The Anxiety of Influence: Selections from the CU Art Museum’s Ceramics Collection

Curated by Lisa Tamiris Becker, Director, CU Art Museum and Kim Dickey, Professor, Department of Art and Art History, University of Colorado Boulder

 

Drawing on Harold Bloom's seminal work of poetic criticism,  "The Anxiety of Influence," to interpret the significant role that "influence" plays within the global history, culture, and tradition of ceramics, this exhibition will present Modern and Contemporary Ceramics as well as selected historic works from the CU Art Museum's permanent collection. The exhibition will feature major pieces by Scott Chamberlin, Rick Dillingham, Arthur Gonzalez, Wayne Higby, Anne Kraus, Graham Marks, Jim Melchert, Linda Sikora, Suo Tan, Peter Voulkos, Betty Woodman and many others. The exhibition will also include works on paper by noted ceramic artists such as Robert Arneson and Ken Price to further explore the conceptual, aesthetic, and methodological influences on Modern and Contemporary ceramic artists. While many previous exhibitions have chronicled the decorative and technological influences of various ceramic traditions as they travelled across Eastern and Western cultures, this exhibition is the first to apply Bloom's complicated post-Freudian theories of "influence" to the realm of ceramics and its poetics, in order to construct a more complex understanding of the medium.