Join us for a book signing and presentation by Glenn Adamson, lauded craft expert and co-curator of Toshiko Tazaezu: Worlds Within, followed by a conversation with Ian McDonald, Artist in Residence, Department of Ceramics and Cranbrook Academy of Art and Laura Mott, Chief Curator, Cranbrook Art Museum.
“She knew well that her work could mean many things, depending on a viewer’s readiness to see it. Weighty in the hands or on the floor, her ceramics are nonetheless shapeshifters. Wet the surface, and unexpected colors shine forth. Pass your fingers over the glaze, cool to the touch, and you can actually feel the break where one color slides into another —or are you imagining it? Shake the piece gently, and they murmur back indecipherably. Wait for the light to change, morning to afternoon, and it’s as if a new artwork has entered the room. Executed with all-in commitment of a true action painter, her works are nebulous, inviting, inviting our interpretation but never fully ratifying it.”
– Glenn Adamson (Adamson, 2024, pp. 33-34 )
Book signing will be at 6pm. The talk will begin at 6:30pm.
Glenn Adamson is a curator, writer and historian based in New York and London. He has previously been Director of the Museum of Arts and Design and Head of Research at the V&A.
Dr. Adamson’s publications include Thinking Through Craft (2007); The Craft Reader (2010); Postmodernism: Style and Subversion (2011, with Jane Pavitt); The Invention of Craft (2013); Art in the Making (2016, with Julia Bryan-Wilson); Fewer Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects (2018); Objects: USA 2020; and Craft: An American History (2021). His next book, A Century of Tomorrows, was published by Bloomsbury in December 2024.
Dr. Adamson is Artistic Director for Design Doha, a new biennial for Qatar (forthcoming in 2024); curator at large for the Vitra Design Museum; and editor of Material Intelligence, a quarterly online journal published by the Chipstone Foundation.
Tagged: 2024, lectures
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