OUR AMERICA/WHOSE AMERICA? EXHIBITION CATALOG

FERRIN CONTEMPORARY presents contemporary ceramic art, sculpture, and selected works by represented artists and masterworks from private collections. Located in North Adams, Massachusetts on MASS MoCA’s 16-acre campus, our airy, white-box space serves as both a project incubator and traditional gallery program. Curated exhibitions are presented in the gallery and in collaboration with partner galleries, museums, and educational institutions throughout the country. Visit ferrincontemporary.com for more on our exhibitions and our collection or estate management programs.

Exhibition and catalog production by Ferrin Contemporary staff, catalog layout by Rory Coyne with installation and artwork photography by John Polak Photography, 2022.

Published by Ferrin Contemporary 1315 Mass MoCA Way, North Adams, MA 01247 ferrincontemporary.com

Contents Section 1| Artists partial exhibition overview individual works & statements

7 9 - 19

Section 2 | Historical Objects partial exhibition overview select individual works & statements

21 22 - 31

list of works

34 - 35

“OUR AMERICA/WHOSE AMERICA?” After forty years, we still view the gallery as a platform to curate and organize multi-artist exhibitions that survey the field of contemporary ceramic art. These exhibitions also provide an ongoing venue to focus on social issues – political, environmental, gender and feminist-based perspectives have both challenge and updated the perceptions of ceramic and art history. In 2022, our founding director Leslie Ferrin invited artist & writer Lauren Levato Coyne to co-curate this exhibition. The two partnered to turn the lens on representations of cultural identity in ceramic art, both past and present.

Our America, Whose America? features works by 23 contemporary artists alongside select works from Ferrin’s own collection of commercially produced ceramics. This grouping of historical objects, collected by Leslie across the span of several decades, are in the form of plates, souvenirs, and figurines from the early 19th through mid-20th centuries. The items were produced in England, Occupied Japan, and various factories in the USA. The exhibition title was chosen from a series of plates mass-produced by Vernon Kiln that features illustrations of American scenes by the painter Rockwell Kent. Combining their wide networks, the curators invited both established and emerging artists to respond to racial stereotypes represented in Ferrin’s collection of mass market ceramics.

Seen now, decades and in some cases centuries later, the narratives they deliver through image, characterization, and stereotype, whether overt and bombastic or subtle and cunning, form a collective memory that continues to impact the way people see themselves and others today.

In their responses to the historical collection, contemporary artists made works that provide new context and interpretation of these profoundly powerful objects. Using their works to present intertwined cultural critiques, the contemporary artists in this exhibition use their work to assert their autonomy, agency, and embodied experiences through many lenses, including race, gender, and class.

Each of these categories is tentacular and touch upon myriad other ideas including nature, warfare, food and water inequity, and more.

– Ferrin Contemporary

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Installation overview of OUR AMERICA/WHOSE AMERICA? | (L - R) table: Russell Biles | wall: Salvador Jiménez-Flores, Rae Stern, Garth Johson, Jacqueline Bishop, English Souvenirs of American Scenes and Mt. Rushmore, Leo Quiles, Michelle Erickson | center: Russell Biles, Beth Lo, Jennifer Ling Datchuk, Paul Scott, Vernon Kilns Rockwell Kent, English Souvenir of Portland, OR, Jason Walker | photo by John Polak Photography 6

(L - R) Niki Johnson, Jason Walker, Michelle Erickson, Beth Lo, Momoko Usami, Salvador Jiménez-Flores photo by John Polak Photography 7

(L - R) Niki Johnson, Elizabeth Alexander, Jennifer Ling Datchuk, Made in Occupied Japan Souvenir, Aunt Jemima syrup bottles Photo: John Polak Photography 8

(L - R) Paul Scott, Beth Lo, Jason Walker, Angelica Pozo Photo: John Polak Photography 9

top: Walker China | bottom: Judy Chartrand | photo by John Polak Photography 10

left: Steven Young Lee | right: Connor Czora | photo by John Polak Photography 11

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EXHIBITING ARTISTS Elizabeth Alexander Russell Biles Jacqueline Bishop Judy Chartrand CRANK Connor Czora Jennifer Ling Datchuk Michelle Erickson Sergei Isupov Salvador Jiménez-Flores Garth Johnson Niki Johnson

Akinsanya Kambon* Beckie Kravetz Steven Young Lee Beth Lo** Angelica Pozo Leonardo Quiles Paul Scott Rae Stern Momoko Usami Kukuli Velarde Jason Walker courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery* courtesy Lucy Lacoste Gallery**

Elizabeth Alexander Elizabeth Alexander is an interdisciplinary artist specializing in sculptures and installations made from deconstructed domestic materials. Through labored processes separating decorative print from found objects, she unearths elements of human behavior and hidden emotional lives that exist within the walls of our homes. She holds degrees in sculpture from the Cranbrook Academy (MFA) and Massachusetts College of Art, (BFA), where she discovered the complex nature of dissecting objects of nostalgia.

Alexander’s work has recently been featured in the 2019 Burke Prize Finalist exhibition at the Museum of Art and Design, and will be featured in Paper Routes, Women to Watch 2020 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and is included in permanent collections at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, AR and the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC. She is currently an Associate Professor at the Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, MA Statement The title is paraphrased after a Frederick Douglas quote from OUR WORK IS NOT DONE, a speech delivered at the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society held at Philadelphia, December 3-4, 1863.

But a mightier work than the abolition of slavery now looms up before the Abolitionist. – When we have taken the chains off the slave, as I believe we shall do, we shall find a harder resistanWce to the second purpose of this great association than we have found even upon slavery itself.

