“Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay”
Walker Art Center
725 Vineland Place
July 11–November 29, 2009
Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania
118 South 36th Street
January 16–June 21, 2009
Curated by Ingrid Schaffner and Jenelle Porter
Traditional Craft and medium-specific mastery meet the informe and neo-assemblage in “Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay.” A terrible name but a timely premise: The show promises to parse a current vogue for sculpture’s most basic material—and, if we’re lucky, to pose larger questions about what it means to make objects at all now that de-skilled eclecticism has become its own cliché. Twenty-two artists contribute more than seventy works scaled large and small. Innovative American potter George E. Ohr stakes out the historical horizon with pieces made at the tail end of the nineteenth century, while bad boy Lucio Fontana marks the turf for Conceptualists who like to get their hands dirty.