2017 NCECA Annual Exhibition: The Evocative Garden

Curated by Gail M. Brown
March 4 – April 1, 2017
Photos by Mario Gallucci

The National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts is pleased to announce that in 2017, esteemed curator of contemporary craft Gail M. Brown will bring The Evocative Garden, an international juried and invitational exhibition exploring natural and cultivated worlds to Disjecta. Invited artists include Megan Bogonovich, Jess Riva Cooper, Kim Dickey, Linda Sormin and Dirk Staschke.

A breadth of implied and articulated dramas will be staged as a personally defined natural landscape or more formalized garden scenario. In works of ceramic sculpture, installation, object and vessel format, each participant will offer a new or recent work- some potent objects as-metaphors, with sub-text and, others as choreographed scenes with figuration or the figure/s implied in a verdant location, in vocabularies from nuanced realism to personal symbolism. 

Each will be designed to reference an array of issues- nature’s fragility and sustainability, the wild and the tame, life’s appetites and dilemmas, conflict and resolution, the everlasting and the temporal- social and historic events, of the natural world and the human condition. Artists remind us that nature and the articulated garden, as context, stimulation and tactile allure, is a seductive, universal, ever present enticement. 

Gail M. Brown is an independent curator whose interest is to enhance visibility and education about contemporary craft within the larger visual arts community. She trained as a printmaker at the Philadelphia College of Art where she identified her own connection to process and media while exploring etching and lithography. Brown has been watching the contemporary craft movement since the early 1970s. She is a passionate observer of the unique potential of art in craft media for the communication of issue-oriented and aesthetic ideas coupled with extensive examination of chosen material process, within the long decorative arts continuum. She curates focused exhibitions which share exceptional work from a national/international body of mature and mid-career artists and introduces potent ideas and forms by younger makers.

Among the 75+ exhibitions Gail M. Brown has curated and juried, many of which focus upon and celebrate clay, are A FEAST OF BEADS: Ceramic Jewelry, NCECA, Seattle, 2012; DISARMING DOMESTICITY- Our Shared Domestic Unease, NCECA, Philadelphia, 2010; SCHOOLS OUT: Emerging Ceramic Artists, NCECA, Baltimore, 2005 and LOOKING IN THE MIRROR: Aspects Of Figurative Ceramics, NCECA, Columbus, 1999.