Across Jun Kaneko’s decades-long practice working with ceramics, he has demonstrated the ability to work deftly across various scales, from the intimate to the monumental. From his youth when he studied painting to his introduction to American ceramics, Kaneko has consistently elevated his chosen medium expanding its parameters beyond traditional craft. His practice has left an indelible mark on the field as he can be counted in the lineage of artists working in the 20th century, transforming clay from a functional medium to an expressive tool used to create fine art.

In the 1960s the burgeoning artist came from Japan to the United States to expand his material palette, studying sculptural ceramics under innovators like Peter Voulkos, Paul Soldner, and Jerry Rothman. Kaneko began accepting teaching appointments in the early 1970s, including a turn as Artist-in-Residence at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan from 1979 through 1986. After Cranbrook, Kaneko re-dedicated himself to his practice and opened a studio in Omaha, Nebraska, where he works to this day.

In describing the impulse to work on a more grandiose scale in series such as his Dangos, Kaneko has stated that he wanted to create works “to look up to.” Elevation: Kaneko and Contemporary Ceramics aims to unpack this phrase beyond its implication of heightened dimensions, partnering Kaneko’s ceramics with artists whose work reaches new conceptual heights, using clay as a metaphor to connect with their cultural heritage. The ceramicists included in this group exhibition, including Kaneko, use clay as a medium to explore identity and culture, from the diasporic experience to imagined futures, often hedging multiple modes of being, to venerate the lived experience of persons who have not historically been celebrated in this craft-turned-fine-arts arena.

While these artists’ ways of making vary, a connecting thread in their material quality expands the use of clay beyond Western conventions exemplified in the art historical canon. Through their use of this historied media partnered with other, non-traditional materials of personal or cultural significance, the artists in this exhibition utilize ceramics to not only elevate conceptual understanding of the human experience but expand material conventions through an anthropological understanding of history and culture. Elevation: Kaneko and Contemporary Ceramics brings together objects to look up to for their reverence of varied ways of life and modes of making, stemming from clay as a cross-cultural, communicative medium.

Artists exhibited in Elevation include Jun Kaneko, Renata Cassiano Alvarez, Ebitenyefa Baralaye, Ashwini Bhat, Magdolene Dykstra, Adebunmi Gbadebo, Sharbani Das Gupta, Kahlil Robert Irving, Michiko Murakami, Joey Quiñones, and Patrice Renee Washington.

(Jessika Edgar, Assistant Professor and Area Coordinator of Ceramics, WSU; Kat Goffnett, Assistant Curator of Collections, Cranbrook Art Museum)