Karen Karnes Exhibition at the Currier Museum in Manchester, NH

A Chosen Path: The Ceramic Art of Karen Karnes
Organized by Arizona State University Art Museum Ceramics Research Center, Tempe, Arizona
August 27, 2011 – December 3, 2011

The Currier Museum of Art will present A Chosen Path: The Ceramic Art of Karen Karnes, celebrating Karnes’ more than 60-year career at the forefront of the studio pottery movement. From her dramatic salt-glazed pottery of the 1960s and ‘70s, to her most recent complex joined sculptural pieces, Karnes (born 1925), of Morgan, Vermont, is one of the medium’s most influential working potters and is a mentor to several generations of studio potters.  Throughout her career, Karnes has created some of the most iconic pottery of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.  She has worked at some of the most significant cultural settings of her generation including North Carolina’s avant-garde Black Mountain College and Gate Hill Cooperative in Stony Point, NY in the 1950s.

“Karen is one of the originators of the art pottery movement in the United States, and I am thrilled that the Currier was chosen as one of only a handful of venues to host the exhibition,” said Kurt Sundstrom, associate curator, Currier Museum of Art. “Visitors to the exhibition will experience artwork that has a mystic beauty which appeals to the eye and the mind.”

A Chosen Path: The Ceramic Art of Karen Karnes is her first retrospective exhibition, and is accompanied by a book-length monograph. The exhibition is organized by the Arizona State University Art Museum Ceramics Research Center, Tempe, Arizona, and curated by ASU Curator of Ceramics Peter Held.

The exhibition is generously funded by an Artist’s Exhibition Series grant from the Windgate Charitable Foundation, with additional funds provided by the Ceres Trust, the Center for Craft, Creativity and Design and the Friends of Contemporary Ceramics.

^{Image credit:Vase, Karen Karnes, 1969, salt-glazed stoneware, 19 inches. Currier Museum of Art, Museum Purchase: The Henry Melville Fuller Acquisition Fund, 2006.23; Vessel, Karen Karnes, 1984, produced in Morgan, VT, glazed stoneware, wood-fired,14 x 13 x 13 in. Collection of Dr. Martin and Joyce Halpert. Photo credit: Anthony Cuñha; Three Forms, Karen Karnes, 2002, produced in Morgan, VT, stoneware, salt-glazed, (L) 20½ x 4½ in.,(M) 30 ½ x 6¼ in. (R) 23½ x 6¼ in.Private Collection, New York Photo credit: Anthony Cuñha}