Exhibition curated by Jo Lauria American Museum of Ceramic Art:

August 17, 2024 through March 2, 2025.

Accompanying Book co-authored by Dan Chavkin, Jeffrey Head, and Jo Lauria published by Monacelli Press, New York: Forthcoming Summer 2024

Curators’ Walk Through with Jo Lauria and Carrie Burckle of the exhibition Connective Threads at Palos Verdes Art Center, April 1, 2023 at 1:00 pm.

Palos Verdes Art Center / Beverly G. Alpay Center for Arts Education is pleased to announce Connective Threads, a survey of contemporary fiber art in Southern California. Organized by Palos Verdes Art Center, the exhibition is curated by Carrie Burckle and Jo Lauria. Connective Threads opens January 28 and runs through April 15, 2023. An artists’ reception will be held February 4 from six to nine pm. 

Exhibiting artists include Fafnir Adamites, Casey Baden, Jim Bassler, Cameron Taylor-Brown, Ben Cuevas, Renata Daina, Gail Fraser, Phyllis Green, Lydia Tjioe Hall, Molly Haynes, Annette Heully, Dong Kyu Kim, Michael Koch, Jeanne Medina Le, Mary Little, Carmen Mardonez, Victoria May, Blue McRight, Diane Meyer, Dominga Opazo, Claudia Parducci, Michael F. Rohde, Gwen Samuels, Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia, Meredith Jackson Strauss, Carol Shaw-Sutton, Regina Vorgang, and Kay Whitney. 

Connective Threads provides a window into what is currently engaging fiber artists, even as this discipline continues to evolve and change. Emanating from artists’ studios in Southern California, the exhibition offers unique perspectives on the complicated identities of fiber art as a genre. Fiber artists can formally exploit the medium’s connections to pattern, color, shape, and texture. Multilayered content can also be woven into its structure through abstract, representational, or narrative strategies. The works on view encompass a rich diversity of influences and inspirations, independent from conventional expectations. Collectively they offer a penetrating examination of fiber’s possibilities.

CURATORS

Carrie Burckle is a visual artist, educator, and founding member of Textile Arts Los Angeles. She has an extensive teaching history; in the Los Angeles public schools, California State University Northridge, San Diego State, Cal State LA, the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising and Woodbury University. Burckle has been an adjunct faculty member in the Fiber program at CSULB since 2002. Jo Lauria is a Los Angeles-based curator, writer, and educator. She is a specialist in the fields of design, craft, and decorative arts. She received the 2016 American Ceramic Circle Book Award for Ralph Bacerra: Exquisite Beauty. Lauria is currently adjunct curator of the American Museum of Ceramic Art and mentor faculty at Otis College of Art and Design.

Breaking Ground: Women in California Clay

Adjunct curator Jo Lauria explains, “Breaking Ground, or groundbreaking, describes innovational, novel, inventive, creative, or disruptive actions. The remainder of the title functions as a filtering mechanism: the groundbreakers are women who have resided in California and whose stories are framed through the lens of their association with clay.”

The exhibition is co-curated by Beth Ann Gerstein (Executive Director), Jo Lauria (Adjunct Curator), and Edith Garcia (Professor, California College of the Arts and the University of California, Berkeley). American Museum of Ceramic Art

September 10, 2022 through March 12, 2023 

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Ceramics Professional Critiques

Delivery Mode Online

Los Angeles-based and award-winning curator, writer, and educator Jo Lauria is visiting critic of this Professional Critiques mentorship program for advanced ceramics artists. Artists will meet with the critic individually and collectively on a monthly basis as they develop a body of work within a chosen theme. This is an ideal opportunity for ceramicists who may benefit from professional guidance in preparation for entering competitions, gallery representation, and/or exhibition opportunities. Critiques will focus on aesthetics, the strength of conviction, presentation strategies, and the development of one’s authentic voice in support of professional attainment within the field of ceramics. The last session will be devoted to a group class wherein each student will present and discuss works completed during the program.

Notes:

- On meeting weeks, students will meet individually with Jo Lauria during scheduled meeting blocks. In addition, students of both sections will meet together at select times for shared discussion topics and guest presentations. 

- This course does not provide certificate credit.

- Please refer to the Section Notes for details of the course format (online, on-campus, etc).

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Connected Spaces: Cheryl Ann Thomas and Michael Rohde

Join the Benefit for Focus on the Masters Educational Programming!

