Cornucopia 04-Y’IV (2004), by Etsuko Tashima
By Greg Stepanich
The Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens is one of Palm Beach County’s most interesting cultural outposts, and it’s playing host through October to an exhibit that tells us something exceptional about that country’s skill in artistic creation.
More importantly, it tells us something about who is doing the creating.
“Japanese contemporary ceramics are the best and most advanced in the world, at least in my opinion,” said Veljko Dujin, the Morikami’s curator of collections. “The state of ceramics in Japan is really spectacular. You have thousands of really good potters, and among them are hundreds of women who are doing as good a job as the men, if not better.”
Through Oct. 2, the Morikami is hosting Soaring Voices: Recent Ceramics by Women From Japan, a traveling show of 87 works by 25 women, running the gamut from practical to pure flights of imagination.
“It’s all over the map. The exhibit is divided into five sections, and in the first one, you actually see functional objects that you could possibly use,” Dujin said. “And then there are sheer sculptures.”
Dujin said many of the artists featured in the exhibit are well-known at home, and production by female ceramicists is highly sought-after by collectors. Much of this upsurge in work by women artists came starting in the 1950s, after Japan’s economy had finally begun to recover from the devastation of World War II.
Help from the Japanese government, which was interested in preserving the nation’s living cultural heritage, was crucial, he said. So was foreign interest, which had revived as well in the years after the war’s end. And although women had been part of family pottery-making concerns for generations, it wasn’t until the 1950s that women began to step out on their own as artists in clay.
Bible of the White Sand (1989), by Takako Araki
“Several of these artists use very innovative techniques,” Dujin said, which only adds to the breadth of what he called a “first-class exhibit.” Soaring Voices has been on an American tour since August 2009, and travels next to the Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
Soaring Voices is showing at the Morikami along with Catching Air: Kites of Japan, a collection of varied kites from the Morikami’s permanent collection (also through Oct. 2), as well as an exhibit of rabbit-related artwork for 2011, the Year of the Rabbit in the Japanese calendar, which uses the Chinese zodiac.
The museum in Delray Beach is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is $12 for adults, $11 for seniors and $7 for students. Call 495-0233 or visit www.morikami.org.
The Caldwell Theatre has been exploring the first half of the 20th century this summer, with the world premiere in July of Michael McKeever’s play Stuff, the true story of the Collyer brothers, privileged New Yorkers who became recluses in the 1920s and died in 1947 in their Harlem mansion, which was filled with more than 100 tons of junk the two men had hoarded over the decades.
This month, the Boca Raton playhouse moves to the next 25 years with a production of Six Years, a play by Sharr White whose five scenes take a look at American history through the device of a marriage, seen first in 1949, and continuing in six-year intervals through 1973. Six Years premiered in March 2006 at the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Ky.
Six Years opens with the return of Phil Granger, a World War II veteran, to his Missouri hometown, six years after he left for the war. His wife Meredith and family have not heard from him since 1944, but she has waited for him, and they try to pick up where they left off. The following scenes explore the rise of suburbia, the Kennedy years, the turmoil of the late 1960s, and the return of POWs from the Vietnam War.
Cast in the show are Margery Lowe as Meredith and Todd Allen Durkin as Phil. Durkin, a Carbonnell Award winner in 2010 for GableStage’s Blasted, is making his debut at the Caldwell. Also in the show, directed by Clive Cholerton, are familiar South Florida acting faces Gregg Weiner, Natasha Sherritt and David Perez-Ribada.
Six Years opens Aug. 10 and runs through Sept. 4 at the Caldwell at 7901 N. Federal Highway in Boca Raton. Shows are 8 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, with 2 p.m. matinees Wednesday and Sunday. Tickets range from $38-$50, or just $10 for students with ID. Call 241-7432 or visit www.caldwelltheatre.com.
Also this month: Keith Paulson-Thorp’s music series at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Delray Beach wraps its 2010-11 season on Aug. 21, with a concert by Camerata del Re, the church’s resident Baroque music ensemble. It’s an all-German program featuring 17th- and 18th-century music by J.C.F. Fischer, Ernst Eichner, Heinrich Schütz, Samuel Scheidt, Karl Toeschi, Johann Adolf Hasse, Friedrich Wilhelm Rust and Johann Rosenmüller. Tickets for the 4 p.m. concert are $18 and $15. Call 278-6003 or visit www.stpaulsdelray.org.
Greg Stepanich is the editor/founder of the Palm Beach ArtsPaper, available online www.palmbeach artspaper.com.
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