Born: 1982 Lives: Amesbury, MA

When I stumbled across my first set of plates in a tiny junk shop it felt like a call to action. I immediately envisioned using the porcelain cutting techniques I have mastered to grind out these harmful symbols of oppression. I edit each plate by extracting the Confederate symbols, leaving only the American landscape between the voids. The dust from each removal is harvested and displayed below its plate of origin to show that history cannot be erased; there is still a residue and the dust still remains.

— Elizabeth Alexander, she/her

Elizabeth Alexander | A Mightier Work is Ahead, 2022, hand cut found porcelain, dust, glass, cork, gold leaf, and brass, sizes vary 14

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Russell Biles

Born: Concord, NC, 1959 Lives: Greeneville, SC

A self-described “son of the South,” Russell Biles was born, raised, and still lives in the southern U.S. He remembers playing around with clay at a young age, making animals and monsters, but it was not until he entered college to study architecture that he was re-introduced to art and ultimately to ceramics.

Since his graduation Biles has been a studio artist in Greenville, SC, working in sculptural forms that range from large totems reminiscent of Northwestern Indian work to small, carefully crafted, colorful porcelain figures. He is best known for the latter work which confronts the direction in which society is moving and finds it severely lacking. Biles uses such American icons as the Cleavers and the Cartwrights as well as contemporary newsmakers to satirize social, religious, and political issues and to engage the viewer in the discussion. Biles employs irony and satire in his work and believes that the humor inherent in satire tempers the critique and hopefully produces a thoughtful reaction rather than an automatic rejection. As important to Biles as the message is the craftsmanship of his work, the quality that gives the work integrity and cements his position as a noted artist whose work is included in a number of both private and public collections.

Statement As a child growing up in the 60’s I enjoyed watching a TV show called “The Rifleman.” Chuck Conners, who played the rifleman, justly dispatched 120 bad guys during the show’s run. As an adult I still enjoy watching “The Rifleman” gun em down but no longer feel that sense of freedom and security once enforced by the magical gun.

Today I realize that our country’s freedom and security have actually come from the end of a gun and those willing to use this gun in our defense. My concern and motivation for creating “Canceled” is my fear that today’s and tomorrow’s generations will fail to accept this reality. Thus compromising our country’s freedom and security.

— Russell Biles, he/him

Russell Biles | Canceled, 2022, porcelain, faux bronze finish (powdered bronze and floor wax), 22 x 11.5 x 9” 16

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JACQUELINE BISHOP Jacqueline Bishop is an accomplished writer, academic, and visual artist with exhibitions in Belgium, Morocco, Italy, Cape Verde, Niger, USA, and Jamaica. In addition to her role as Clinical Full Professor at New York University, Jacqueline Bishop was a 2020 Dora Maar/Brown Foundation Fellow in France; 2008-2009 Fulbright Fellow in Morocco; and 2009-2010 UNESCO/Fulbright Fellow in Paris.

Bishop has received several awards, including the OCM Bocas Award for her book “The Gymnast & Other Position”, The Canute A. Brodhurst Prize for short story writing, The Arthur Schomburg Award for Excellence in the Humanities from New York University, A James Michener Creative Writing Fellowship, as well as several awards from the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission. Jacqueline’s recent ceramic work consists of brightly colored bone China plates used symbolically in Caribbean homes and explores how they hid the violent legacy of slavery and colonialism in the Atlantic world.

Statement On one hand, the market woman/huckster is the most ubiquitous figure to emerge from plantation Jamaica. Yet, as pervasive as the figure of the market woman is in Jamaican and Caribbean art and visual culture, she remains critically overlooked.

Born: Kingston, Jamaica, 1971 Lives: Miami, FL

In this set of fifteen dishes, I am both paying homage to the market woman centering her importance to Caribbean society from the period of slavery onwards placing her within a critical context. In particular, I place the market woman within a long tradition of female labor depicted in diverse imagery that I have sourced online, including early Jamaican postcards, paintings of enslaved women from Brazil, the colonial paintings of the Italian Agostino Brunias, and present-day photographs, which I collage alongside floral and abolitionist imagery.

I work in ceramics because all the women around me as I grew up my mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother cherished ceramic dinner plates. These were centerpieces kept in one of their most important acquisitions, a specially made mahogany cabinet. To fabricate the plates, it is important that I am working with Emma Price, a British ceramicist based in Stoke-on-Trent in the former Spode factories.

In the realization of the series, that connection imbues them with a meaning that shows the long and enduring relationship between England and Jamaica.

My hope in doing this work is to give much respect to the market women of the Jamaican and larger Atlantic world who have fed, and continue to feed, nations. The market woman is the defining symbol of Jamaica and Caribbean societies.

— Jacqueline Bishop, she/her Jacqueline Bishop | The Market Woman’s Story, 2022, digital print on commercial porcelain, 8.75 x 12.25 x 1”, set of 15 plates

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JUDY CHARTRAND Judy Chartrand is a Manitoba Cree artist, born in Kamloops, BC and was raised in a marginalized neighborhood located in Vancouver’s skid row area back in the early 1960s. She is an artist whose work frequently confronts issues of postcolonialism, socio-economic inequity and Indigenous knowledge expressed through the mediums of ceramics, found objects, archival photos and traditional techniques that include beading, tufting and porcupine quilling on hide.

Statement I was drawn to Coming of the White Man plate where the center bears an image of two native American figures as statues surrounded by images of City Hall, Post office, Mt. Hood and the Portland Hotel.

