Anna Walker’s exhibition title, The Burdens of History, invites us to ruminate on the many ways that
time’s passage compels the imagination to creative practice. With evocative organizing concepts,
the exhibition’s call appealed to artists working with historical touchstones to reach innovative
concepts and practices. Ceramic art is perhaps the most earthbound of all creative forms. The ground
beneath our feet is a location we dig into to source materials as well as a repository for shards-filled
strata embedded with signifiers, influences, and origins. In Richard Powers’ novel Generosity (2009),
a creative nonfiction course is engaged in a classroom argument about whether there are a fixed
number of stories in the world. The instructor reflects that he ought to advise his students that there
are only two: “the future arrives to smack around the past, or the past reaches out to strangle the
future.” Playful and pugilistic, this characterization of creative nonfiction...
