Getting to Know You: Conceptual Ceramics, Studio Pottery, and the Gardiner

Part of the Gardiner Signature Lecture Series

Advanced ticket sales are now closed. Tickets will be available at the door beginning at 6 pm.
$18 General / $15 Gardiner Friends

This lecture introduces the Gardiner and wider Toronto communities to new Chief Curator Sequoia Miller. Miller will discuss his recent doctoral research into conceptual ceramics of the 1960s and 1970s, in which artists like Jim Melchert and Lowell Darling pushed clay to its outer-most reaches, at times not even using the material to make ceramics. Miller will also discuss his long-time practice as a studio potter, and how it impacts his work as a curator and historian. Finally, he will consider the possibilities for the Gardiner Museum to take on an increasingly activist role in illuminating ceramics as an aspect of contemporary life.

About the Speaker

Sequoia Miller, Chief Curator at the Gardiner Museum

Sequoia Miller is the newly arrived Chief Curator at the Gardiner Museum. He completed a PhD in Art History at Yale University, where his research centered on connections between ceramics and conceptual art practices in the United States in the 1960s and ’70s. Sequoia recently curated The Ceramic Presence in Modern Art at the Yale University Art Gallery and authored the award-winning catalog. He holds an MA from Yale in Art History, as well as an MA in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture from the Bard Graduate Center in New York. Prior to returning to school, Sequoia was a widely recognized studio potter based in the Pacific Northwest of the US.

Image: Jim Melchert, Ghost Box, 1966