It reminded me of images I’ve seen where the three Spanish ships: the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria are off in the distance and on the shore are indigenous males pointing in the direction of the ships. The story that unfolds differs greatly depending on whose version you side with as in the colonizer or the colonized.

I have chosen to respond with using another image where after peace talks with a coalition of Delaware, Seneca-Cayuga and Shawnee tribes, Colonel Bouquet authorized the spread of smallpox.

Each one of them were aware of the plan to break this agreement and use two infected blankets and a hanky to deal with the tribes in a more permanent way.

Born: Kamloops, BC, Canada, 1959 Lives: Vancouver, Canada

My response piece has in turn, infected their image with today’s definition of an obnoxious, angry, entitled and often racist white person who uses their privilege to get their way or police other people’s behaviors…henceforth, smallpox Karens.

— Judy Chartrand, she/her

Judy Chartrand | Peace Talk Fuckery (1763), 2022, low fire paper clay, underglaze, glaze, 11.5 x 11.5 x 2” 20

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CRANK CRANK, born on November 22, 1963, the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination which coincided with the death of American innocence, is an outlier, a miscreant, a genderless artist entity that is not necessarily human. CRANK absorbs pop culture, current events, world history, literature, music, and the art market to create works that grab the viewer by the collar. CRANK’s mash up of contemporary American consumption – cultural icons, corporate logos, and sculptural shape – creates narratives that question the idea of ownership in a combination of past, present, and future. Every element of a CRANK work including the title, price, form, and content remains essential to the work itself, acting as a cue to the works’ layered meaning. CRANK attempts to flip notions of control and without a concrete identity, CRANK becomes the game itself rather than the player in both the art market and society at large. With recent acquisitions from well-respected curators and institutions including the Heard Museum, CRANK has garnered critical praise in a very short time for describing life in the twenty-first century.

Born: 1963

Statement These pieces are by the artist entity CRANK who uses traditional Native American vessel forms and red earthenware clay that are then painted with underglazes including 18 karat gold highlights to create pop-culture motifs.

These sculptures explore wide-ranging concepts such as ownership of open source material, cultural appropriation, immigration, sexual orientation, consumerism, and pop music. This work features 90s rapper Vanilla Ice on one side and the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) logo on the other side, hence the name ?Ice Ice Baby,? as well as Americana stars and ribbon of polka dots on one side. It?s a very timely work considering everything going on the border, at once humorous and heartbreaking. The work explores notions of falsehood, cultural identity, and the U.S./Mexico border.

— CRANK, they/them

CRANK | vases (installation view), 2019, coiled red earthenware – Kid Tested Mother Approved, 13 x 13 x 22” 22

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CONNOR CZORA Connor Czora is an artist, educator, and activist currently based in Washington, DC. Born in Rochester, NY, they received their BFA in Ceramics and Gender Studies from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2019.

Czora’s art has been shown and awarded internationally, including features in the 2021 NCECA Annual: Social Recession and Time’s Best Photojournalism of 2020. Previously, Czora has assistant taught at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and interned at Baltimore Clayworks. Czora currently teaches and works as Creative Director at the District Clay Center.

Statement My work explores the relationships between imperial ceramics, cultural taste, and sociopolitical power structures in the United States. Tracing the history of Western decorative arts, my work interrogates how ideologies are embedded and perpetuated within cultural objects.

Born: Rochester, NY, 1997 Lives: Washington, DC

Frequently working in porcelain, I draw inspiration from baroque and rococo European and American ceramics. The extravagant forms, overglaze scenery, and delicate gilding of such pieces embody opulence and authority. In my practice, I juxtapose this luxury with the material struggles of the contemporary United States. Exploiting our cultural notion of the decorative as docile, I disarm viewers through ornament to foster discussions of sensitive subjects in communities that may ignore them otherwise. These motifs span from resistance to repressive governments and the commodification of protest movements to the social construction and performance of gender and class.

My methods of making often contrast traditional studio processes, such as wheel- throwing, with expanded media, such as digitally-fabricated ceramic decals. Through these productive disparities, my techniques further explore the thematic tensions that are created and exposed within my work.

Framing contemporary struggles for justice and equity through historical decorative aesthetics, I challenge our understanding of the past and our role in creating a more just future.

— Connor Czora, they/them

Connor Czora | Trenton Vase: Uprising, 2021, glazed porcelain, custom ceramic decals, and gold luster, 23 x 12.5 x 11” Connor Czora | Trenton Vase: Pandemic, 2020, glazed porcelain, custom ceramic decals, and gold luster, 23 x 12.5 x 11” 24

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JENNIFER LING DATCHUK Trained in ceramics, Jennifer Ling Datchuk works with porcelain and other materials often associated with traditional women’s work, such as textiles and hair, to discuss fragility, beauty, femininity, intersectionality, identity, and personal history. Her practice evolved from sculpture to mixed media as she began to focus on domestic objects and the feminine sphere. Handwork and hair both became totems of the small rituals that fix, smooth over, and ground women’s lives. Through these materials, she explores how Western beauty standards influenced the East, how the non-white body is commodified and sold, and how women’s – globally, girls’ – work is still a major economic driver whose workers still struggle for equality.

Born: Warren, OH, 1980 Lives: San Antonio, TX

Datchuk holds an MFA in Artisanry from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and a BFA in Crafts from Kent State University. She has received grants from the Artist Foundation of San Antonio, travel grant from Artpace, and the Linda Lighton International Artist Exchange Program to research the global migrations of porcelain and blue and white pattern decoration. She was awarded a residency through the Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum to conduct her studio practice at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, Germany and has participated in residencies at the Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen, China, Vermont Studio Center, European Ceramic Work Center in the Netherlands and Artpace in San Antonio, Texas. In 2017, she received the Emerging Voices award from the American Craft Council and in 2020 was named a United States Artist Fellow in Craft.

