Plan your visit to CLAY, offering a seasonal menu of fresh local fare in one of the city's most beautiful spaces. Try our newly-launched spring menu today!
See an extraordinary spectrum of contemporary works, including vessels, figurative sculpture, and abstract forms in The Diana Reitberger Collection, on display in our Modern and Contemporary Ceramics Gallery.
Our new kids clay camps now include earlier start times, art-filled field trips, and fresh new themes. Register now for a summer of creative hands-on fun!
The Gardiner Museum is among the few museums in the world focused on ceramics, and is one of the most important specialty museums internationally. It houses approximately 4,000 objects, including European porcelain, ceramics from the Ancient Americas, Chinese porcelain, Japanese porcelain, and contemporary ceramics. Search the collection online!
Everyone can love clay! Become a Friend at one of the world’s great specialty museums and enjoy the benefits, including unlimited admission, invitations to exhibition previews and special events, discounts on lectures and clay classes, and more.
Lobby Display
Today, Japanese clay art is experiencing one of the richest and most diverse periods in its long history. Throughout 2018, three lobby displays, curated by Joan B. Mirviss, an authority on Japanese ceramics and a New York City gallery owner for 40 years, will feature the work of ground-breaking Japanese ceramists who stand on the world stage, boldly asserting their independence, creativity, and technical genius.
For centuries in Japan, women were excluded from the male-dominated landscape of ceramic arts, restricted from taking apprenticeships, making ceramic vessels, or even participating in the firing process. However, with the advent of university programs and professional ceramic schools throughout Japan in the postwar era, women have been able to move past these gender-specific boundaries. Today, Japanese female masters of clay are the equals of their male contemporaries, as luminaries and independent creative talents.
Japan Now: Female Masters showcases the brilliant work of some of the most celebrated contemporary female ceramists of Japan. With their own sensibilities and without ties to specific regional or familial ceramic traditions, these artists have raised their nation’s ceramic arts to an entirely new level.
January 12 – April 22 Form + Function
June 7 – September 2 Surface
September 7 – January 13 Female Masters
Header image: Fujikasa Satoko, Hiten; Seraphim, 2016. Stoneware with white slip glaze. 23 1/4 x 25 1/8 x 17 3/4 in. On loan from the Diana Reitberger Collection