The New York Times Features The Museum of Contemporary Craft
March 27, 2013
In a glowing article, Finally, the Bowl Gets Its Due, New York Times writer Julie Lasky delves into the exhibition Object Focus: The Bowl and its the connections between tradition, craft, and design it investigates.
Read the New York Times article.
In addition to highlighting MoCC Director and Chief Curator Namita Gupta Wiggers efforts to point to the bowl as an instrument of craft and as a successful design object, Lasky also notes PNCA faculty member Daniel Duford’s essay on the Object Focus: The Bowl Tumblr.
Lasky writes “Daniel Duford, a potter and printmaker, wrote more personally about a ceramic bread bowl of unknown origin that had been inherited from his wife’s great-grandmother in Puyallup, Wash.” Lasky also discusses PNCA’s BFA in Illustration program as the first people to participate in the drawing station installed in the exhibition.
The article begins by discussing a recent Northern Song dynasty bowl that went for more than $2.2 million at auction in Sotheby’s.
But the bowl, Lasky notes, is easily overlooked. In a phone conversation with Lasky, Wiggers said “we don’t talk about the bowl because it’s completely this everyday thing. We take it for granted. We know it too well.”
And thus the impetus behind Object Focus: The Bowl: to draw attention to and unpack an everyday object that is filled to the brim with thousands of years of craft and design.
Wiggers said, “When I talk to people about the bowl, it is always about something else. It’s a metaphorical conversation about ritual, like in the tea ceremony, or about the fabrication process. It’s very hard to just talk about the bowl itself. We talk around the bowl.”
Lasky discusses the Tumblr page as well, pointing out the inclusion of writers such as Mara Holt Skov and Daniel Duford. She writes, “Ms. Wiggers has capitalized on the narrative richness of bowls by inviting scholars, writers and artisans to select an example from the show and write a brief essay about it.”
Read written accounts and essay on the Object Focus The Bowl Tumblr here.