Statement Inspired by porcelain export ware shoes, I made a mold of a blue and white Victorian style boot and altered it to make cowgirl boots. Decorated and adorned with recontextualized imagery from the past to speak about current times, these boots depict my experiences of being a first generation, daughter of a Chinese immigrant.

I live with the constant question of “What are you?” and these capture my experiences of being half or both. The fringe of these boots are made from Asian hair that has been bleached and dyed to various colors. The global migrations of the hair industry from Asian to the West mimics the trade and migrations of Chinese porcelain as it traveled the world.

— Jennifer Ling Datchuk, she/her

Jennifer Ling Datchuk | Made by American Chinese / Made by Chinese American, 2022, porcelain and human hair, 7 x 3 x 12” 26

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MICHELLE ERICKSON Michelle Erickson has a BFA from the College of William and Mary and is an independent ceramic artist and scholar. Internationally recognized for her mastery of colonial era ceramic techniques her pieces reinvent ceramic history to create 21st century social political and environmental narratives. Her ceramic art is represented in major museums including the Museum of Art and Design NY, the Seattle Art Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Ms. Erickson’s rediscovery of historical ceramics techniques is widely published and her contemporary art is profiled in numerous national and international publications. She has lectured widely at institutions that include The Potteries Museums Stoke on Trent, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has designed and produced ceramics for major motion pictures such as The Patriot, and HBO’s series John Adams.

Born: City, State, 1960 Lives: Hampoton, VA

Statement Michelle Erickson’s satirical ceramic transfer The Party’s Over was created in 2014 and adapts Paul Revere’s 1774 engraving The Able Doctor as a modern reinvention of the use of ceramics as a democratic means for social and political commentary. Transposed portraits of key contemporary self-proclaimed ‘tea party’ politicians and activists fit alarmingly well into this brutal 18th century satire.

Her latest iteration in the Party Platter series, incorporates a large version of the composition depicting the violation of an allegorical America and dually represents the broader notion of an imperiled Liberty facilitated greatly by Citizens United. Most specifically the piece speaks to the inconceivable plight of women’s rights at risk in 21st century America.

Party Platter describes America’s current political landscape through the lens of American revolutionary history. The founding of American democracy is based on the ideals of Equality Justice and Liberty but the realities of colonialism continues to challenge our Democracy in the 21st century. The original sins of Indigenous genocide, the inhumanity of slavery, and the inequity and subjugation of women are deep wounds in the American contract yet to be healed. Republican Tea party politics embodied in the Trump Presidency has exposed the wounds of institutional racism, cultural and environmental injustice and the assault on women’s rights in the 21st century.

— Michelle Erickson, she/her

Michelle Erickson | The Party’s Over, 2018, slipcast porcelain, artist’s designed ceramic transfers, overglaze, hand painted gold enamel, luster, 14 x 18 x 2” 28

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SALVADOR JIMÉNEZ-FLORES Salvador Jiménez-Flores is an interdisciplinary artist born and raised in Jalisco, México. He explores the politics of identity and the state of double consciousness. Jiménez-Flores addresses issues of colonization, migration, “the other,” and futurism by producing a mixture of socially conscious installation, public, and studio-based art. His work spans from community-based work, drawing, ceramics, prints, and mixed media sculpture.

Jimenez-Flores is a member of The Color Network, an organization that promotes the advancement of people of color in the ceramic arts and assists artists develop, network, and create dialogue while maintaining a place for a database, resources, and mentorship. He is also a member of the Instituto Gráfico de Chicago, an organization inspired by the socio-political art of Mexico’s Taller de Gráfica Popular (The People’s Print Workshop) and uses art as a platform to inform and generate community discourse about urgent social issues.

Born: Jalisco, Mexico Lives: Chicago, IL

Jiménez-Flores has presented his work at the National Museum of Mexican Art, Grand Rapids Art Museum, Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and Museum of Art and Design amongst others. He served as Artist-In-Residence for the city of Boston, Harvard Ceramics Program, Office of the Arts at Harvard University, and Kohler Arts Industry. Jiménez-Flores is a recipient of Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grants and The New England Foundation for the Arts, Threewalls’ RaD Lab+Outside the Walls Fellowship Grant, and he is a 2021 United States Artist Fellow.

He is an Assistant Professor in ceramics at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Statement My work titled “A Hand Gesture to Systemic Racism” is a representation of my personal frustrations with structural racism that Black, Indigenous, Immigrants, Refugees and People of Color experience on a daily basis in the United States of America. We experience these visible and invisible racisms in the workplace, schools, churches, government, universities, and in the public through microaggressions, xenophobia, discrimination, bullying, manipulation and more. For over seven years I have being part of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion taskforces for various organizations and universities and as much as I push for actionable and pragmatic items, nothing really happens, but the organizations pride on their DEI committees and initiatives.

— Salvador Jiménez-Flores, he/him Salvador Jiménez-Flores | A Hand Gesture to Systemic Racism: Al que le quede el saco que se lo ponga, 2022, earthenware, stoneware, black stain, underglaze, glaze, wood, steel, graphite, and latex, 96 x 60 x 20”

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GARTH JOHNSON As a writer, curator, artist and educator, Garth Johnson is a self-described craft activist who explores craft’s influence and relevance in the 21st century. He is the Paul Phillips and Sharon Sullivan Curator of Ceramics at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York. He was formerly the curator at the Arizona State University Ceramics Research Center. He also served as the artistic director at The Clay Studio in Philadelphia, and was an associate professor at College of the Redwoods in Eureka, California. He also served as the artistic director at The Clay Studio in Philadelphia, and was a practicing artist and associate professor at College of the Redwoods in Eureka, California through 2014.

