Over the last 25 years, Linda Leonard Schlenger has amassed one of the
most important collections of contemporary ceramics in the country. This
exhibition features over 80 objects from the Schlenger collection by
leading 20th-century ceramicists—including John Mason, Jim Melchert,
Kenneth Price, Lucie Rie, and Peter Voulkos—alongside works in other
media from the Yale University Art Gallery’s permanent collection by
artists such as Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, Isamu Noguchi, Mark
Rothko, and Edward Ruscha. Although critically lauded within the
studio-craft movement, works by these ceramicists are only now coming to
be recognized as integral to the wider field of contemporary art. By
interspersing these exceptional examples of the medium with other
objects from this period, including painting, sculpture, and works on
paper, this exhibition aims to reexamine the position of postwar ceramic
sculpture within the context of contemporary art, highlighting the
formal, historical, and theoretical affinities among the works on view.