San Rafael, California
Marin Museum of Contemporary Art
“Cluttered Heads,” at Marin Museum of Contemporary Art (on view through March 30, 2025), features works by virtuoso ceramic artist Richard Shaw and Reniel Del Rosario, a young artist whose work has been informed by Shaw’s legacy, along with collaborative pieces by Shaw and wife Martha Shaw. As described by Natasha Boas, co-curator with MOCA director Jodi Roberts, part of the impulse behind the exhibition was the “idea of artistic transmission and influence across generations.” The show also investigates how the tangled messes of our everyday lives can engender transcendent art.
Shaw has been working this conjurer’s trick for decades, mining treasures and trash littering the house and studio and transforming them into elegant, poignant, and amusing constructions—trompe l’oeil ceramic sculptures—using an exacting process of slip casting porcelain, then adding details by adhering transfers in an overglaze. Shaw moved to San Francisco in the 1960s as the ceramic revolution was underway, coinciding with the heyday of the West Coast Funk movement. Studying with Ron Nagle and Jim Melchert at the San Francisco Art Institute, and then Robert Arneson, Manuel Neri, and William T. Wiley at UC Davis, Shaw was exposed not only to ceramics, but also to a way of finding profound meaning in humble objects.
Del Rosario, who arrived at UC Berkeley shortly after Shaw had retired from teaching at Cal (1987–2012), suggests that he was, perhaps, “possessed by Shaw’s spirit.” Del Rosario’s parents, immigrants from the Philippines, had strongly encouraged him to pursue a STEM path, and he was initially considering architecture. Yet once he found the art department, and the ceramics studio in particular, he was hooked. Shaw’s aura seems to have led him into a branch of ceramics that is, if not quite trompe l’oeil, at least adjacent.
Three of Shaw’s figures greet the viewer, one standing about human height, the other two on a smaller scale. In Standing Figure (2003), a battered suitcase serves as a torso, rough wood sticks act as legs, and pencils, brush handles, cigars, and long thick screws substitute for fingers; the graceful Willoware Lady (2013) and Walking Musician (2014) incorporate a toilet plunger, books, and a violin—all painstakingly replicated in clay. Shaw’s figures are so exuberant, they seem ready to spring into life. Their playful quality recalls animation and cartoons, perhaps relating to the fact that his father, Dick Shaw senior, had worked as an illustrator at Disney.
Del Rosario takes quite a different tack in his equally exuberant, rough-hewn works, embracing a kind of DIY aesthetic and a focus on cultural critique. In table-based installations like The Picnic (2024), he uses objects akin to Shaw’s—faux foodstuffs, paint cans, and flowers—to create a critical mass of objects spilling over the edges of their supports. The emphasis is on multiples and deliberate imperfections, with stronger echoes at times of Warhol than Shaw. Earlier performative projects involving fake galleries and fake bodegas, where objects were given away or sold very cheaply, also relate to the social practice work of artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija.
Shaw and Del Rosario share numerous inclinations—a playfulness, an attraction to the absurd, and perhaps above all a love of clay. With infinite precision and a delicate touch, Shaw’s work takes ceramics in a unique direction, meshing genres as disparate as Funk art and Surrealism, tapping the unconscious while finding subtle humor around every bend. Del Rosario has a more pragmatic approach to the material, his “close-enough” replicas serving as a vehicle to critique consumer culture and question the role of the artist. Each has had the good fortune to find inspiring mentors and cultivate a vision of unlimited possibility.