Johnson’s works celebrate the history of ceramic objects and their ability to convey status. He often juxtaposes common vessel forms like plastic containers and soap bottles with gold or silver handles taken from fine silver coffee and teapots.

Statement My family has a huge problem with craft. My mother and father participated in just about every craft fad that I can remember. Wire art, macrame, and decoupage in the 70’s, and stained glass in the 80’s.

My mother is an insane quilter, my Aunt Barbara a glass painter. One great-grandfather was a blacksmith, another collected and carved gemstones. I was born and raised on a farm in Nebraska, attended art school at the University of Nebraska, then got my MFA in ceramics at Alfred University.

Craft has dogged me all my life. I love it, I hate it, I write about it because it seems totally alive to me.

— Garth Johnson, he/him Born: Lincoln, NE Lives: Syracuse, NY

Garth Johnson | Manifest Destiny (Currier and Ives – The Western Farmers Home #756), 2010, Bing & Grondahl limited edition Currier and Ives porcelain plate, decal, 8 x 1”, from a set of 12 32

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NIKI JOHNSON Niki Johnson is an artist, designer and curator currently living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Raised in New Mexico, Johnson has spent her adult life living across the United States, including five- year stints in San Francisco and Memphis. Johnson received her BFA from the University of Memphis and MA/MFA degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a focus in sculpture and printmaking. In the decade following graduation, she has owned and operated her own small business, curated several local and national exhibitions, and dabbled in teaching.

Johnson’s practice often includes writing on and speaking to the role of activism in her studio. Her artwork is part of several private and public collections including those of Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin, Madison Public Library, UW-Health’s American Center, the Milwaukee Art Museum and Sara M. Vance Waddell. Reviews of Johnson’s artwork have been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Hyperallergic, and Vice Magazine, amongst other national and international media sources.

Born: Green Bay, WI, 1977 Lives: Milwaukee, WI

Statement Fitting in with the Squares appeared to me as I came to terms with the 2016 presidential election. Two items stood out as I sorted my studio while doing some pretty serious soul searching: an accidental self-portrait taken on a point and shoot camera in the late 90’s and a giant a collection of Norman Rockwell plates I’d amassed from thrift stores over the last decade. Initially the shared color palette of the image and the plates came together for me but it was the incongruence of their content that set me into motion.

During the eighteen-month process of cutting down approximately 300 plates into about 9000 pieces so I could cull 2400 of the right tone and pattern, the cultural value of the commemorative plates and the personal underpinnings of the image became clear to me. It slowly revealed the formative and persistent role of resistance and resilience in my life.

In the woman in this portrait, I see shades of my mother, who raised me in an era she fought to secure. I see a woman with greater agency over her life than her foremothers. I see a woman who knows what to take from life, what to leave, and how to build a future out of the pieces that fit.

— Niki Johnson, she/her Niki Johnson | Fitting In With The Squares (Self-Portrait), 2019, porcelain Norman Rockwell commemorative plates on wood, 67 x 47”

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AKINSANYA KAMBON Born as Mark Teemer in Sacramento, California, Akinsanya Kambon is a former Marine, Black Panther, and art professor. Stricken with polio as a child, he turned to drawing for comfort and ultimately his therapy. He frequently visited the Crocker Art Museum as a child which fascinated and showed him the human potential in creating art. In 1966, Kambon was drafted and served a tour of duty in Vietnam with the United States Marine Corps, as an infantryman and combat illustrator, until 1968. Sharing experiences of racism with other Black servicemen inspired Kambon’s activism upon returning to the United States.

Born: Sacramento, CA, 1946 Lives: Long Beach, CA

Statement I’ve looked at a lot of African spirituality and I like to incorporate what I’ve learned into my own work.

My biggest influences have been my travels to Africa. I think I’ve been to Africa 14 times to do research on African art: I’ve lived with the Bambara people in Mali, I’ve lived with the Mende in Sierra Leon, and every travel group has a totally different culture.

We must follow the lead of the wisest among us. I hope that people can embrace a better understanding of history, and understand the humanity in people. So many people have a superiority complex in this country. They’re not going to admit anything… a lot of people are so ashamed [and] they don’t want to look at that shame. But you gotta understand how some people were devastated spiritually and culturally by [slavery and racism]. And some people don’t get over it. I think you should understand and realize that some of the ideas that your ancestors passed onto you, you still have them.

— Akinsanya Kambon, he/him

Akinsanya Kambon | Equestrian, John Randall, Buffalo Soldier, 2012, raku-fired clay, 15.5 x 4 x 9.5” 36

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BECKIE KRAVETZ Beckie Kravetzbegan her sculpture career as a theatrical mask maker. She received her training at the Yale School of Drama, the Centro Maschere e Strutture Gestuali in Italy, the Taller de Madera in Guatemala, and the Instituto Allende in San Miguel, Mexico. In 1988, she became the resident mask maker for the Los Angeles Opera, where she also worked as a principal makeup artist and assistant wig-master. Her skills have helped transform the faces of dozens of singers, including Placido Domingo, Sir Thomas Allen, Carol Vaness, Samuel Ramey, Gerald Finley, and Rod Gilfry.

