GREENSBORO, NC.- The Green Hill Center presents Toshiko Takaezu: The Art of Clay, an exhibition of works by internationally acclaimed ceramic artist Toshiko Takaezu. The show will run through August 25th.

An established figure in the world of fine arts, Takaezu’s work is included in the collections of some of the world’s finest museums: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, and the National Museum in Bangkok, Thailand. Along with these honors, she has also been named a Living Treasure of Hawaii, received the Human Treasure Award from the University of North Carolina, and has been awarded several honorary doctorates for her lifetime work.

Green Hill will present an expanded version of an exhibition originally organized by the Japanese American Museum in Los Angeles in 2006. An overview of Takaezu’s career, her small and large-scale clay works and her less well known woven work will be on display. A master of glazing, also on display will be examples from her Makaha Blue series of stunning deep-cobalt closed forms which feature colors that rival the intensity of an Yves Klein painting. This will be the exhibition’s only east coast venue.

The exhibition pays homage to Takaezu’s accomplishments as a master ceramist who redefined her craft by closing her bottles, making ceramic forms with no functional use. It also honors the many years during the 60s and 70s that she spent at the Penland School of Crafts and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, inspiring a generation of North Carolina artists.

Born in 1922 in Hawaii to Japanese immigrants from Okinawa, Takaezu studied at the University of Hawaii before attending the prestigious Cranbrook Academy of Art in the early 1950s. In the following decade, she became known for her “closed forms” which she achieved by the simple yet radical act of “closing the mouth of the vessel.” Takaezu, along with Peter Voulkos and other ceramic artists of the 1950s and 1960s, was instrumental in exploring clay as a medium for art beyond its conventional utilitarian purpose.

Takaezu’s closed vessels exhibit a fascinating contrast between their rounded, cylindrical shapes and the intense color and kinetic brush strokes of her glazes. Her “pots,” as she calls them, become three-dimensional canvases on which color erupts, blends, and disappears, only to reappear in a different form on the other side of the vessel.

Takaezu once commented that “in my life I see no difference between making pots, cooking, and growing vegetables.” And while many of Takaezu’s forms may seem to reflect natural elemental forms, her motivation has little to do with representation. In fact for Takaezu it is “what I don’t know [that] pushes me to work.”