Ken Price began his career in the late 1950s when he was included in the original stable of artists at Los Angeles’s fabled Ferus Gallery. Among the artists who chose clay as their principle medium, Price emerged as heir apparent to Peter Voulkos, one of Price’s early teachers at the Otis Art Institute and a forerunner of the movement to reposition clay as a sculptural medium rather than within the traditionally assigned roles for ceramics of functional objects and decorative arts. At Ferus he achieved immediate success with diminutive yet precisely finished sculptures, which Price designated as "hand-scaled." Although small in stature, these works often engage monumentality in an entirely novel manner. In such works, it is distilled and implied, rather than overtly deployed. Sculptures such as Astronauts in the Ocean reduce and distill titanic subjects — the universe and the awe-inspiring transport of humans into outer space, in this case — to minuscule dimensions, so that they operate in a similar vein as the small boxed works of Joseph Cornell, whose maxim "tiny is the last refuge of the enormous," Price often acknowledged.