A Chosen Path: The Ceramic Art of Karen Karnes

A Chosen Path

Outdoor showroom, Karnes’s Gate Hill studio, 1977. Photo: Robert George.

A Chosen Path

The Ceramic Art of Karen Karnes

Edited by Mark Shapiro FOREWORD BY GARTH CLARK

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS CHAPEL HILL

This book was published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Arizona State University Art Museum Ceramics Research Center, Tempe, Arizona.

TOURING ITINERARY

17 September 2010-8 January 2011

Arizona State University Art

Museum Ceramics Research

Center, Tempe, Arizona

1 February-30 June 2011

Asheville Art Museum,

Asheville, North Carolina

27 August-3 December 2011

Currier Museum of Art,

Manchester, New Hampshire

31 January-27 May 2012

Racine Art Museum,

Racine, Wisconsin

23 June-30 September 2012

Crocker Art Museum,

Sacramento, California

© 2010 The University of North Carolina Press All rights reserved Printed in Canada

Designed by Richard Hendel Set in Scala and Geogrotesque by Rebecca Evans

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress

Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Karnes, Karen, 1925-

A chosen path: the ceramic art of

Karen Karnes / edited by Mark Shapiro;

foreword by Garth Clark.—1st ed.

p. cm.

This book was published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Arizona State University Art Museum Ceramics Research Center, Tempe, Arizona. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8078-3427-5 (cloth: alk. paper)

1. Karnes, Karen, 1925 — Exhibitions.

2. Art pottery, American — 20th

century — Exhibitions. 3. Art pottery,

American — 21st century—Exhibitions.

I. Shapiro, Mark (Mark Joshua), 1955-

II. Arizona State University.

Art Museum. III. Title.

NK42IO.K3725A4 2010

738.092—dc22 2010010139

14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Foreword: Karen Karnes, Modernist

Garth Clark

Curator’s Statement

Peter Held

Introduction

Mark Shapiro

Karen Karnes: An American Life in Seven Contrasts

Christopher Benfey

The Woman behind the Pot

Jody Clowes

Individual and Collective: Karen Karnes and the Twentieth-Century Craft Movement

Janet Koplos

Her Pot

Edward Lebow

In Her Own Words

Karen Karnes

Plates

Exhibition Checklist

Chronology with Selected Exhibitions

Selected Public Collections

Bibliography

Contributors

Acknowledgments

Index

Karen Karnes working on large planter, 1957. Photo: Ross Lowell.

Foreword Karen Karnes, Modernist

Karen Karnes is at once one of the best known and least understood artists in American ceramics. She is most often described and thought of as a traditionalist. In a limited sense this does apply. Karnes has a deep respect for the traditions of her medium. She uses traditional techniques like salt-glazing and wood-firing. Her work deals almost exclusively with the vessel, and the utilitarian pot has been her mainstay. But the traditional label implies a conservative approach to pottery and suggests that, like ceramists inspired by Bernard Leach for instance, she is aesthetically dependent on historical formats.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Karnes began her career as a modernist, experimenting with biomorphism or free form as it was known in the late 1940s and early 1950s. She has never been a captive of the ceramics community alone and from 1952 to 1979 lived in two legendary arts communities, Black Mountain College and the Gate Hill community, with Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jack Tworkov, among others. If anything, in common with these groundbreaking artists, a restless, reinventing avant-garde spirit drives her ceramics.

This searching quality has won her many collectors, both of crafts and of fine arts, the latter drawn by the toughness and purity of her aesthetic and its modern inspiration. One finds as much of her work in the downtown lofts of Manhattan’s art community as in Middle America’s craft collections. When Isamu Noguchi organized his museum and sculpture garden in Queens, New York, the only artist other than himself whose work he included was Karnes (represented by a pair of large garden seats that he had acquired from her in the late 1960s).

Karnes’s earliest work in clay in the late 1940s was in the style of the moment and could be found concurrently in the work of Noguchi, Charles Eames, and Joan Miro and numerous other artists and designers. During her two-year stay in Italy at the end of that decade, her pots became even more modernist and minimal with cut rims and defining outer spines. And, despite being mold-born, each was altered by hand, so no two were alike; her textured surfaces and simple two-tone color had a stark graphic power.

When Karnes returned to the United States, she was on track to gain a graduate degree from Alfred University, the most prestigious ceramics program in the county, but she followed her own compass to Black Mountain College, where she and her then-husband, David Weinrib, became potters-in-residence. The lack of a degree never bothered her. I did not want to teach, so it was of little use to me, she remarked. Karnes was committed to being a working potter. She has raised a family, built a home, and lived solely by the income of her pottery ever since. She has been the primary breadwinner through all her relationships, no mean achievement since her pots in the first few decades were inexpensive, which required her to produce a large volume of work.

Black Mountain was a stimulating, nonconformist environment, and Karnes and Weinrib wasted little time in turning the pottery into a center for progressive ceramics. She had learned to throw in Italy and had a natural gift for this technique. She continued to work mainly on the wheel at Black Mountain, making mostly functional wares. Among the best of these were her sturdily elegant tea and coffee services, with their crisp strength and undercurrent of lyricism in the throwing.

