Closed Form

As a highly skilled and sought-after instructor, Toshiko Takaezu taught in such prestigious ceramics programs as those at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the Cleveland Institute of Art, and Princeton University. By the early 1980s, the artist had access to sizeable kilns at Skidmore College in Saratoga, New York, where she taught summer workshops. As a result of these expanded facilities and access to personnel, she experimented with large structures that could reach well over six feet in height. These works became a canvas for Takaezu’s gestural brushstrokes; her deliberate and spare application of glaze here achieves the same emotional potential as Abstract Expressionist painting.