The belated celebration of Toshiko Takaezu’s work comes as no surprise, considering how Western art history has downsized the achievements of groundbreaking women artists. By the time the art world came knocking on her door, she had already evolved a body of work that symbolically ended the tradition of treating ceramics as a minor art, and women as minor artists. Now, two exhibitions—“Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within,” a retrospective at the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, New York, and “Full Circle: Toshiko Takaezu and Friends,” a collaborative show at LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton, New York—are documenting the enduring legacy of this Asian American artist (1922–2011) who, on her own terms, helped redefine the art object.
Takaezu’s parents emigrated from Okinawa to Hawai’i in the early 20th century. Of mixed heritage, and the middle child of 11 children, she was raised during the Depression, on a farm where she spent childhood summers laboring on a sugar plantation. Imagine her fingers pressed into the soil, her young hands flailing against dense foliage, everything surrounded by the volcanic island’s blazing colors. Then consider her unique sculptures. Each piece resonates with the grit of an artist forever connected to the beauty of nature and the hard realities of living within it. Consider, too, the call and response between physical energy exerted in the landscape and the gestural pushes and pulls of Takaezu’s process: the supple body harvesting a new form, its rippling ridges mimicking the furrows of a sun-soaked brow; the rapid hand-painting capturing wind-swept blades of grass on an earthen vase. Also conjure, through such dazzling works as Closed Form (2004), the unearthly conflations of golden and purplish hues electrifying a Hawaiian skyscape.
To help with family finances, Takaezu quit high school, worked as a maid, and then, fortuitously, found employment with the Gantt family, founders of the Hawaiian Potters Guild. There, she learned to make manufactured ceramics such as a small flower-shaped Cup of Gold (1940s). This experience introduced her to the possibilities of working with clay, a material to which she was immediately drawn, though commercial production was of no interest to her. Eventually, she traveled to study in Japan, where the art of ceramics is highly respected, but traditionally practiced by men. Back in the U.S., she made a living teaching ceramics—most notably at Princeton University—and selling her work privately, avoiding galleries and dealers.
Nothing, it seems, ever diminished Takaezu’s determination or passion for art. As Fitzhugh Karol, a former student whose works are included in “Full Circle,” recalled, “Her work was everything; she was quiet but powerful, confident and steadfast, with a holistic approach to life and art.” Takaezu’s interdisciplinary fusion of everyday life with a broad swath of genres and styles is clear in the visual dialogues that take place across multimedia installations of her works. An accomplished weaver and painter, she thought beyond a completed work to its placement, something curators are well aware of as they try to exhibit her work as she did—as a body of interrelated forms. For example, in “Worlds Within,” Akari (1973), a large acrylic painting suggesting a dark mountainscape, proceeds from a thin wash of brushstrokes to bands of earthen tones dripping like roots soaking up rust-colored ground. The painting nods to two sculptural works on a stand below: a wide-mouthed Bowl (1971), with an abstract but discernible landscape, and Tall Form (1972), featuring a golden-glazed, gourd-like shape emerging from a thick base. The painted glazes on the ceramic pieces mimic the brushstrokes in the acrylic work. Together, these three works raise the kinds of complex questions about the nature of the art object that Takaezu spent a lifetime quietly answering. Does functionality (of the bowl, for instance) diminish art object-ness? Does the ceramic “craft” of the vertical form equate with the “fine art” painting on the wall above? Such “What is a work of art?” questions had long belabored art historical rhetoric, especially during the era when Takaezu was working.
She avoided answering these questions directly, eschewing labels just as she resisted titles for her works. She referred to herself simply, as a potter, and only the expressive element of the work seemed to matter to her. In terms of art and craft, she did offer this thought, however, saying, “Handcraft is the food for the searching soul; a contrast to the mechanization of the industrialized world.” Consider, too, her willful bow to the gods of chance and serendipity—it was in the spirited risk-taking moment of process that her work sprang to life.
Kate Wiener, co-curator of “Worlds Within,” notes that Takaezu was also opaque about connections to direct art historical influences, though she admired the Indigenous pottery made by women in Santa Fe and the work of color field painters such as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis. Because Takaezu’s work reaches widely across art history, from ancient to contemporary, it is indeed difficult to place her within any specific movement. The astounding variety of her color glazes, her innovative firing methods, and her varied surfaces recall everything from Indigenous sculpture to Asian brushwork, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and folk art, while her attention to space and placement connect to installation art. Looked at through this kaleidoscopic lens, her closed forms, plaques, plates, Moon sculptures, paintings, and weavings render opinions of influence irrelevant, a matter to be assessed in the eye of the beholder, who might see in a work such as Sweet Potatoe (1981) an abstract spud, a Minimalist painting in the round, or, more simply, the three-dimensional form it set out to be.
Most remarkable, and the reason behind the inevitability of Takaezu’s current renown, is how she shifted ceramics from its designation as craft to the stature of sculpture, a transformation that began with a series of multi-spouted vessels from the 1950s. As curator Glenn Adamson points out in his “Worlds Within” catalogue essay, Takaezu “…was manipulating vessel forms into unorthodox, sometimes awkward configurations while treating their surfaces as theaters for action painting.” Collections of these squat forms, their multiple elongated spouts pointed upward, are frequently displayed huddled together, like nesting birds. This Surrealist touch poetically and conceptually relocates the profane teapot from tabletop to earthen landscape.
