Now on view:
Betty Woodman in Hot! & Ready to Serve: Celebrating Functional Ceramics
American Museum of Ceramic Art, Pomona, California
through September 13

In honor of International Museum Day this past week, our Collections Coordinator Celia Lê visited AMOCA, where Betty Woodman’s Pillow Pitcher is on view alongside works by Ron Nagle, Paul Soldner, Peter Voulkos, among others in Hot! & Ready to Serve. This exhibition celebrates ceramics’ dual roles as utilitarian tools and expressions of cultural and personal identity. It includes Fiesta dinnerware sets, Shoji Hamada’s tea bowl, and works that “referenced utilitarian origins while embracing painterly surfaces and sculptural installations,” such as Woodman’s Pillow Pitcher.

In the mid-1950s, the California Clay movement—where ceramics shifted from utility to sculptural—was largely male-dominated. “This was a time when, in order to be a real potter, you had to work in stoneware and be one of the boys. And they were all boys,” Woodman recalled. Though not directly part of the movement, in 1977 she joined the faculty at Scripps College in nearby Claremont, where she developed her iconic off-white clay formula, before teaching at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

“Despite the gender bias of the fifties and sixties, women made their marks in ceramics,” wrote curator Anne Pagel in the exhibition catalogue for California Clay: The Big Bang, naming Woodman among them. “Woodman pioneered the idea of vessels being exuberantly colorful, expressionistic, representational surface treatments. Ceramics history provided a smorgasbord from which she drew forms and motifs that she twisted, turned, and expanded in unimaginable ways.”