The Gardiner Museum is open seven days a week! Explore our permanent collection, discover special exhibitions, and get hands-on with clay in our studios. We look forward to welcoming you.
Discover an installation of works by American artist Sharif Bey on now in our lobby. Bey's practice is influenced by African and Afro-diasporic aesthetic traditions, as well as ancient Andean ceramics and contemporary popular culture.
Summer will be here before you know it! Don't wait to sign up for the Gardiner's popular summer camps. New this year, all our week-long sessions are full-day multimedia camps, so kids can draw, paint, sculpt, and more.
Every object in our permanent collection can be accessed through our eMuseum portal. Learn about individual collecting areas, like Italian Maiolica or Modern and Contemporary Ceramics, or search the full collection by keyword. You'll be amazed by what you discover!
Help us continue to offer innovative and engaging exhibitions, programs, and community projects in person and online, as well as plan for the future. Please consider making a donation today.
What is Slow Art Day?
Slow Art Day is a global event with a simple mission: help more people discover for themselves the joy of looking at and loving art.
Why slow?
When people look slowly at a piece of art they make discoveries. The most important discovery they make is that they can see and experience art without an expert (or expertise). And that’s an exciting discovery. It unlocks passion and creativity and helps to create more art lovers.
Slow Art Day 2021
This year, we created a virtual slow looking exercise that focuses on two ceramic sculptures from The Diana Reitberger Collection by Japanese women artists at the top of their field. We invite you to follow the prompts, which encourage a deeper engagement with the works. Press play, relax, and enjoy!
Fujikasa Satoko (b. 1980) crafts dynamic and fluid sculptures that are hand built using traditional Shigaraki clay and the tehineri technique, in which slender coils of coarse yet pliable clay are blended, requiring months of work to complete a single form. Because of the extraordinary thinness of the walls, especially toward the top, the pinching and pulling of the clay is a race against time and drying. She views her aesthetic as representing the interaction between form and air, a synergy between the solidity of clay and the intangible forces of nature.
Hattori Makiko (b. 1984) creates swirling, densely packed sculptures that are completely covered, both inside and out, with thousands of tiny bundles of ribbon-shaped clay shavings evocative of flower petals. This exceptionally meticulous and time-consuming technique, which involves application with a thin needle, requires a form of rhythmic repetitiveness in which the artist finds personal serenity.
Header: Fujikasa Satoko, Hiten; Seraphim, 2016, Stoneware with white slip glaze, The Diana Reitberger Collection