Alfred Ceramic Art Museum
The Alfred Ceramic Art Museum at Alfred University houses nearly 8,000 ceramic objects ranging from small pottery shards recovered from ancient civilizations to modern and contemporary ceramic art. The primary mission of Alfred Ceramic Art Museum is to collect, preserve, conserve, research, interpret and exhibit ceramic art for aesthetic and educational purposes. The museum is a research and teaching facility, which offers an engagement in cultural history via ceramic art to the student, artist, scholar and collector as well as the local, national and international community. Tours of our collection are made by appointment only. The main gallery space on the 2nd floor is open to the public while exhibitions are on view during the Museum's open hours.
Virtual Tour
To see a little more of the museum and work by some of the people that have helped build Alfred's legacy of excellence in ceramics, please explore the virtual tour of our 2025 exhibition History: A Legacy in Motion. Navigate by clicking on the arrows, and clicking on the red and green icons will open close ups of the images and texts about the artists. Experience the Virtual Tour.
Museum Closure
The Museum will be closed July 20 – September 10, 2026 as we install our new exhibitions. Please join us on Thursday, September 10th from 5 to 7pm for the opening reception for our two new solo exhibitions described below.
Upcoming Exhibitions
Paula Murray
Resilience
September 10th to December 20th
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 10th, 5-7pm
Murray’s work is unapologetically beautiful and unafraid to take on some of the most difficult and universal issues of human experience: Breaking and healing, transformation, the search for truth of different kinds, and finding pathways towards reconciliation.
Spanning three decades of Paula Murray's artistic practice, the exhibition explores transformation through fracture, revealing resilience, empathy, and the enduring truth that our shared humanity is greater than our differences. At a time of increasing polarization and uncertainty, Resilience offers visitors a space for reflection and connection.
Paolo Porelli
Figure Out: Catastrophe or Regeneration
September 10th to December 20th
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 10th, 5-7pm
Italian sculptor Paolo Porelli’s current installation at Alfred is a wildly imaginative human menagerie of often bizarre, mythological figures. Playing with the Manichean idea that the universe is composed of both constructive and destructive forces, the figures suggest points on the scale between these poles, and thereby hint at the complex and precarious environmental predicament we find ourselves in today.
Viewed through a different lens, his slip-cast creations can be read art-historically as post-modern mutations or re-imaginings of the Italian sculptures of antiquity that still adorn much of his hometown of Rome.At another level still, they also can be seen as referencing pop-cultural playthings, the dolls and soldiers and science fiction heroes that so often exemplify a worldview of good versus evil. Yet here the heroes and villains are not nearly so clear cut.
However one approaches the work, it is the suggestion of a playful imagination triumphing over mundane stereotypes and received wisdom that is the animating force behind these utterly original figures.
Upcoming Events
Book Launch
September 18th at 4:30 pm
The Alfred Ceramic Art Museum is delighted to host a book launch of multiple new releases:- Art historian Ezra Shales will be on site talking about his new book Pitchers of American Life: Art Within Reach published by Bloomsbury.
- Alfred University's own Meghen Jones will talk about Path of the Teabowl, a monumental book she edited in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name here at ACAM.
- The museum will also be launching its own most recent catalog: History: A Legacy in Motion. Alfred Ceramic Art 1900-2025, showcasing the artist-teachers that helped to establish and continue to maintain Alfred's reputation.
We will also be having a sale on all museum catalogs! Come out to celebrate our fantastic publications.
The Museum is located on the northeast corner of Main and Pine Streets on the Alfred University campus. View more information on exhibitions or visiting the Museum. Museum membership information is available online, or by contacting Alfred Ceramic Art Museum, Membership Office, Alfred University, Alfred, New York 14802. For more information phone 607-871-2421 or email [email protected].