A Gallery Year at the Clay Art Centre, NY

Prior to 2016, Clay Art Center’s exhibition program hosted shows with both functional and sculptural ceramics featuring emerging, mid-career, and established artists. While every show held its own conceptual merit, the long-time audience for the gallery did not necessarily follow a narrative between exhibitions, and there was little connection between our exhibitions and educational programming. Being a non-profit institution, we questioned what the educational component of the gallery was and how we could sustain interest with our long-standing patrons. In came the idea of having an ‘umbrella’ theme – a point of focus where we would have enough room to maneuver between sculpture and function as well as solo and group shows but have a guiding thread that connected everything together.

To start off our first year-long focus in, we showcased four core exhibits with an artist-in-residence show in-between. Instead of prescribing to our own perspective of what aesthetics and concepts our region would produce, we began the year by initiating a regional juried exhibition so we could engage artists that were not yet on our radar. Tapping Leslie Ferrin (of Ferrin Contemporary) as a juror, we sent out a call for ceramics with a geographic parameter. For the exhibit, titled , Ferrin selected 17 artists to represent emerging talent from in our backyard. Then, a sub-committee comprising New York curators and administrators Glenn Adamson, Barry Harwood, David McFadden, and Jennifer Scanlan were asked to choose a finalist out of the group to award a solo show later in the year. Lauren Skelly received this award, and her solo exhibition, , became Clay Art Center’s third core exhibit for the year. The second exhibit was a New York invitational curated by Judith Schwartz, Ph.D. examining the contemporary landscape of New York sculpture; titled the gallery featured seventeen artists who lived and worked within the city limits. To polarize this, the final exhibition, , was another invitational of pottery co-curated by Judith Schwartz and Adam Chau showcasing an eclectic mix of more than 50 artists of all different aesthetics, backgrounds, and techniques. Clay Art Center set out to find what the ‘New York aesthetic’ was and concluded that variety and diversity was the trope of the region.