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JAPAN
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Katsushiro Sōhō 勝城蒼鳳 (Japan, 1934–2023) Early Summer Wind, 2018 Bamboo 10 × 18 × 18 in. (25.4 × 45.7 × 45.7 cm) PG2022.57.6
Katsushiro Sōhō was raised in Tochigi Prefecture, north of Tokyo, an area with a strong tradition of basketry and the birthplace of Iizuka Rōkansai, widely regarded as Japan’s greatest bamboo artist. Katsushiro watched his father, a farmer, weaving baskets for sale during the winter months and later studied under a series of masters including Saitō Bunseki, himself a student of Rōkansai, who encouraged Katsushiro to free up his practice and move away from making commercial flower vases and brooches in favor of work that was aesthetically and technically more challenging. Katsushiro also honed his skills by taking on assignments to repair works by respected earlier masters. The present basket—named Early Summer Wind in honor of a tour group, including Lorne Lassiter and Gary Ferraro, that visited the artist in 2018—was made from shinodake or suzutake (Pseudosasa purpurascens), a species of mountain bamboo with especially thin stems.
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Using a procedure favored by several artists in the Kanto region (Tokyo and surrounding prefectures), the artist hand-cut the stems, beat them flat, and plaited them in tabane-ami (bundled) technique using multiple strips stained in contrasting hues. The base, executed in regular asanoha plaiting created by incorporating extra elements into a larger hexagonal pattern, is surrounded by a foot ring of thinly cut strips, laid on their sides and secured by bamboo knots. The ends of these strips project outwards and upwards to form the outer walls, plaited near the top in free-style square plaiting. Some of the upper ends of these strips are twisted together to make a rim, while others form the handle. Viewing this masterpiece of planning and execution, it is not difficult to understand why the artist received the rare official government accolade of “Living National Treasure” (officially, “Holder of an Important Intangible Cultural Asset”) in 2005.
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reflected in the cultures’ artwork. In short, my interest in viewing art from different cultures enabled me to better understand the whole culture better, as well as better understand my own culture. — Lorne: Serendipity. Right place. Right time. So trite. So true. At the first Founders’ Circle weekend in 2000, we happened to offer a ride to Jane and Arthur Mason whom we met standing in the parking lot of Joie Lassiter’s gallery. They immediately introduced us to all of their Washington, DC friends who had come to Charlotte for the events. These former Renwick members became our friends and mentors. I joined the newly formed board of the Founders’ Circle, and we began to travel with the group to SOFA shows and trips such as Prague and London Collect. — Annie: Most of the objects in your collection have no utilitarian purpose—form trumping function in prodigiously crafted sculptures. Materiality and mood seem to be the unifiers, techniques and surface treatments eliciting a range of emotional responses. How does living with these disparate bamboo, ceramic, glass, wood and fiber objects impact your daily life? — Gary: Even though we started our joint collecting largely with glass, we soon became more ecumenical. In other words, we never met a craft genre or a specialized technique within a discipline that we automatically excluded from consideration. Whenever we purchased a piece, frequently without having the foggiest idea where it might take up temporary residence, we could hardly wait for it to arrive so we could re-curate our collection to
Fig. 4 (left) Dante Marioni (United States, born 1964) Untitled, undated Glass, 40 3/4 × 6 7/8 (diameter) in. (103.5 × 17.5 cm) Promised Gift
Fig. 5 (opposite) Gareth Mason (United Kingdom, born 1965) Green Meteor Brand Cross Crust, 2009–13 Porcelain, slip, feldspar, dolomite, sang de boeuf glaze, stoneware, silver alloy, and copper alloy, 15 1/2 × 11 × 16 1/2 in. (39.4 × 27.9 × 41.9 cm) 2020.26.4
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THE WEST
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Sharif Bey (United States, born 1974) Raptor and Sphere, 2021 Vitreous china and mixed media 23 × 22 × 4 in. (58.4 × 55.9 × 10.2 cm) Promised Gift
Combining a fascination with body adornment and the artifacts of natural history museums with the artist’s passion for clay, the necklace format evolved into one of Sharif Bey’s signature series. From the wearable to the monumental, these objects are at once intimate and familiar and enigmatic and otherworldly. Characteristically, the composition arose from Bey’s curiosity about traditional royal North African Berber amber necklaces, with their large heavy beads, pondering why anyone would wear such uncomfortable jewelry. He realized that it was more than just suffering for beauty; the necklace was a symbol of identity, status, and culture. Bey maintains that when he is making, he is summoning imagery from several cultural sources and eras, intent on succumbing to the flow of the process and final sculpture. His objects are gender neutral and as much about beads as regal beautification as they are about the abstracted forms and cast shadows. The title Raptor and Sphere conjures up both the sacred and divine nature of animal claws and teeth and other body parts worn by kings and warriors in several indigenous cultures, and the double entendre of the word “sphere,” at once a shape and a reference to a certain segment of society united by a common bond. Sharif Bey is a dedicated husband, father, teacher, and artist. His art making is inextricable from his life and very much blended into the quotidian. Bey returned to the pinch-pot making of his youth when he needed an easily produced and portable way of creating ceramic art during his nomadic years as a graduate student, married, with a young child, and no fixed studio. Improvising his way through making on the home front, the pressmolded claw and bead shapes depicted here had terra sigillata applied by his son before the beads were tissuewrapped and placed into the firepit in the Beys’ backyard. AC
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Bodil Manz (Denmark, born 1943) Cylinder No. 1 “Construction!”, 2005 Porcelain 3 × 3 5/8 in. (7.6 × 9.2 cm) 2017.5.12
Cylinder No. 5 “Square II”, 2005 Porcelain 7 3/8 × 9 1/4 in. (18.7 × 23.5 cm) 2017.5.13
Bodil Manz is renowned for her sculptural porcelain vessels adorned with geometric lines, shapes, and patterns, on which the material properties of the clay—its thinness, smoothness, and translucency—combine with the formal elements of shape, scale, line, and volume to achieve transcendent beauty. Cylinders No. 1 and No. 5 are characteristic of this body of work. The cylinder is Manz’s signature form, one that she has explored in hundreds of iterations over several decades, varying the scale and decoration to make each vessel unique. Her compositions of thin and thick lines and geometric shapes, such as the squares and rectangles seen here, reflect Modernist influences such as the paintings of Piet Mondrian and the Russian Constructivist Kasimir Malevich. Manz expertly relates the flat geometry of her designs to the volume of her cylindrical vessels. She applies the geometric shapes to both interiors and exteriors, exploiting the translucency of the porcelain to create unified compositions. On the interior of Cylinder No. 1 “Construction!” are a blue, vertical rectangle to the right of the maroon square on its exterior, and a black band running horizontally between the tops of the interior and exterior blue rectangles. The intimate scale of the vessel allows the viewer to look inside it, as well as through it, to experience the effect. The making of Manz’s vessels is as rigorous as their geometry. She creates their forms by pouring porcelain slip into plaster molds, then biscuit-firing them several times, resulting in eggshell-thin, matte surfaces. She designs her compositions on paper, then reproduces them as glaze decals that she applies to the vessels’ interiors and exteriors. Manz then fires her vessels several additional times at high temperatures, which achieves depth of color by causing the glaze to penetrate the clay body, but also risks the deformation of the thin porcelain forms. REE
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