BATON ROUGE.- The Louisiana Art and Science Museum presents the exhibit Shades of Clay: A Multicultural Look at Contemporary Clay. The show reveals and celebrates the extent to which the medium of clay has expanded from its traditional employment as a craft to become not only a medium for fine art but a particularly fitting medium for showcasing contemporary multicultural and multiethnic fine art. The 20 artists in this exhibition are African American, Afro-Cuban, Thai, Chinese, Moorish, Chicano, Latino, Native American, and Cuban.

Whereas some of the artworks in clay directly reflect the cultures that inspired them, other pieces are personal explorations of ideas, of philosophies, and of clay itself.

Although a number of artists such as Picasso and Miro made artworks from clay, it was not until the 1950s that clay gained public recognition as a fine-art medium. Peter Voulkos, Billy Al Bengston, and others had led a campaign to elevate clay to that level, and they dedicated themselves to solving the technical problems of creating clay forms in unprecedented sizes and shapes. Voulkos’s ceramic sculptures paved the way for today’s clay artists.