Society for Contemporary Craft
2100 Smallman St
Pittsburgh, PA 15222

ENTRY DEADLINE: Wednesday, June 14, 2017 (midnight MDT)
If you encounter problems and require technical assistance with submission contact [email protected]

EXHIBITION DATES: March 14–August 18, 2018

ABOUT THE NCECA ANNUAL
The recently refreshed format of the NCECA Annual blends impactful attributes of invitational and open juried models of exhibition development. NCECA’s aspiration for this exhibition is to enable exceptional work to represent clay’s concerns for craft and material expression in concert with meaningful content and conceptual rigor. NCECA remains committed to the belief that relatively under-exposed artists will have opportunities to present their work with that of more established and already recognized emerging creators in the field.

The NCECA Annual is developed through the vision of a single curator/juror who generates an organizing concept for the exhibition and invites five artists whose work will frame curatorial ideas. Additional works and artists for the exhibition will be selected through an open call for submissions. The curator/juror will review these entries and make final selections for the exhibition.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION’S CURATOR, WINNIE OWENS-HART
Winnie Owens Hart is recognized as an educator, artist, filmmaker, author and critical thinker in matters of clay, art and culture. She taught at Howard University for more than 37 years and has conducted research, exhibited, and presented lectures internationally. Her career in ceramics began very early in life and has continued professionally since the 1970s. She opened her first studio in 1972 in Alexandria, Virginia. As a young art student, she imagined what pot-making and art must be like in Africa and then pursued that vision throughout undergraduate school. While teaching crafts in a Philadelphia public school, she discovered a film that demonstrated some African women hand-building a huge pot. She realized her dream of studying women’s traditional pottery techniques and culture in 1977, when she was selected to represent the United States and exhibit her ceramic work at FESTAC in Lagos, Nigeria. After receiving an NEA Fellowship she returned that summer to work in the village. Eventually she took a job with the federal government of Nigeria teaching ceramics at a nearby university to enable her to continue apprenticing traditional pottery, and was eventually accepted as part of the community’s pottery culture. For the past 10 years she has worked with women in a pottery village in Ghana. A published author, Owens-Hart has curated exhibitions primarily focused on contemporary African American artists and has also produced documentary films, including Style & Technique-Four Pottery Villages and The Traditional Potters of Ghana-The Women of Kuli. Over more than four decades, her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally with work in the collections of the Smithsonian and Kohler, universities and private collections.