“The Eternal Quality of Aesthetic Joy”: Laura Andreson and Her Legacy

This exhibition will bring to light the seminal impact that Laura Andreson had on the Southern California clay movement, contemporary sculpture, and design, both as an educator at UCLA and overall innovator in ceramic forms and surfaces. The exhibition will foster appreciation for the legacy left by a female artist and educator who was working at a time when both art and education were very patriarchal. 

Approximately forty pivotal examples of Andreson’s work will be exhibited alongside the work of some noteworthy students including JB Blunk, David Cressey, and Bernard Kester, as well as the work of several of Andreson’s own mentors and peers such as Gertrud and Otto Natzler, Glen Lukens, and Carlton Ball. Andreson’s work shaped Southern California art, design, and life, with resonance on a national scale.

Determined and ahead of her time, Andreson formed the ceramics department at UCLA in 1934 and it was one of the first in the country. Through 1970, she fostered and helmed the program as it flourished. It was integral to the legitimization and rebirth of ceramics. Exacting and formidable, her mission was to explore the nature of clay and to guide her students to take the medium into new realms. Today, clay is well entrenched in the contemporary art world and although it is the most ancient of art materials, it was not well respected as an artistic medium at the time. Through her harmoniously proportioned forms, technical mastery, and methodical scientific study of glaze and clay bodies, she helped form the modern language of ceramic art.

Andreson taught thousands of students over the course of her respected career who have credited her with opening doorways for their own artistic explorations. Yet, the expansive body of her work has never been presented in a museum retrospective in Los Angeles, where she lived and worked. In fact, the last dedicated exhibition of her work was held at the Mingei Museum in San Diego in 1982 where her fifty-year career was celebrated. This exhibition will spotlight her vision four decades later and it will convey how the work remains fresh and relevant today. Many Californian artists will also be represented through this exhibition as their work embodies and builds on her teachings. These artists, in turn, have passed on Andreson’s artistic views and approaches to subsequent generations of artists.

This project is supported by a grant from the Pasadena Art Alliance.
www.pasadenaartalliance.org