Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘Northern Clay Center’

I went to the Museum of Fine Arts to see an exhibition on 100 years of American ceramics. It was a lovely show, but I would have liked to see an example of the late Anne Kraus’s mysterious tea cups there. If Warren McKenzie could give her a whole show at the Northern Clay Center when I was living in Minneapolis, I know it’s not just the gal on the street who thinks Kraus is major.

The MFA ceramics show was a very small show, tucked away in a corner. It hardly seemed enough to justify the admission fee and parking.

So I took a walk through a really big show there, one on the Japanese artist Hokusai (you know: “The Wave”). Unlike the ceramics show, this one was crowded and almost too extensive to take in, but I enjoyed what I saw — especially some colorful wall hangings.

I took photos both outside the museum and inside (a sign said it was OK — just not to use a flash). My Hokusai photos are mostly of large-scale reproductions. The originals were small and harder to shoot through glass.

The show is running until August 9, and if you go, I recommend that you pause for the wall of slides at the entrance, which is delightful and gives one a sensation of watching the art coming into being, like a waterfall swishing down a landscape.

natural-water-pitted-stone

Indian-outside-the-MFA-by-Dallin

MFA-dining-room-glass sculpture

Hokusai-at-MFA-Boston

Hokusai-bird

tubby-time-Hokusai-style

Read Full Post »

My last job in Minneapolis was located not far from the wonderful Northern Clay Center on Franklin Avenue. I liked to go over at lunch, and when the late Anne Kraus was showing her ceramics, I must have visited five times just to look at her domestic but fanciful pieces and read their cryptic messages. Kraus decorated exotic tea cups. teapots, tiles, and more with intricate, mysterious scenes, and on them she wrote puzzling remarks. You would think about them long after leaving.

This one, “I Can’t Sleep Tile 1998” has this written near the top: “I ask this intruder if he can be quiet because I want to sleep so that I can dream. But he tells me that we are right now asleep and deep into a dream.” (The photo in the Garth Clark Gallery survey book was taken by Noel Allum.) You can see more of Kraus’s work online. Here, for example.

By the way, Warren MacKenzie, a giant among potters, was one of the original founders of the Northern Clay Center in 1990. He gets around, and I have observed that he has an exhibit at the Lacoste Gallery in Concord (MA) almost every year. He is showing there now.

On October 28, 2011, the NY Times noted a sale of some Anne Kraus ceramics, which brought numerous people who were searching on her name to my post.

Read Full Post »