Inaugural Exhibition Explores the Legacy of Toshiko Takaezu

Toshiko Takaezu (1922–2011) was a singular force in twentieth-century American art; an innovator who pushed the physical and conceptual boundaries of ceramic art; and a longtime instructor in Princeton’s Program in Visual Arts, where she taught from 1967 to 1992. The artist is the subject of the new Museum’s inaugural Welcome Gallery exhibition, Toshiko Takaezu: Dialogues in Clay, which features Takaezu’s ceramics set in dialogue with artworks by nine of her contemporaries. Takaezu was born in Pepe‘ekeo, Hawai‘i, to an émigré family from the Japanese island of Okinawa. She studied ceramics at the Cranbook Academy of Art in Michigan, where the influential Finnish American ceramist Maija Grotell instilled in Takaezu a commitment to research-based experimentation with materials and a desire to develop a signature style. At Princeton, the artist passed these tenets on to her own students, whose first exposure to their professor’s rigor was the mandatory clipper hanging on a string by her classroom door, as long nails are not conducive to handling clay. Takaezu often brought students to her home and studio in Quakertown, New Jersey, for field trips, serving them food she had grown on plates she had made; a select few students had the opportunity to work as apprentices at the studio, which can still be visited today.

Takaezu developed a holistic artistic practice. In addition to making ceramics, she painted on canvas, wove textiles, and gardened, all of which she understood as expressions of the same cultural-philosophical project, stating, “In my life I see no difference between making pots, cooking, and growing vegetables. They are all so related.” But if this vision of the studio-home as an encompassing aesthetic environment suggests a self-contained world, Takaezu—and the artworks that emerged from it—was deeply engaged with the broader aesthetic and conceptual currents of her time.

Takaezu shaped her greatest artistic achievements in clay. In the late 1950s, she developed the “closed form,” a teabowl whose sides have been raised and closed into a near-sphere or cylinder, thereby removing its potential function for carrying and pouring liquid. At one point, the artist  recollected: “After many years, a natural form arrived, one . . . I enjoy and also one on which I could paint. I didn’t want a flat surface to work on, but a three-dimensional one.” With this form, which she considered a surface for glazes, Takaezu demonstrated the porosity of the medium of  ceramics, its close relationship to painting and sculpture. Her dynamic vessels cut across the institutional boundaries that separated these media—and, by extension, craft and art—in a sustained challenge to a post–World War II art world defined by the pursuit of medium specificity.

Dialogues in Clay presents an alternative perspective on this art historical moment by centering Takaezu within a network of artistic mentors, collaborators, and contemporaries. Some of these artists played formative roles in Takaezu’s life, including her teacher Maija Grotell. Other individuals featured include Kitaōji Rosanjin, a maverick ceramist and restaurateur whom Takaezu met on an important trip to Japan in the 1950s; Tetsurō Sawada, whose paintings Takaezu helped exhibit at the Hunterdon Art Center in New Jersey in 1971; and Lenore Tawney, a groundbreaking fiber artist who shared Takaezu’s Quakertown home in the years around 1980. Bringing together the work of all these creators visualizes the diverse field of artistic exchange  that shaped Takaezu’s practice. 

Through carefully staged combinations of artworks, the exhibition also proposes dialogues between Takaezu’s oeuvre and that of certain peers whom she did not know personally. On the walls behind Takaezu’s ceramics will hang a painting by Helen Frankenthaler and works on paper by Robert Motherwell, both of whom pursued similar questions as Takaezu related to process and materials. By encouraging the free flow of paint, those painters thematized the agency of their materials in a way that mirrors Takaezu’s embrace of the fluidity of glaze and the serendipities that can result from the inherent uncertainty of firing clay in a kiln. 

Dialogues in Clay also highlights Takaezu’s institutional legacy at Princeton. Her memory lives on through not only the artworks she donated but also her transference of wisdom and skill. The impact of her pedagogy will be presented in the exhibition through the voices of some of her former students—now practicing artists themselves—who have contributed interpretive labels that attest to the long-term influence of her teaching on both their artistic practices and their identities as makers.

Beyond the gallery’s walls, the bronze bell titled Remembrance, which Takaezu installed as the centerpiece of a garden dedicated to the memory of the Princeton alumni who died in the attacks on September 11, 2001, stands between Nassau Hall and Chancellor Green. Such connections between the campus and the Museum also can be made through the Welcome Gallery’s generous ground-floor windows, which provide passersby with a visual point of entry into the Museum. When seen in the windows’ natural light, Takaezu’s ceramics offer a visual experience of spatial presence and tactile delight that can reawaken one’s senses, asking us to look anew. 

Toshiko Takaezu: Dialogues in Clay is on view through July 5, 2026.

The exhibition is made possible by the Judith and Anthony B. Evnin, Class of 1962, Exhibition Fund; the Kathleen C. Sherrerd Program Fund for American Art; the Melanie and John Clarke Exhibition Fund; and contributors to the Director’s Exhibition Fund.