Soaring Voices: Recent Ceramics by Women from Japan

“The vast and varied range of remarkable ceramics comprising Soaring Voices is a testament to the strong female clay-making culture that developed in the Jōmon period and grew to encompass generation upon generation of Japanese women artists.”– Susanna Brooks Lavallee, Morikami Newsletter

“To anyone who follows ceramics—especially Japanese ceramics—this is a not-to-be-missed show

– Janet Koplos, American Craft

For thousands of years, women in Japan have been involved in the making of ceramics, but with few exceptions their names have not been preserved. Soaring Voices bears powerful witness to a still-evolving renaissance of female preeminence in the medium.

Until the mid-twentieth century, ceramic studios in Japan were by tradition family-run establishments in which men controlled most aspects of production, from the processing of clay to the crafting and marketing of the finished works. This began to change in the 1950s, when the cultural upheavals of the post-war era—and the wide availability of mass-produced clay—ended male dominance in the field and launched a generation of self-taught female ceramists, who managed their own studios and brought a new sensibility to the ancient craft. This exhibition showcases, through 87 works by 25 women artists, contemporary interpretations of a traditional art form by way of a range of motifs inspired by the natural world: plants, shells, mountains, rivers, and the delicate play of light and shadow.

The Museum of Contemporary Ceramic Art at the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, Shiga Prefecture, Japan, organized and debuted the exhibition in collaboration with hus-10, Inc., Tokyo, Japan. The exhibition traveled to the New Otani Art Museum, Tokyo, and to Shizuoka Art Gallery, Shizuoka, Japan, in 2008; then to the Musée National de Céramique in Sèvres, France, in 2009, before traveling to the US.

The exhibition was generously supported in part by the E. Rhodes & Leona B. Carpenter Foundation and the S&R Foundation.

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