented...
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