In 1961, Craft Horizons magazine editor Rose Slivka published her landmark essay, “The New Ceramic Presence,” in which she sought to articulate the evolving relationship between ceramics and abstraction. Just as they had been through Ceramic National history, exhibition juries were often more receptive than the general public to new ideas, modes of working, and boundary-pushing work. In the 1962 National, the jury gave the highest award to Chinese-born sculptor Win Ng for an abstract sculpture that embodied the “new ceramic presence” that was quickly gaining momentum.
As the decade of the Sixties unfolded, the Ceramic Nationals faced two daunting challenges. The first was purely logistical. Because artists were making increasingly large sculptures, it was more difficult and more expensive for regional locations to receive and unpack works for the regional juries to evaluate before shipping the selected works on to the Everson for the exhibition. Before long, the logistical difficulties at the regional centers affected the exhibition’s ambitious circuit, making it harder and more costly to ship the work to far-flung locales.
At left: John Mason in his studio. Courtesy of the estate of John Mason
The second challenge was ideological—both for the Everson as an institution and for the general public. Ceramic National juries traditionally embraced a wide spectrum of sculptural and functional work. But the introduction of radically new conceptual and experimental sculptures put additional stress on juries who struggled to balance the merits of the technical excellence of functional pottery with bold forays into expression and humor and create a level playing field in terms of judgement. At first, then-director Max W. Sullivan (pictured at right with Everson staff members) papered over these difficulties, introducing the 1962 National by saying, “No one should expect to find that the ceramic artist is less interested in direct expression than is the contemporary painter or sculptor.”
In 1968, however, the Ceramic Nationals took place in the Everson’s new I.M. Pei-designed building for the first time. Pei’s building proved to be a grand setting for the Nationals, providing architectural synergy that worked much better for expressionistic works than had the old Everson location in a nineteenth century mansion on James Street. In all, that year’s exhibition included a whopping two hundred eighty-eight pieces, with just seventy-nine of them following on the national circuit. Half of that year’s exhibition awards went to California artists, a testament to the West Coast’s growing influence.
Despite the attention that the 1968 National earned, it was the last one using Anna Olmsted’s template of regional juries and traveling exhibitions. To the outrage of the ceramics community, the Everson put 1970’s National on hold. In its place, artist Toshiko Takaezu invited a select group of ceramic and fiber artists to exhibit in Fibers and Ceramics 70. Potters like Val Cushing and Gertrud and Otto Natzler were supposed to balance the inclusion of sculptors Robert Arneson and Jeff Schlanger, but the exhibition failed to please either the Everson’s core ceramics audience or the public-at-large.
With significant lobbying from Olmsted, Everson director James Harithas brought back the juried Ceramic Nationals in 1972. Faced with nearly 5,000 submissions in the form of slides, jurors Jeff Schlanger, Robert Turner, and Peter Voulkos declined to make any selections on the grounds that the entries didn’t meet their expectations. Instead, the Everson mounted another hybrid exhibition comprising a small group of invited artists, an Olmsted-curated satellite exhibition of older artists, and—bizarrely—a room of slide projections of a small selection of the jury’s favorite submissions.
The Everson eventually revived the Ceramic Nationals in 1987, 1990, 1993, and 2000. While these exhibitions were each popular, it became increasingly hard to replicate the original model in an era of multi-media practice in which ceramic artists also regularly employ video, performance, digital fabrication, social practice, and large-scale installation. Such work became too diverse for juries to effectively compare and too large in scale to jury in person. Nine decades after the Ceramic Nationals began, ceramic artists have achieved recognition as fine artists and scaled the ultimate heights of the art world—representing their countries at the Venice Biennale, winning Britain’s Turner Prize, and routinely finding representation in the world’s most exclusive art galleries.
