- Artist or Maker
- Toshiko Takaezu
United States, Hawaii, Pepeekeo, active Quakertown, New Jersey, 1922-2011 - Title
- Homage to Ko'olau Range
- Date Made
- 1994-1995
- Medium
- Stoneware, glaze
- Dimensions
- Height: 57 in. (144.78 cm); Diameter: 28 in. (71.12 cm)
- Accession Number
- AC1999.213.1
- Collecting Area
- Decorative Arts and Design
- Curatorial Notes
Toshiko Takaezu’s Homage to Ko‘olau Range stands like a sentinel, relating in a direct, bodily way to the viewer. The title references a dormant volcano on the Hawaiian island of O‘ahu. While Takaezu spent nearly her entire professional career in the contiguous United States, she was born in Hawai‘i to Japanese immigrant parents, and the island landscape remained an influential source of inspiration. After studying at the Cranbrook Academy of Art near Detroit, she spent a formative year in Japan learning ceramic techniques. This vessel was built by first throwing the base on a spinning potter’s wheel, then adding successive coils of clay to increase the form’s height, a technique she may have learned in Japan. Its gestural surface, with expressive drips resonant of Abstract Expressionist painting, is the result of a glazing method that she had been experimenting with since the late 1950s. Largely abstract and seemingly spontaneous, her surfaces often evoke imaginary landscapes, either terrestrial or lunar, and she thought of her ceramic vessels as canvases. By the 1990s, Takaezu had both the years of experience manipulating clay and access to a large kiln that were required to make monumental, body-scale pieces like this one.
Bobbye Tigerman
2024
- Selected Bibliography
Adamson, Glenn, Dakin Hart, and Kate Wiener, editors. Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within. New York: The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, 2024.
