Design Revolution in the Making

Use BEAUTY and relationship to the audience or context to showcase art in society.  Making beautiful design user friendly, fitting for the audience targeted, and functional/multiple use are key characteristics, I believe, of great designed art work.  Indeed, the highly skilled execution of the designed product is vital  to producing art that stands the test of time.  This is not a new proposition, but a tried and true ancient structure of working as seen in the timeless functional cultural items from around the world.  Innovative water filter production from clay, nesting measuring cups/bowls, and a child's ceramic piece puzzle game are great examples of use of the material matching need.  The assignment for today's ceramic designers need not come from a patron or commission, but from a grassroots understanding of possible need.  Then, the artist finds a business niche and can work to live and live to work.

Ayumi Horie Seeking Social Change with Pottery

I would not go so far as to say an artist is seeking social change as though they were a Marxist, but as a business model, selling to the public the idea of buying your art product as a positive experience with lifelong benefit, is
a capital idea, no? Forming a Pottery Liberation Front is a fun and exciting way to garner media attention for your cause.  Postcard shock art with pottery if various compromising positions, should likely draw attention to your product in this entertainment driven visual society. Great ideas! Great need to bring homemade functional ware to the attention of buyers.

Art Stream's Alleghany Meadows Nomadic Gallery

Excellent idea economically and formidably to get the artwork to the public.  Take advantage of the free society and market yourself to the buyers, I say!  I would like to see not only an expansion of the seasonal airstream burrito stand located in Red Hook NY set up in other locals along the highway - much like the umbrella hot dog stands, but a semi-truck with a roll-up side wall that houses a roving art studio/workshop/education site/sales counter.  Bringing art to the too busy full-time working middle and lower classes creates for me, an authentic experience with the power of art to transform lives.

Responsive Art - Concepts for Culture and Sustainability

Writer Victor Margolin lists three criteria for sustainable ecological art in his article Cultural Sustainability (pp.22-23) Art must engage the land or landscape, respond to social issues, and or incorporate recyclables.  Taking art from the mindset of museumology to anthropology via social action is in the power of the popular artist today.  (p.26)  Margolin sites artist Joseph Beuy's work as "collapsing the boundaries between art and life"(p.27) with his installation of thousands of oak trees planted outdoors.  Margolin feels there is the problem of ecological aesthetics to be solved for the art critic if an artist per say created ecological works as opposed to accepting a landscape designers' outdoor work.
I believe that Hidegard Kurt's point of ecological works meeting the needs of creating harmony with natural resources, revealing a social collaboration with the culture of the present to protect and provide for resources for the future's poor epitomizes creation of natural art forms from nature for beauty's sake and thus the artist of today should be involved in this new aesthetic.

Czech artist and designer Maxim Velovsky, an overview

Ceramic artist Maxim Velovsky is wonderful in producing authentic historically inspired conceptually modern Czech ceramics.  "High gloss breakables" in prestigious porcelain bespeaks of a love of cultural heritage in turning mundane commodities from communist society into a beauteous statement of freedom. For example, creating water holding rubber work boots re-purposing the en mass produced boot used for keeping water out for the proletariat.  His concepts perfectly reveal transitions from communism to freedom in his generation.  His work is wonderful!

Allegany Meadows and A Case for Handmade, articles on ceramics

I appreciated Home Cooking by Shannon Garson for suggesting that the homemade item for practical kitchen use serves us much more symbolically than functionally.  Taking an object from the "mundane into the transcendental" experience as from a coffee mug exemplifying commercial banality and artifice to  homemade crockery or porcelain ware with earthen textures and/or smooth luminosity of glaze and surface is necessary for human attachment to human made.  Machine made items give us functionality and as perfection being a non-human attribute, serves us up a cold detachment in our goals of daily nourishment.  Indeed, to connect to the humane, and enrich our experience daily we must consider using homemade vessels and plates for the unique beauty of a such a functional art piece gives the "spice of life that puts all things in balance." (p.5)

Tara Polansky Ceramics - Design Focus

Artist Tara Polansky testifies to her work about 911 as being colored in red, white and blue to signify how exploited -in the name of patriotism, the suffering people of the tragedy were.  Her cracked and dry volumes attest to this effect texturally and her illustration on the vessel is telling.  Similarly a match of form and illustration, is the use of the smooth delicate tea cup form with old style photo impressions on them of couples at a dinner party or a figure in an historical 1940's style.