In 1954 Karnes left the college to put down her roots at the Gate Hill community in Stony Point, New York, building the studio and kilns where she was to work for twenty-five years. This period provided several important breakthroughs in her work and career. Two require special mention. In 1957 her colleagues Mikhail Zakin and M. C. Richards were introduced to the owner of a clay mine in New Jersey who had offered free clay to potters. In those days financial survival was precarious and free materials a welcome bonus. The owner turned out to be a ceramics engineer and took the women to task for their ignorance of technical matters and the overall lack of invention among studio potters. He shared the clay he had developed for flameproof wares. Karnes was soon producing a distinctive, handmade oven-top casserole, an undreamed of sophistication among most potters at that time (and still a rarity today).

The casserole was an immediate commercial success, selling for about thirty-five dollars, a large sum at the time. Unaltered in its basic design for more than fifty years, it was still in production until a few years ago when Karnes stopped throwing on the wheel. It is a classic of post-1950s American pottery. The design is masterful, with a low center of gravity (which makes it easy to handle and balance when filled with heavy, bubbling hot food) and a wide generous mouth for ease of serving and cleaning. Gently curved walls and a domed lid encouraged even distribution and circulation of heat. Its handle, a twisted ribbon of pulled clay that was attached with gestural elan, provided visual distinction.

Karnes’s move to salt-glazing was her next achievement. This was the perfect union of form, surface, and aesthetic sensibility. The technique was discovered in Germany in the fifteenth century and involves tossing salt into the kiln at a crucial moment in the firing. The salt then vaporizes and reacts to the surface of the pots, leaving them lightly glazed with a distinctive sheen and texture not unlike that of an orange rind.

Karnes first fired with salt in 1967 at a workshop at Penland School in North Carolina. Her response was immediate and visceral. But her approach was anything but traditional. For the next fifteen years Karnes produced the most extraordinary body of saltwares since the pots of the magical Martin Brothers in Victorian London nearly a century earlier. She manipulated the salt and the fire to produce a wide and unprecedented range of colors and textures. Soon she was established as one of the most prominent masters of American ceramics, by now a crowded and growing field, and she began to attract interest internationally.

What one notices first in this work is color. She combined traditional blues and tans with spirals of bright green, sharp mustard yellows, and mauves. Even the pieces that seem at first glance to be monochrome reveal themselves to be surprisingly polychromatic on closer inspection. Karnes had succeeded in taking salt glaze into the modern era.

Her innovation extended to form. She bypassed the route most contemporary salt-glaze pottery tended to follow, with hard-edged, geometric, almost metallic forms. When German salt-glazed wares first arrived, potters, without a precedent for this new body and surface technique, turned to the example of metal vessels and mimicked their shape, lines, and crisp formality. Karnes’s pots also have a certain formality and excellent carriage, but they are organic with a soft slouch to their edges.

Salt glaze did something else for Karnes. It unleashed a sexuality that had been latent. The sensuality of the surfaces (they feel glorious to the touch; seductive, silky-smooth yet dimpled) encouraged her to give her pots a joyous erotic fecundity. It was not merely suggested through sensual form but in overt detailing. Distinctive shallow, vagina-like orifices she created on the pots’ surfaces made the statement more obvious and exciting, and while she may or may not have welcomed the attention, feminists embraced her. Her pots had become sexy.

The salt-glaze breakthrough coincided with other changes in her life. M. C. Richards, the poet and potter, and the dancer Paulus Berensohn, whom Karnes had met at Gate Hill, hosted a kiln-building workshop at Berensohn’s farm in Pennsylvania. To teach it, they brought in Ann Stannard, an art teacher at King Alfred’s College in Winchester, England. It was at a time in both women’s lives when they were seeking change, and the camaraderie they established during this workshop blossomed into a loving, life-long commitment.

In 1979, Stannard and Karnes, now both in their fifties, left Gate Hill and created a home on their own in northern Vermont, homesteading for several years under primitive conditions that would have intimidated potters half their age. (The house was a mile and half from any road, so moving materials and supplies was an arduous trek.) This pioneering soon lost its appeal and prompted a move to a more accessible home in Morgan, Vermont, close to the Canadian border.

Despite the fact that she was by now considered the most significant salt-glaze practitioner in America, one whose works were eagerly sought after by galleries and collectors, Karnes made the financially risky decision to give up the technique and make wood-fired pots, a logical and symbolically appropriate move in a tree-covered state. But Karnes did not follow the then nascent American wood-firing movement in its obsession with the Japanese anagama tradition, with its brown crusty surfaces and intense fire markings. Her inner modernist asserted itself, and she reinvented the tradition.

Her pots, at first huge lidded vessels (still her favorite form) and later other shapes, were a polychromatic delight of richly colored surfaces in midnight blues, royal purples, and acid greens quite unlike any other wood-fired pottery. They were lightly speckled with iron, and the shifts in tonality, courtesy of the kiln, gave a subtle painterly depth to the surfaces. The first exhibition of these massive wares at the Hadler Gallery in New York in 1977 was a succes d’estime, the talk of the ceramics world.

Ever since, Karnes has been innovating. She followed her lidded vessels with vases whose wide-open arms jut invitingly from their sides, their bases split in two as though they are standing on chunky legs. She created multimouthed vessels, segmented nesting bottles locked in embrace, and skinny elongated pots that combined to form ceramic forests. She explored large pots—not actually pots but forms that speak about pots—with new intimacy, insight, and freedom.

Then came a potentially fatal detour. On May 9, 1998, Karnes was firing in her kiln shed. She had scrupulously observed safety rules, but on that day, after continuous firings and little rain, the shed had become tinder-dry. Without warning it exploded into flame and within fifteen minutes took down her studio and the house. Insurance only covered the loss of the house, not her workplace and equipment.