Awards
2005 Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism
Garth Clark
Garth Clark (photograph by Eric Ogden)
The Frank Jewett Mather Award goes to an author of art criticism that has appeared in whole or in part in North American publications. This year we recognize Garth Clark, a groundbreaking critic and historian of modern and contemporary ceramics.
Clark is author or coauthor of twenty-seven books on ceramics. His recent volume Shards (New York: D.A.P./Ceramic Arts Foundation, 2004) includes writings from the last twenty-five years: articles, catalogue essays, monographs, and papers. A summation of his exceptional career, Shards is a model of fluent, lucid, informed, and incisive prose. The book establishes him as a leading figure in ceramics criticism today; as a chronicle of many years of thinking and writing about the place of ceramic arts in contemporary society, it encapsulates his invaluable contributions to our discipline.
Clark was born in South Africa and discovered ceramics there. He received his master’s degree from the Royal College of Art, London, in modern ceramic history, and became an expert in British pottery. Relocating to the United States in 1976, he curated, with Margie Hughto, the exhibition A Century of Ceramics in the United States, 1878–1978. The related book remains the standard history of the subject.
Clark is also author of Potters of Southern Africa (1974), American Potters: The Work of Twenty Modern Masters (1981), The Eccentric Teapot: Four Hundred Years of Invention (1989), and The Book of Cups (1996), as well as monographs on the British artists Michael Cardew and Richard Slee, the Belgian potter Piet Stockmans, and the eccentric turn-of-the-century ceramics genius George Ohr (coauthored). His writings have appeared in Crafts, Studio Potter, Ceramics Monthly, American Ceramics, American Craft, Antiques, the Los Angeles Times, and numerous international publications. His prose is marked by readability, humor, directness, and a personal character. He explores with assurance both the particulars of formal analysis and the larger issues of causes and consequences in education, economics, semantics, and the absence of a canon of contemporary ceramics.
While leading the field in ceramics criticism, Clark has generously encouraged the writing of others. He edited Ceramic Art: Comment and Review, 1882–1977, providing an intellectual history for contemporary criticism. He has organized an important series of international ceramics symposia, beginning in Syracuse, New York, in 1979 and most recently in Amsterdam in 1999. His Ceramics Arts Foundation supports publications.
Clark has been described by Peter Schjeldahl as exercising “wide-ranging erudition and profound sophistication with a common touch.” He has worn many hats—teacher, administrator, editor, collector, gallerist—but on this occasion CAA honors him for writings that have shaped thought about the field of ceramics, and indeed the field itself.
Committee: Sue Taylor, Portland State University, chair; Janet Koplos, Art in America; James Meyer, Emory University; and Greg Sholette, independent artist and writer.