Born: New York, NY 1959 Lives: Cummington, MA

Statement My vision is inspired by 38 years as a theatrical mask-maker and principal makeup artist with Los Angeles Opera. The transformation of the human face fascinates me. My wearable masks eventually evolved into fine art masks containing sculpted interior dioramas: tiny stage sets revealing aspects of the character’s identity. Then, those masks evolved into heads and busts, then full figures. Sometimes I combine figures with masks, showing individuals on the brink of resolution or change. My choices of ceramic, bronze, resin, fabric, and mixed media further enrich my characters’ narrative.

Against the current news crescendo of racially motivated violence, biases in our legal system, and inequities magnified by the ongoing pandemic, I was inspired to create this fractured figure of Lady Justice: on the edge of a precipice, robes and flesh ripped to the heart, arms severed, blindfold off, and scales rigged so that a mountain of colored clay balls are outweighed by a single, familiar white ball often associated with white privilege. Like her, the cliché of justice being done has been torn apart — “Undone”.

— Beckie Kravetz, she/her

Beckie Kravetz | Undone, 2022, stoneware, acrylic, resin, vintage balance scale, mixed media, 14 x 17 x 38” 38

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STEVEN YOUNG LEE Steven Young Lee was the Resident Artist Director of the Bray for 15 years and is currently the Director Emeritus and Special Projects Manager. Lee has maintained an active studio practice and has lectured extensively in North America and Asia. In the Fall of 2016 he was one of four artists featured as part of the Renwick Invitational at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. His work has been collected by the Smithsonian Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, the Portland Art Museum, the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul, Korea, and many public and private collections.

Born: Chicago, IL, 1975 Lives: Helena, MT

Statement This installation was created for a solo exhibition at the Portland Art Museum. It was inspired by a painting in the museum’s collection of a Tiger and Magpie, a genre of paintings from the Joseon Dynasty.

These “minhwa” paintings were created around the New Year by itinerant artists who would provide them to families in order to bring luck and good fortune in the coming year. The tiger depicted the ruling class and the magpie represented the common people and these paintings provided a social commentary of the relationship between the two parties.

I have translated this painting onto a series of 96 handmade plates that replace the figures with contemporary characters from my childhood, Tony the Tiger and Heckle and Jeckle. Tony is an anthropomorphized figure of strength and Heckle and Jeckle were rabble-rousers that created mischief.

Both characters have a direct gaze with the viewer inviting them into the narrative.

— Steven Young Lee, he/him

Steven Young Lee | Tiger (Selection of two plates from Tiger and Magpie), 2019, porcelain, cobalt inlay, glaze, 12 x 24 x 1” Steven Young Lee | Tiger and Magpie, 2019, porcelain, cobalt inlay, glaze, 12 x 24 x 1” 40

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BETH LO Ceramist and mixed media artist Beth Lo makes work about family, culture and language. Her Good Children vessels and sculptures have been exhibited nationally and internationally and she has been the recipient of a United States Artist Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship, Montana Arts Council Individual Artist Grant and an American Craft Museum Design Award. She is also a children’s book illustrator and professional bass player. She retired after 30 years of teaching ceramics at the University of Montana in 2016.

Statement My work in ceramics and mixed media revolves primarily around issues of family and my Asian-American background. Cultural marginality and blending, tradition vs. Westernization, language and translation are key elements in my work. Since the birth of my son in 1987, I have been drawing inspiration from major events in my family’s history, the day-to-day challenges of parenting, and my own childhood memories of being raised in a minority culture in the United States. I use the image of a child as a symbol of innocence, potential and vulnerability.

For the Model Minority series, I am satirizing the stereotypical idealizations of Chinese immigrants to the US, as well as questioning the values that are being espoused.

— Beth Lo, she/her Born: Lafayette, IN, 1949 Lives: Missoula, MT

Beth Lo | Model Minority, 2022, porcelain, 15.5 x 10.5 x 5”, courtesy Lucy Lacoste Gallery 42

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ANGELICA POZO Angelica Pozo, a ceramic public art & studio artist, residing and working in Cleveland, OH. Her credits include: Presenter at Alabama Clay, Potters Council Regional and Tile Heritage Conferences; Instructor at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Arrowmont School of Arts & Crafts, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Penland School of Crafts, Southwest Craft Center; Author of Ceramics For Beginners: Surfaces, Glazes & Firings (Lark, 2010) and Making & Installing Handmade Tile (Lark 2005); juror for 500 Tiles (Lark 2008), her writing and art were also featured in The Penland Book of Ceramics: Master Classes in Ceramic Techniques (Lark, 2003). She has also been an Artist in residence at Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild, and Baltimore Clayworks.

Ms. Pozo has received several awards, including an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship. Her studio work is featured in several permanent collections, including the Museum of Art & Design, New York, The Canton Museum of Art, Canton, Ohio and the National Afro-American Museum & Cultural Center, Wilberforce, Ohio. Her site-specific public art is installed at various public institutions in and outside of Ohio. Currently working on a memorial plaza project for Jesse Owens in Cleveland where he grew up and initially trained.

Born: New York, NY Lives: Cleveland, OH

Statement A large portion of my artistic output for the past 25 plus years has been ceramic tile and mosaic public art and community art commissions.

So, it is in the spaces between those big projects, that I have been able to carve out time to do my own studio work mainly ceramic sculpture, tile work and at times including dinnerware. Despite the somewhat sporadic nature of my personal studio art production, the work has through the decades continued to visually and thematically deal with the natural world and our relationship with it. Through the depiction of landscape and plant forms I am often commenting on environmental concerns as well as representing themes of femininity, sensuality, fertility and spirituality.

