Almost everyone has played with mud at one point in their lives. To take the earthy material and turn it into a work of creative innovation is a true feat. For this artistic accomplishment, Toshiko Takaezu is someone to look up to.
With over 20 pieces from the museum itself and some from private collectors, the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston, Mass. is displaying a special full-year exhibit titled Toshiko Takaezu: Shaping Abstraction from Sept. 30, 2023 to Sept. 29, 2024.
Takaezu, an Asian American ceramist and painter, impressed the world with her mastery in ceramics and abstract paintings. Born to Japanese immigrant parents in 1922 in Hawaii, Takaezu forged her own path as an innovative, multidisciplinary artist in the United States.
As part of the MFA’s mission to introduce American artists of diverse cultural heritages, Toshiko Takaezu: Shaping Abstraction highlights Takaezu’s practices and explorations on crossing cultural boundaries and integrating modern abstraction with traditional Japanese pottery.
Toshiko Takaezu: Shaping Abstraction is a comprehensive exhibition featuring her lifelong work in ceramics, as well as some acrylic on canvas paintings and a newly acquired large-scale weaving.
“You are not an artist simply because you paint or sculpt or make pots that cannot be used,” Takaezu said. “[Art] has mystery, an unsaid quality; it contains a spirit and is alive.”
The exhibit resides in Gallery 332 in the Art of the Americas section of the museum. The area is an open space where visitors can move freely around and view the exhibit in any order of their preference.
Unlike most exhibits that take viewers through an artist’s creative journey in a chronological way, this layout was interesting and relaxing because of the option to wander around, stay a little longer at certain sections, return to pieces, and make connections among them.
Kathy Lu / Heights…
Read the full article here