But it is with the “closed forms,” begun in 1958, that Takaezu definitively redefined the art object. By leaving just a tiny opening at the top of a form, she closed off the realm of “craft,” transforming the wheel-thrown “pot” into a work of art. These works vary in size, from the handheld to a series of humanoid forms so large that the diminutive artist had to stand on a ladder as she worked them. As she described it: “There I am on top and when I look down it’s as if the whole universe is right inside the pot.” The “Star Series” (1994–2001) consists of a group of anthropomorphic figures, each about five feet high. Placed in the landscape, they reach deep into mythic history, landing us somewhere between the silent monoliths of Stonehenge and the enigmatic ancestral sculptures of Easter Island.
Takaezu’s iconic closed forms exude palpable sensuality, seeming to breathe through their pointy apertures, which have been compared to nipples and navels. Themes of birth and regeneration also inform works such as Homage to Tetragonolobis (late 1970s), which refers to a nutrient-rich Asian bean. The large stoneware bowl is divided into four sections, each one containing egg-like porcelain orbs. The work sits directly on the floor, on a layer of black sand. At the Noguchi Museum, Homage is accompanied by the wall-hung tapestry Mutation (1970s), which consists of a series of hand-knotted bands of earth and sky hues, the ensemble coalescing into a metaphorical landscape resonant with the cycle of life.
Takaezu’s approach to the life cycle took a cosmic turn about the time of the 1969 Apollo II mission, when she began a series of “rounder than round” Moon sculptures. To ensure that the forms would maintain that roundness, she placed them in hammocks to dry. The process created its own installation, Gaea (1979–), a series of suspended netted “wombs” hanging in the landscape and cradling a family of moons in alien pods.
Takaezu’s works exude mystery, a phenomenon that many relate to her deep fascination with interior space. For her, the darkness of the huge pot that she feared falling into represented a vast, cryptic place where the soul of the artwork resides. Thinking of her forms as human equivalents—characters recognizable from their outer appearances, their inner natures largely unknown—she considered the interior aspect of her work an important element of her creation. When a piece of clay loosened and detached from inside a pot during firing, she accidentally found a way to give voice and presence to that unknown element. The rattling sound produced as the broken fragment moved around inside inspired Takaezu to add small “rattles” within her pieces; sometimes visitors are allowed to handle some of the small works and hear the music of the spheres.
One cannot leave a discussion about Takaezu as an artist without mention of her role as a teacher and source of inspiration. Many of her students began their artistic odysseys at her rural New Jersey home and studio, where they were also required to work in the kitchen and adjacent garden. (Her home continues to function as a working studio for ceramic students and apprentices.) There, among the fruits and leafy vegetables, one would find a sculpture or two, perhaps inspired by a gourd or nearby pepper. What better preparation for creating art than digging deep within the landscape of creation itself, as Takaezu did on a sugar plantation in Hawai’i? What better way to understand that all life, from the infinite to the infinitesimal, is related than watching a garden grow from sunrise to moonrise, from seed to soaring plant? And what better way to make the point that art is part of life than by keeping a bunch of Moon sculptures beneath the dining table, where their smooth or irregular surfaces could massage guests’ feet?
Takaezu’s seamless merger of the natural, the metaphysical, and the everyday informed the ideas about art that she shared with her students, close friends, and colleagues—particularly Isamu Noguchi and Jack Lenor Larsen. Noguchi, a renowned sculptor and designer of furniture, lighting, landscapes, and theater sets, also experimented with ceramics. The synergies between these two artists, a generation apart, are evidenced in a sculptural vase that Noguchi made in 1952, which is included in “Worlds Within.” Takaezu shared a similarly close relationship with the textile designer, artist, and collector Jack Lenor Larsen, whom she met in 1953, when she was a student at the Cranbrook Academy. Another believer in the connections between art and life, Larsen turned his home and magnificent sculpture garden, which Takaezu knew well, into a public environment where visitors can experience his “case study” in a creative approach to living. “Full Circle” takes advantage of LongHouse’s indoor and outdoor spaces to great effect. On the grounds, one discovers Takaezu’s bronze Three Graces (1994). Inside, her closed forms, placed unpretentiously on the original tile floor, are surrounded by small eclectic groupings of works from Larsen’s collection. Works by Takaezu’s close friends and students, including Maija Grotell, Lenore Tawney, Anna Kang Burgess, Fitzhugh Karol, and Martha Russo, celebrate the legacy of an artist who literally and figuratively turned art in a new direction.
“Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within” is on view at the Noguchi Museum through July 28, 2024, and “Full Circle: Toshiko Takaezu and Friends” is on view at LongHouse Reserve through August 4, 2024. A concurrent exhibition at the MFA Boston, “Toshiko Takaezu: Shaping Abstraction,” showcasing the museum’s collection of Takaezu’s work, continues through September 29, 2024.