— Angelica Pozo, she/her

Angelica Pozo | Ohio Buckeye Platter, 1996, terracotta, wood, metal, 24 x 22.75 x 3.75” 44

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LEONARDO QUILES Leonardo Quiles creates illustrations, comics, and objects centered on the visual narrative of the postcolonial Latinx experience. Quiles considers his work a form of resistance against the totalitarian suppression of ethnic diversity in the US and its colonies. His interest in the social-political effects of cultural alienation and race politics feeds the images he uses. Through examining his own lived experience and that of friends and family, Quiles deftly narrates the abandonment of one’s ethnicity for the dominant culture.

Leonardo Quiles studied at Parsons School of Design and received his MFA from the renowned illustration department at Hartford Art School. His work has been included in exhibitions in New York, San Francisco, and locally at Stockbridge’s Norman Rockwell Museum. His work for the MTA’s Arts and Transit program has been seen on subways in and around New York City. His debut graphic novel as author/illustrator will be published in the Spring of 2024 by Macmillan Publishers. Leonardo currently lives and works in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts.

Statement Vejigante Mask and Pedro Albizu Compos Plate represent a revitalization of identity politics and the fight against internalized racism. These pieces straddle the liminal space between kitsch and criticism, comics and culture clash, poetry and platitude. As with most of Quiles’ narrative works, they question the conditions of sovereignty in the context of post-colonial contemporary visual culture in which biased images, representations, and ideas usually function.

— Leonardo Quiles, he/him Born: Brooklyn, NY, 1971 Lives: Dalton, MA

Leo Quiles | porcelain plate (thrown by Viola Quiles), 2022, porcelain, underglaze, glaze, 9 x 9 x 1.5” 46

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PAUL SCOTT Paul Scott is a Cumbrian-based artist with a diverse practice and an international reputation.

Creating individual pieces that blur the boundaries between fine art, craft and design, he is well known for research into printed vitreous surfaces, as well as his characteristic blue and white artworks in glazed ceramic.

Scott’s artworks can be found in public collections around the globe – including The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design Norway, the Victoria and Albert Museum London, National Museums Liverpool, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh and Brooklyn Art Museum USA. Commissioned work can be found in a number of UK museums as well as public places in the North of England, including Carlisle, Maryport, Gateshead and Newcastle Upon Tyne. He has also completed large-scale works in Hanoi, Vietnam and Guldagergård public sculpture park in Denmark.

A combination of rigorous research, studio practice, curation, writing and commissioned work ensures that his work is continually developing. It is fundamentally concerned with the re-animation of familiar objects, landscape, pattern and a sense of place. He was Professor of Ceramics at Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO) from 2011–2018. Scott received his Bachelors of Art Education and Design at Saint Martin’s College and Ph.d at the Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design in Manchester, England.

Born: Derbyshire, United Kingdom 1953 Lives: Cumbria, United Kingdom

Statement Paul Scott, a material-based conceptual artist, creates ceramic work that blurs the boundaries between art, craft, and design. With a penchant for rescuing cast-offs, he restores them to a new life by using them as a canvas for biting social commentary. His work tells stories that explore the unexpected movement of images through materials, media, cultures, politics, histories, and geographies, inviting us to see these objects in a new way.

— Paul Scott, he/him

Paul Scott | Cumbrian Blue(s), New American Scenery, The Angola 3, 2019, in-glaze screen print (decal) on salvaged Syracuse China with pearlware glaze, 11 x 11 x 1 (set of 12) 48

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RAE STERN Rae Stern’s practice employs digital tools in the manipulation of various media including ceramics, photography, paper, and textiles. After a decade in the high-tech industry, her work is concerned with the social and cultural effects of technology and the illusion of imagery.

Stern’s work has been exhibited internationally at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Eretz Israel Museum, Belger Arts, Harvard University, and Medalta Museum. Her work is included in the collections of the Racine Art Museum, The International Museum of Dinnerware Design, The Eretz Israel Museum, as well as numerous private collections in Israel and the US. Stern completed her undergraduate degree in psychology and communications at Tel Aviv University, followed by a master’s degree in design from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. She attended residencies and training at Anderson Ranch, Belger Crane Yard Studios, the Penland School of Crafts, and has received grants from Asylum Arts, Belger Arts, and Englewood Arts.

Born: Haifa, Israel, 1981 Lives: New York City, NY

Statement Our interconnectivity as humans is far more complex than the arbitrary boundaries of national or religious affiliation. While working on the Outside Time Installation, Elinore Noyes, an intern on the project, mentioned that during World War II her Dutch great-grandparents, Dr. Walle and Ellie Nauta, harbored a teenage Jewish girl, Dina Dasberg, by disguising her as a live-in nanny for their daughter, Tjalda. After the war Dina immigrated to the United States, where she started a family, worked as a social worker, and later adopted a child herself. Dr. Nauta was recruited by the US military and the family moved to Washington, DC. His research and teaching in the University of Maryland and M.I.T. helped establish the field of Neuroscience.

The wartime photo of toddler Tjalda reaching towards Nanny Dina can be read as a gesture of mutual reliance - as Dina’s own survival depended on her relation to the child. That dangerous decision made

by Noyes’s great grandparents changed the lives of both families and affected the narratives of the following generations. The families now live in America and pass down a narrative of solidarity, moral action and courage.

