The Ever-Changing Shape of Color

Ken Price is passionate when it comes to two topics: surfing and ceramics. He was something of a pioneer in both. When he started riding waves in the 1950s, Price was one of a few hundred adventurers, all with custom-made boards. He discovered clay at about the same time, and was quickly drawn to its possibilities as a form of expression equal to paint on canvas or sculpture in stone--a revolutionary idea at the time.

This shift of ceramics from a craft to an art form is the leitmotif of “Color and Fire: Defining Moments in Studio Ceramics, 1950-2000” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Organized by Jo Lauria, assistant curator of decorative arts at LACMA, the exhibition traces the dramatic changes in the uses of clay, as well as how those developments paralleled movements in the larger art world--and Southern California’s major role in the process.

Three works from three decades of Price’s career are included among the approximately 170 dazzlingly diverse pieces by international artists--all from LACMA’s definitive collection. They tell a story of American artists learning first to appreciate the Japanese mingei (folk craft) movement and then going on to find their own vernacular.

“I encountered a lot of craft dogma that I was surprised by,” says Price, 65, speaking by phone from his home in Taos, N.M. “A lot of that comes from this high Japanese craft aesthetic of no decoration and a high moral view of pottery--it’s like an obligation to make functional ware and that form has to follow the function.”

The sculptor began working with clay in 1953. A year later, he and a surfing buddy, Billy Al Bengston, went to watch a demonstration by Peter Voulkos, who had just been appointed chairman of ceramics at the Los Angeles County Art Institute (now Otis College of Art and Design). Voulkos’ works were pushing into the realm of Abstract Expressionism--massive blocks stacked atop one another for no other reason than the pleasure of mass, texture and form. “We realized he was in a class by himself,” Price says.

After graduating from USC in 1956 with a degree in art, Price enrolled at the art institute and spent a year studying and working under Voulkos. He and his fellow apprentices constituted a confident new wave of modern ceramists, many of whose works appear in the LACMA show, including Bengston, John Mason, Michael Frimkess and Henry Takemoto. It was a competitive but energizing environment, inspired by the charismatic dynamo who believed that clay could be the equal of any other artistic medium. Voulkos encouraged his students to find their own voice with the material. As Price recalls, “We wanted to make work that had to do with the time and place we were living in--being Americans and in Los Angeles.” Not, he underlines, work that was locked into the Japan of another era.

Early in his career, Price established himself in the vanguard of ceramic art. His abstract, often biomorphic forms were decidedly nonfunctional, and he preferred to show in art galleries rather than craft shops, starting with the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1960. (A 1961 gallery announcement pictures the artist on his surfboard riding a wave, the words “Kenneth Price” printed between his outstretched hands.) Since then, his works have been shown in venues ranging from the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York to the Menil Collection in Houston as well as a number of West Coast galleries and museums.

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Price has the distinction of being the first clay artist to have had a one-person show at the gallery of legendary New York art dealer Leo Castelli (in 1983)--a high point, but, he says, “I couldn’t afford to keep showing there.” Today he shows at one of Los Angeles’ top galleries, L.A. Louver, alongside artists such as John McCracken and Mark di Suvero. “He has been engaged in an extraordinary exploration that’s unique,” says gallery director Kimberly Davis. “We’ve never looked at him as anything other than a sculptor.”

Price’s works in the LACMA show touch on distinct periods in his career. “Happy’s Curios,” named for his wife, is part of a larger installation in which Price created hundreds of Mexican-style terra cotta cups, bowls and plates and the shelving on which they sit. They were his “homage to Mexican pottery,” he says, which he began shortly after moving to Taos in 1971, and continued creating for about six obsessive years.

The other two pieces, “Duncan’s Primaries” (1980) and “Echo” (1997)--the first hard-edged and geometric, the other curvaceous and biomorphic--reflect his enduring fascination with color. Price has never hesitated to experiment with different colors and ways of applying them to the surface--from traditional glazes to enamel, oil paint and automobile paint, to what he uses now, acrylic. “Color is the aspect I’m really engaged with,” he says. “It’s all dealing with color, surface and form, some organic fusion of these elements.”

“Duncan’s Primaries” consists of cubes stacked at angles, each plane a bright, transparent color, a strong white line highlighting the edges. “It drove me nuts, it was too exacting,” Price says, although at the time he was interested in the results, exploring “color relationship on flat planes.” The series sold particularly well, but he abandoned it after a couple of years, feeling he had reached a dead end.

In the last decade, he moved once again to flowing, amoebic forms, some nearly 2 feet in diameter and often with a cavity shaped into them. “Echo” is one of these, an iridescent-yellow creature with an ear-shaped cavity.

“I’m trying to make them look like they’re made out of color,” Price says of his current work. “Color carries emotional content.”

“It is such a seductive piece,” says curator Lauria, who tracked the work since its unveiling in 1997--and two year later acquired the piece for the museum. “The surface is so luscious, and its texture and form engaged more than one of my senses: It has tactility, visual stimulation, color.”

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Over the last 40 years, Price has lived throughout the country--New York, Massachusetts, Arizona and other places. Today he maintains studios in Santa Monica and Taos, and divides his time between his own work and teaching at USC.

This summer, Price is busily powering up a new series for a January show at L.A. Louver that combines his love for the sea and surf with his passion for ceramic sculpture. Although related to his previous work, the cavity has disappeared, and pieces in this series look like free-standing ocean waves. A preview appears in the gallery--this one about 10 inches high, lime green and speckled with coral red. The work is made with layers of acrylic color, sanded down to the smoothness of rocks long washed along a beach, and the speckles are small pools of colors in themselves, three or four concentric circles of color.

“They’re not strictly representational of ocean waves,” Price says. “I’m trying to incorporate the forms of energy and movement in waves. I’m always looking at waves, and I feel that I have a soul connection to them and to the Pacific shoreline. When the surf’s up in Hawaii, I can spend the whole day just watching the waves with my mouth hanging open!”

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“COLOR AND FIRE: DEFINING MOMENTS IN STUDIO CERAMICS 1950-2000,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Dates: Through Sept. 17. Closed Wednesdays. Admission: Adults, $7; seniors and students, $5; children, $1. Phone: (323) 857-6000.