The Ceramic Presence in Modern Art

Over the last 25 years, Linda Leonard Schlenger has amassed one of the most important collections of contemporary ceramics in the country. This exhibition features over 80 objects from the Schlenger collection by leading 20th-century ceramicists—including John Mason, Jim Melchert, Kenneth Price, Lucie Rie, and Peter Voulkos—alongside works in other media from the Yale University Art Gallery’s permanent collection by artists such as Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, Isamu Noguchi, Mark Rothko, and Edward Ruscha. Although critically lauded within the studio-craft movement, works by these ceramicists are only now coming to be recognized as integral to the wider field of contemporary art. By interspersing these exceptional examples of the medium with other objects from this period, including painting, sculpture, and works on paper, this exhibition aims to reexamine the position of postwar ceramic sculpture within the context of contemporary art, highlighting the formal, historical, and theoretical affinities among the works on view.