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An Ancient Craft Lives: American Ceramist Robert Sperry
| Article
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13532 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1988 |
1,870 Words |
| Author
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Matthew Kangas
Matthew Kangas is an art critic, curator, and lecturer who
lives in Seattle and writes for Art in America and
American Craft. |
The art of Robert Sperry is a remarkable fusion of spontaneity and control and of art ancient and modern, Japanese and American. Born some sixty years ago in Bushnell, Illinois, and reared in rural Saskatchewan, the prominent potter, sculptor, and muralist has lived in Seattle since 1954. Sperry went there to continue his graduate studies in art at the University of Washington with Paul Bonifas, a Swiss production-ware designer.
Succeeding Bonifas as head of the ceramics department in 1960, Sperry taught three generations of students. At the same time, he actively pursued his own career through demonstration workshops; national and international gallery and museum exhibitions; contributions to American, Japanese, and Italian journals; and since 1980, a succession of private and public commissions for his large ceramic-tile murals.
Japanese Influence
On sabbatical in Japan in 1963, Sperry confirmed his strong affinity for Japanese ceramics. The trip resulted in an award-winning documentary, Village Potters of Onda, which chronicled the disappearing folk-pottery tradition of a remote village. Sperry's approach to contemporary ceramics is Janus-like: Attentive to the chaos and uncertainty of the present, he remains rooted in the past through his love for the assimilation of the aesthetics and techniques of Asian ceramics.
Sperry's work was given a major retrospective in 1985 at the Bellevue Art Museum near Seattle, with a full catalog by museum director and leading ceramic historian LaMar Harrington. Over the past decade, and especially since 1984, Sperry has received wide attention, with subsequent exhibitions in Chicago, San Francisco, Malibu, and New York. When the International Ceramics Society held its 1984 annual conference in Seattle, Sperry received the society's coveted gold medal.
Though the history of ceramics has often involved national rivalries for trade and battles for secret formulas (as witnessed by the 1710 virtual house arrest of the first European porcelainmakers at Meissen, Germany), ceramists today confine themselves to the two worlds of functional ware and art. Sperry is no exception. His earliest works were wheel-thrown functional pottery, followed by uniquely carved sculptural objects. During this period, California potter Peter Voulkos' large wheel-thrown plates and hand-built vertical slabs of unglazed clay in vaguely figurative, abstract forms influenced both Sperry and fellow potter Rudy Autio. By
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