— Rae Stern, she/her

Rae Stern | Elinore Noyes Vignette: The Underlying Neural Networks, Outside Time, 2019, unglazed porcelain, digital components, LED light, 3D printed TPU filament. Dimensions including pictured round platform: 13 x 17 x 17” 50

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MOMOKO USAMI Momoko Usami received a BFA and an MFA from Kyoto City University of Art in Kyoto, Japan, and moved to the United States in January 2008. A resident artist at Lillstreet Art Center in Chicago in 20092010, Momoko went on to establish her personal studio in the countryside near Kansas City, Missouri, where she started Art Farm in 2014, hosting small art classes for the community. Momoko draws inspiration from many things, including Japanese painting from the Edo period, dreams, and daily encounters on the street. Her unique, playful, and often interactive ceramic works have been shown in the United States, Canada, and Japan.

Born: Kobe, Japan, 1980 Lives: Barnard, MO

Statement Vision and Time are the two unspoken agreements to share the world you live. At the same time, they are very obscure and ambiguous. They are affected by his or her own background, memory, preference, or a feeling, colors, and temperature at the moment. Therefore, images in the real world are always fluid and beguiled; there is no frame and no ending. I attempt to express my interest in how people choose their own view. Real world images are full of temporal beauty and interest.

My work deals with eternal touchable materials such as clay, metal, and resin, or fragile images such as light, shadow and reflection. I use everyday phenomena as some of the important elements because it endows everyone fairly and it makes my work personable. I attempt to grasp a wobble and nonsense in the real world, and to make people uncover fresh views even in the mundane, in their everyday life. My interest in real life makes us think about observing the world carefully.

Now more than ever, artists have a responsibility in society to document what’s happening in the world to pass it on to future generations, and to help heal broken hearts with curiosity and beauty.

— Momoko Usami, she/her

Momoko Usami| Rock of Anger (Insurrection), 2022, porcelain, 11.25 x 11.15 x 1.5” 52

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KUKULI VELARDE Kukuli Velarde is a Peruvian-American artist who specializes in painting and ceramic sculptures made out of clay and terra-cotta. Velarde focuses on the themes of gender and the consequences of colonization in Latin American contemporary culture. Her ceramic work is a visual investigation of aesthetics, cultural survival, and inheritance.

Born: Lima, Peru, 1962 Lives: Philadelphia, PA

Velarde has had multiple solo exhibitions, most recently including Kukuli Velarde: The Complicit Eye at Taller Puertorriqueño (Philadelphia, PA), Kukuli Velarde at AMOCA (Pomona, CA), and Plunder Me, Baby at Peters Project Gallery (Santa Fe, NM). Her work may also be found in numerous public institutions, including the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, TX), the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, WI), and the Museo de Art Contemporaneo de Lima, (Lima, Peru).

Velarde is the recipient of numerous grants, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, a United States Artists Knight Fellowship, and a PEW Fellowship in Visual Art. She was awarded the Grand Prize for her work exhibited at the Gyeonggi International Ceramic Biennale in Icheon, South Korea. Velarde holds a BFA (magna cum laude) from Hunter College of the University of New York. Velarde lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. Statement I am a Peruvian-American artist. My work, which revolves around the consequences of colonization in Latin American contemporary culture, is a visual investigation about aesthetics, cultural survival, and inheritance. I focus on Latin American history, particularly that of Perú, because it is the reality with which I am familiar. I do so, convinced that its complexity has universal characteristics and any conclusion can be understood beyond the frame of its uniqueness.

— Kukuli Velarde, she/her

Kukuli Velarde | A Mi Vida II, 2017, earthenware, underglaze, paint, resin, 22 x 10.5 x 7” 54

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JASON WALKER Jason Walker’s ceramic sculpture question how we perceive and decipher technology and nature within our changing world. He has exhibited and taught widely including at the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., Haystack Mountain School for the Crafts, Penland School for the Crafts, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, The Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen, China and the International Ceramics Workshop, Kecskemet, Hungary, South Korea, Ireland and France.

Walker has been awarded a 2009 NCECA International Residency Fellowship and a 2014 Artist Trust Fellowship from Washington State, as well as the Taunt Fellowship award at the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts. His work is included in collections at the Fine Art Museum of San Francisco: De Young, the Carnegie Mellon Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Arizona State University Art Museum Ceramic Research Center, Tempe, Arizona and the Portland Art Museum in Portland, Oregon.

Born: Pocatello, ID, 1973 Lives: Cedar City, UT

Walker received a BFA from Utah State University and a MFA from Penn State University and is represented by Ferrin Contemporary, and currently resides in Cedar City, Utah and is Lecturer of Ceramics at Southern Utah University.

Statement The culture I live in does not emphasize our physical connection and dependence on nature. The current ideology is reliant upon technology, and it promotes disembodied activity such as television [and] computers . . . The gap between man-made and natural is ever increasing.

Light bulbs, plugs, power-lines and pipes that grow from the earth are common images found in my work, juxtaposed with birds, insects, and organic matter such as leaves and trees. Similar to the thinking of the Hudson River School of painting, I attempt to portray nature’s vastness and human-kind as a small proponent of it. Yet I draw the small things of nature large and the huge creations of man small. I want to show how we influence the landscape, or nature. My ideas stem from my own experiences bicycle touring, backpacking and the daily hikes I take with my dog.

— Jason Walker, he/him

Jason Walker | Back Flow, 2022, porcelain, underglaze, glaze, 10.5 x 10.5” x 1” 56

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“OUR AMERICA/WHOSE AMERICA?” AUGUST 6 – OCTOBER 30, 2022 exhibition page Ferrin Contemporary 1315 Mass MoCA Way, North Adams, MA 01247 ferrincontemporary.com