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At that moment / Beyond the Pedestal

Tour de Clay shows medium's recent evolution

Maryland Art Place has two exhibits of ceramic arts

By Glenn McNatt, SUN Art Critic

As Baltimore's six-week Tour de Clay festival is showing, clay has been undergoing startling transformations over the past few decades, from a material associated mainly with vessels and other decorative objects to a supple artistic medium expressive of a variety of styles and approaches.

At That Moment, an exhibition at Maryland Art Place that presents some of the pioneering figures in the clay community and their students, is both a strong statement about contemporary practice as well as a somewhat bewildering study of lines of artistic influence.

The two "Old Masters" of this show are clay sculptors Rudy Autio and Jim Leedy, both active from the late 1950s on. Autio is represented by a massive sculpted vessel called Wild Horse Island, and Leedy's work includes a large, site-specific installation made of bricks, clay urns, broken pottery and photographs.

Doug Baldwin, who studied under both Autio and Leedy, taught for many years at Maryland Institute College of Art, where his students included Philip Capuano and Rich Lipscher. (Lipscher currently teaches animation at MICA.)

Autio and Leedy's students also included Dave DonTigny, Linda Wachtmeister, Bill Lane, Marshall Maude, Brandon Reefe, Araan Schmidt, Adam Welch and Michael Wickerson.

Tracing the exact lines of influence among these three generations of artists is a task of almost Byzantine complexity.

The show's organizers have made a heroic attempt to sort things out, and (given the fact that few of the artists are well known outside the clay community) the effort seems to have succeeded to an extent.

Yet it's not at all clear that such genealogies really matter that much. Indeed, what is most striking about the various relationships among these artists is how little in fact they seem to predict. One couldn't anticipate much at all about DonTigny's work, for instance, from the example of his teacher, Autio.

The fact that such relationships exist is in the end less interesting than the variety of styles and approaches they have nurtured.
One can enjoy this show perfectly well as a snapshot of the present moment in the ceramic arts without troubling too much about relationships that, in the end, are mostly academic anyway.

A companion show, Beyond the Pedestal, presents Nancy Blum, Carolyn Bernstein, Ampofo-Anti and Nicole Fall, four artists whose ceramic artworks are designed primarily as installation.

Both shows run through March 26. There will be a reception for the artists on March 18 from 6:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. The gallery is at 8 Market Place, Suite 100. Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. Call 410-962-8565 or visit www.mdartplace.org.