Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/141341
COLLECTION MFAH COLLECTION MFAH DECORATION Aoki Katsuyo's Sin Forest, 2005 Howard Kottler's Pastoral Wood, circa 1968 BEYOND the T eacup FAH NM COLLECTION MFAH I TIO LEC OL C missed the press preview for "Shifting Paradigms in Contemporary Ceramics: The Garth Clark and Mark Del Vecchio Collection," Barnaby Barford's Conversation Piece, 2002 and when I went to see the show a week later at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, I expected to breeze in and out. Not so. This sweeping survey of 160 objects in the Beck Building's prime first-floor galleries spans five decades and shows off one of the most important collections of postWorld War II ceramics in the world — one now owned by the MFAH. While it's impossible to single out just one top treasure collected by the ceramic-obsessed scholars and gallerists Clark and Del Vecchio, I was enthralled with the politically charged dinner party by Barnaby Barford, in which a video is projected onto a dinner plate mimicking a Blue Willow pattern; Howard Kottler's droll porcelain plate depicting regionalist painter Grant Wood's American Gothic; László Fekete's Trophy of Rebirth with its deconstructed classicism; and the lacy spirals and gravity-defying whorls of Aoki Katsuyo's exquisite, dramatic porcelains. Organized by Cindi Strauss, MFAH curator of modern and contemporary decorative arts and design, this show-stopper and its accompanying catalog (co-published by the MFAH and Yale University Press, $100) appeal to the design-minded as well as anyone interested in broader 20th-century movements. "Shifting Paradigms in Contemporary Ceramics: The Garth Clark and Mark Del Vecchio Collection," through June 3, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; mfah.org. Catherine D. Anspon Aoki Katsuyo's Labyrinth, 2005 COLLECTION MFAH; © BARNABY BARFORD László Fekete's Trophy of Rebirth, 2004