NEW ORLEANS, LA (PNAN) – On view “Katherine Choy: Radical Potter in 1950s New Orleans” through Sunday, April 23, 2023 at the New Orleans Museum of Art is an exhibition highlighting Katherine Po-yu Choy (1927–58), who was born into an affluent merchant family in Hong Kong.
In 1946 she 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, then a 24-year-old rising star of American craft, she became director of ceramics at Newcomb College. 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, which were 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, the ceramic artist increasingly expanded from those clay traditions which became prevalent in the last two years of her life. She created, jagged, painterly vessels and 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 could also be a canvas for emotional expression.