Zoom Panel Meeting with Curator Jo Lauria and artists Cheryl Ann Thomas and Michael Rohde. Wednesday, July 13, 2022, from 6 pm to 7:30 pm PST.

Exhibition curated by Jo Lauria American Museum of Ceramic Art:

March 12, 2022 through August 21, 2022.

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Peter Callas, An Enduring Legacy

Regarded as one of the preeminent ceramic artists in the American Studio Ceramics tradition to work with anagama kilns, Peter Callas (1951– ) influenced an entire generation of ceramic artists. Opening February 12, 2022 at the American Museum of Ceramic Art, Peter Callas: An Enduring Legacy is a comprehensive career retrospective featuring works spanning nearly 30 years of creative production. Among the 50 works featured are Callas’s innovative expressionist sculptures and abstracted container forms that function as visual records of the transformative forces of fire. Other works on display include intimate tea bowls, selected works on paper, and the premiere of an original film about the artist.

Exhibition curated by Jo Lauria American Museum of Ceramic Art:

February 12, 2022 through July 24, 2022. 

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Connected Spaces: Cheryl Ann Thomas and Michael Rohde

This two-person exhibition will be a showcase of new work by ceramic artist Cheryl Ann Thomas in conversation with new work by weaver Michael Rohde. The artists have created a select body of work in response to each other’s oeuvre.

Exhibition curated by Jo Lauria American Museum of Ceramic Art:

March 12, 2022 through August 21, 2022.

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Water, Earth & Fire

Exhibition co-curated by Jo Lauria Palos Verdes Art Center:

January 29, 2022 through April 16, 2022.

FEBRUARY 12 – APRIL 16, 2022

OPENING RECEPTION: February 26, 6-9 pm

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NPR SELECTS: Master of the Midcentury The Architecture of William F. Cody

Click here to read the NPR book review

Master of the Midcentury The Architecture of William F. Cody

Monacelli Press, authored by Catherine Cody, Jo Lauria, and Don Choi.

Book now available on Amazon:

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Master of the Midcentury The Architecture of William F. Cody

Book release: September 2021.

Monacelli Press, authored by Catherine Cody, Jo Lauria, and Don Choi.

Book now available NOW on Amazon:

Click here to place an order

Jack Rogers Hopkins: California Design Maverick

Book release: 2021.

Limited to 150 copies.

Edited by Jefferey Head & Katie Nartonis.

A Step Beyond: Contemporary Footwear – Functional to Fanciful

February 8 to April 25, 2020

Virtual Exhibition now available

https://www.otis.edu/ben-maltz-gallery/

Contemporary footwear intersects gender and fashion in continually new and creative ways. In design and fabrication, both functional and fanciful footwear emerge from a collaborative process of creativity and craftsmanship. The exhibition presents a chronology of fashionable shoes over the past 100 years as well as focusing on footwear from a variety of perspectives, including custom or limited-edition shoes handcrafted for private clients, and shoes mass-produced for the consumer market. In addition, a section of the exhibition features artists and illustrators who use the shoe as a protagonist in their individual artistic narratives.

Silver Splendor: The Art of Anna Silver

In March of 2019, the American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA) mounted the first major museum survey of Anna Silver’s work—Silver Splendor: The Works of Anna Silver, curated by Jo Lauria. The exhibition brought together over 70 works, including recent works in glass, and rarely seen preparatory drawings.

This exhibition and accompanying catalog celebrate Anna’s creative evolution over the course of fifty years. The survey of work demonstrated Anna’s mastery of the painted surface as applied to functional and sculptural forms. Cups and saucers, bowls, teapots, vases, and plates have been Silver’s objects of choice, and most recently she has added reliquary boxes and totem sculptures to her varied and prodigious output. As notable ceramic historian and gallerist Garth Clark has aptly stated: “Anna is pushing the form and painting as far as an artist can take it.”

Silver Splendor was on view March 7, 2019 through August 25, 2019, with an opening reception on March 9.

 Michael Rohde: The Empathy of Patience

Exhibition was on view at San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, February 1 through March 17, 2019; Jo Lauria, Guest Curator.

The exhibition charted Michael Rohde’s evolution as a weaver showcasing more than four series of hand-loomed works spanning the years 2000 to 2018.

Living with Clay: California Ceramic Collections

Catalog released in 2020; essay on the collection of Sonny and Gloria Kamm