NEW ORLEANS, LA.- Katherine Po-yu Choy (1927–58), whose exhibition is on view until this Sunday at the
New Orleans Museum of Art, was born into an affluent merchant family in Hong Kong. In 1946 Katherine Choy left her childhood home in Shanghai to study in the United States, earning degrees from Mills College in Oakland, California, where she was introduced to ceramics at the school known to foster an experimental environment in clay.
In 1952 Katherine Choy, by then a 24-year-old rising star of American craft, became director of ceramics at Newcomb College. Katherine Choy is remembered among national craft audiences for her 1957 founding of the Clay Art Center in Port Chester, New York, which still operates in her honor fostering a community around the practice of ceramic arts.
Choy’s early pots show inspiration from Asian clay traditions, as was popular among American potters in the 1950s. She mastered classic forms, applied calligraphy-like brushwork, and developed lush glazes sometimes with the help of her family, who sent ingredients from China. However, Katherine Choy increasingly expanded from those clay traditions. The jagged, painterly vessels that Choy made the last two years of her life were as artistically advanced as any made elsewhere in the 1950s United States. A considered departure from the refinement of her training, her pots sprouted additional necks, could be aggressively large or asymmetrical, and had glazes that intentionally left parts of the raw clay exposed for all to see. Her Modern pottery conveyed—in a new idea from the world of painting—that ceramics, too, could be a canvas for emotional expression.
The accompanying exhibition catalogue looks comprehensively at Katherine Choy’s biography, her network of teachers, students, and colleagues, her award-winning ceramics, and her merging of artistic expression with handcraft in the mid-1950s. The catalogue leans heavily on period sources to substantiate the first monograph of the short but fervent life of a promising cross-disciplinarian artist gone too soon, but having already asserted her singular voice in changing what expressive ceramics would contribute to the art world.
Katherine Choy: Radical Potter in 1950s New Orleans was curated by RosaMary Curator of Decorative Arts Mel Buchanan with Winston Ho and is supported by the Elise M. Besthoff Charitable Foundation, George Dunbar, and Charles L. Whited, Jr. Special thanks to the artist’s family, Reena Kashyap and the Clay Art Center, and the Newcomb Art Museum.
The exhibition and catalogue Katherine Choy: Radical Potter in 1950s New Orleans mine archives and gather oral histories to tell the story of an artist that was widely celebrated by the American craft world, but who has been nearly forgotten. NOMA’s exhibition is the first presentation of Choy’s ceramics in New Orleans since the artist’s Louisiana friends mounted the Katherine Choy Memorial Show at the Orleans Gallery in fall 1959.
“A star of midcentury experimental ceramics, Katherine Choy indelibly left her unique mark on New Orleans, while continuing the great tradition of pottery at Newcomb College,” said Susan Taylor, Montine McDaniel Freeman Director. “NOMA’s exhibition celebrates the artist’s assuredness in a radical vision for what artists working in clay can contribute to the world.”
NOMA’s exhibition Katherine Choy: Radical Potter in 1950s New Orleans brings together 25 pots from the permanent collection of NOMA, local loans from the Newcomb Art Museum and the artist George Dunbar, and from the Clay Art Center, which is still in operation.
“Katherine Choy’s powerful ceramic works demonstrate remarkable achievements during a short career, and this celebratory exhibition aims to place her as a major contributor to the advancement of modern pottery,” said Mel Buchanan, RosaMary Curator for Decorative Arts and Design. “Presented at NOMA is a significant body of work by an accomplished artist who created objects that were revolutionary in the 1950s, and that still look fresh today.”
