Please join Houston Center for Contemporary Craft and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, for a special presentation by Garth Clark, celebrated author, editor, collector, gallerist, lecturer, and perhaps the most influential and provocative voice in the field of international ceramics.
More a one-person stage show than a conventional lecture, WITNESS combines Clark’s wit, erudition, deep scholarship, and entertaining speaking style with a dynamic multimedia presentation encompassing the key revolutionary moments for ceramics since 1970.
Co-presented by Houston Center for Contemporary Craft and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The event is free to the public.
About Garth Clark
Garth Clark (b. 1947 Pretoria, South Africa) is a 1976 graduate of the Royal College of Art, London, and is currently chief editor for the non-profit CFile Foundation, a global online campus for contemporary ceramics in art, design, architecture, and technology. He lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Along with Margie Hughto, in 1979, he curated the groundbreaking survey, A Century of Ceramics the United States, at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse. Clark, Hughto, and Ann Mortimer founded the Institute for Ceramic History in the same year to present a conference in conjunction with the exhibition. Clark continued to direct the ICH until 1999.
Clark opened the Garth Clark Gallery with his partner Mark Del Vecchio in Los Angeles in 1981 and in New York City in 1983. These spaces became the primary international galleries for contemporary ceramics in the country before closing in 2008.
Clark has authored, edited, and contributed to over 70 books on ceramic art, as well as 300 essays, reviews, and monographs, including Michael Cardew: A Portrait, American Ceramics: 1876 to the Present, Shards: Garth Clark on Ceramics and Art, and Shifting Paradigms in Contemporary Ceramics. Forthcoming publications include a study of Lucio Fontana’s ceramic oeuvre and Mind Mud: Ai Weiwei’s Conceptual Ceramics.
HCCC’s presentation of this event is funded in part by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance.
The Freed Lecture series at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is made possible by an endowment from the Eleanor and Frank Freed Foundation.
Above: “Colored Vases” (detail). Han Dynasty vases and industrial paint, dimensions variable. Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio. Installation view of “Ai Weiwei: According to What?” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., 2012. Photo by Cathy Carver.
