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| Eleventh Annual Dorothy Wilson Perkins Ceramic History Lecturer Tanya Harrod Thursday, November 5, 2009
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Tanya Harrod will present the Eleventh Annual Dorothy Wilson Perkins Ceramic History Lecture sponsored by the Schein-Joseph International Museum of Ceramic Art at Alfred University. Her lecture is titled Out of the studio, or, do we make better work in unusual conditions? She will talk about how Michael Cardew’s (1901-1983) vision of ceramics was shaped when he lived in a village on the banks of the Volta in Ghana during 1945-8 and built a kiln, created clay bodies and glaze materials, kiln furniture and, finally, some pots using only local materials. He suffered ill health and malnutrition and extreme mood swings. This paper looks at this episode and goes on to discuss other examples of design in extreme situations. |
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Tanya Harrod trained as an art historian at the Universities of York and Oxford. She is the author of the prize-winning The Crafts in Britain in the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press 1999). She has organised many exhibitions and contributes regularly to The Burlington Magazine, The Spectator, Crafts and The Times Literary Supplement. She is currently completing a biography of the potter Michael Cardew for Yale University Press and is researching a broadly-based study of the meaning of the handmade for Reaktion Books. Her latest book is Ann Stokes: Artists’ Potter, a study of an unusual, largely self-taught ceramicist with a devoted following in the British fine art world (Lund Humphries 2009). Her current interests include the vernacular in relation to modernism, art education in sub-Saharan Africa in the colonial period, and the effect of the New Media on the applied arts. She is on the Advisory Panel of the Journal of Design History, of The Burlington Magazine and of Interpreting Ceramics and is Advisor to the Craft Lives Project based at the National Sound Archive of the British Library. She is a member of the International Association of Art Critics and of the London-based Critic’s Circle. In 1999 she was given Ceramics Arts Foundation Award for distinguished service to the Ceramic Arts. She is a Visiting Professor at the Royal College of Art, London and research fellow at Bath Spa University, Bath. Along with Glenn Adamson and Edward S. Cooke she is the editor of The Journal of Modern Craft. |
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 Dorothy
Wilson Perkins
Born on September 20, 1917 in Hammond, Indiana, Dorothy's family eventually settled in Wellsville, New York where she graduated from high school with honors in 1935. The following year she enrolled in Alfred University taking courses at the New York State College of Ceramics, where she completed her B.F.A. degree (again with honors) in 1939. Offered a scholarship at the Ohio State University, Dorothy took graduate courses with Arthur E. Baggs, who had been a former student of Charles Fergus Binns at Alfred. She received her M.A. degree from O.S.U. in 1940. Returning to Wellsville, Dorothy married her Alfred classmate Lyle Perkins in the University's campus chapel. They moved to Hershey, Pennsylvania where her husband was teaching. After a period of Navy duty for Lyle and teaching for Dorothy, Lyle completed his M.F.A. at Alfred in 1947. They next moved to Providence, Rhode Island. During the 15 years that Dorothy taught at the Rhode Island School of Design she made the majority of her creative pottery. At this same time she also wrote numerous articles for Ceramic Age and Ceramics Monthly; produced pottery for exhibition here and abroad; taught two consecutive summers for Charles Harder at Alfred; and traveled extensively. In 1951 both Lyle and Dorothy started programs at O.S.U. leading to doctorates in 1956. When Lyle and Dorothy began their lengthy commitment to the programs at the University of Massachusetts in 1962, Dorothy was barred from taking a faculty position due to nepotism rules in place at the time. Nonetheless her many accomplishments in life included exerting a strong influence in the ceramic world which lasts to this day. Her ceramic work can be found in numerous collections, including those at O. S. U. and the Schein-Joseph International Museum of Ceramic Art at Alfred. Dorothy was the first slide librarian at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (1971) and upon her retirement in 1981, that facility was named in her honor. Dorothy Wilson Perkins died of lung cancer on August 17, 1996. Her memory will live on through those who knew her, her splendid ceramic pieces, and through this new Dorothy Wilson Perkins Ceramic History Lecture which will be held each fall. Lyle Perkins died June 20, 2005. |
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