March 30 General Meeting – Scripps Ceramic Annual
Our late March meeting (rescheduled from April to accommodate the New Orleans trip) was held at the lovely Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery at Scripps College, where we saw the 78th Scripps College Ceramic Annual. PAA has now funded 25 catalogues for the ceramics exhibition, which this year is titled Handle Carefully: The Power of Words and Clay. Curator and interim director Kirk Delman, who has been interested in the use of text in this medium, this year invited educators who were also ceramicists to participate in the show. One of Delman’s goals was to see how artists and viewers could reconcile fragments of language and incomplete information. Pieces in the exhibition touch on racial, ethinic, and gender stereotypes that the artists have faced. There was a particularly moving collection of ceramic guns, each with the name of a person killed by gun violence within a nine-day span last year. Delman also noted that it was a treat for him to have a typewriter made by Robert Arneson, the “father of funk ceramics.” Our visit to this intriguing exhibition was followed by lunch at Pizza N Such in Claremont.