Co-curator of “Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within,” Glenn Adamson will explore the renowned ceramic artist’s work within the context of postwar craft and painting. The exhibition debuted at the Noguchi Museum in New York on the centennial of her birth and is currently on view at the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In this talk, Adamson will focus particularly on the use of sonic and kinetic elements in Takaezu’s work, which animate the ‘dark air’ within her closed forms. This activation provides a point of comparison with other artists of her generation, while also reframing the relation between abstraction and the vessel form.
A curator, writer, and historian based in New York and London, Adamson is the author most recently of “A Century of Tomorrows” (Bloomsbury, 2024).he is currently curator at large for the Vitra Design Museum in Germany, artistic director for Design Doha (a biennial festival in Qatar) and editor of Material Intelligence, a quarterly online journal published by the Chipstone Foundation.
Adamson’s previous publications include “Thinking Through Craft” (2007); “The Craft Reader” (2010); “Postmodernism: Style and Subversion” (2011, with Jane Pavitt); “The Invention of Craft” (2013); “Art in the Making” (2016, with Julia Bryan-Wilson); “Fewer Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects” (2018); “Objects: USA 2020”; and “Craft: An American History” (2021). Current curatorial projects include “Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within” for the Isamu Noguchi Museum, “Nike: Form Follows Motion” for the Vitra Design Museum, and “Ground/Work 2025” for the Clark Art Institute.
NOTE: Unlike most McKinney lectures, this lecture takes place on a Monday.
