Continuing through March 26, 2016
At 84 Paul J. Smith is venerated in American art circles for his decades-long work as a risk-taking curator, notably at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts (now the Museum of Art and Design) in New York. Over the years, as an avocation, Smith took black-and-white portraits of artists enjoying rising careers in clay, fiber, wood, metal and glass — including Peter Voulkos, Jun Kaneko, Robert Arneson and Stephen De Staebler. He amassed hundreds of photographs, enough to create the coffee-table book "Masters of Craft," recently published by Schiffer. The current exhibit, subtitled “A Photographic Journal of the Ceramics Community,” culls 20 of Smith’s portraits dating as far back as the 1970s and pairs them with key works from each artist's career — an entirely doable task given the ASU Ceramics Research Center’s comprehensive collection.
Included in the show are whimsical vessels, narrative plaques, large figurative pieces and gleaming Native American pottery — all exemplary works. But the focus belongs also to the photography, where Smith has often caught the artists in unguarded moments. Beatrice Wood flashes a smile but not toward the camera; James Tanner has an at-ease expression; Rick Dillingham is on an old rotary phone in his studio; and Maria Martinez stands under a magnificent New Mexico sky at the San Ildefonso Pueblo. It is documentation such as this that underscores the colorful personalities represented in the best of Studio Craft.
