MADISON, Wisconsin — Like planets resting from orbit, 11 round forms of varying sizes lie scattered on the gallery floor atop a bed of sparkly volcanic sand. Dim lighting enhances the mood. Nearby, two large hammocks each cradle orbs, their cosmic weight suspended, ready to launch. Influenced by the Apollo moon landing of 1969, Toshiko Takaezu’s ceramics appear to be glazed with light, shimmering in milky whites or awash with passages of turquoise, purples, and metallic earth tones. For six decades, beginning in the 1950s and ending with her death in 2011, Takaezu created primarily nonfunctional ceramic forms aligned with the natural world. She was greatly influenced by place — her childhood in Hawai‘i, her experience studying at Cranbrook Academy of Art among Michigan’s changing seasons, eight months in Japan exploring Buddhist and ceramic traditions, and decades spent in rural New Jersey amid cultivated gardens.
Worlds Within, which originated at the Noguchi Museum in New York and is currently at the Chazen Museum of Art, is the largest traveling survey of Takaezu’s work in 20 years. The installation’s open layout, with no interior walls, creates a landscape of art for visitors to stroll through. Along the way, the imprint of the artist’s hands is everywhere. Many vessels are maps of Takaezu’s touch, ridges marking where her fingers pulled the clay upward on the potter’s wheel; others reveal hand-kneaded seams. Combined with the gestural sweep of her glaze application, objects that might appear dense or impenetrable become breezy, watery, and hemmed with the suggestion of fog, rain, and wind.
Toshiko Takaezu’s textile “Ne (Roots)” (1973) with “Almost Closed Form” (1962)
Takaezu worked tirelessly to build a career in a field dominated by White men. As exhibition co-curator Glen Adamson notes in a catalog essay, she was marginalized as an Asian-American woman, and further excluded “by choosing ceramics and textiles, then considered minor disciplines, as her primary mediums of expression.” But Takaezu persevered and is now rightfully recognized as one of the most important forces in the history of ceramic arts.
Unlike the work of her lifelong acquaintance Peter Voulkos, who’s rough-hewn, deconstructed ceramic forms gained prominence in the ceramic field, Takaezu’s touch is less aggressive. Where Voulkos crafts furrows and disruptions, Takaezu caresses the slow birth of her art from earthly means and flowing surfaces. Her work is reverent rather than eruptive.
The exhibition is beautifully anchored by various configurations of work recreating past installations that Takaezu curated herself. For example, from early in her career she frequently displayed her ceramics alongside or on top of her weavings. This interdisciplinary practice feels fresh even decades later: The textures of the weavings meet the organic vessels just as the prairie meets the sky.
Assorted closed forms by Toshiko Takaezu from the 1980s and 1990s
Beyond the elaborate painterly surfaces that fuse with the fired clay rather than adorn their surfaces, Takaezu melds the art world, the internal realm of the human spirit, the ancient origins of clay forms, functional and nonfunctional ceramics, and the forces of nature for a holistic aesthetic. Works from the 1960s labeled “closed forms” no longer fall into vessel or container cateories, but exist as objects.
Takaezu’s Tamarind series of the 1960s mimics the fruit’s bulbous seed pods but also evokes curvy feminine bodies. Yet the artist gives the dark interiors of these closed forms equal conceptual weight — what we cannot see is silently emphasized. At one point, she began enclosing shards of pottery inside the forms, inviting viewers to shake them, to “hear” the song of their interiors. This opacity both protects space and refuses complete access to maintain the integrity of mystery.
Installation view of Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within inspired by a 1990 exhibition that paired the textile “Floating Seaweed II (1965) with ceramics
An aspect of Takaezu’s history that is underrepresented in the exhibition is her 50-year friendship with textile artist Lenore Tawney. The two lived together for four years, often showed their work together, and traveled to places such as Guatemala to explore indigenous crafts. They shared interests in Buddhism and spirituality. As mavericks in their fields, they emboldened one another by pushing against restrictive art world hierarchies that have relegated their crafts to the margins. Their deep connection feels woven into the work and offers a model of women collaborating in freedom, defiance, and influence.
Worlds Within concludes with five human-sized totems from the Star Series (1994–2001), each titled after an Egyptian or Dogon celestial body. Visitors can wander a meditative path within and around the oblong forms. As the exhibition quietly demonstrates, late in Takaezu’s life her two small hands served as conduits for the forces of the universe.
Installation view of works in Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within based on a 1964 Annual Faculty Show, Cleveland Institute of Art
Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within continues at the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin (750 University Avenue, Madison, Wisconsin) through December 23. The exhibition was curated by Noguchi Museum curator Kate Wiener, independent curator Glenn Adamson, and sound artist and composer Leilehua Lanzilotti.
