Plate+No.+179

Date: n.d.
 * [[image:https://s3.amazonaws.com/saam.media/files/styles/x_large/s3/images/1997/1997.109.25_1a.jpg?itok=E6l0aV7h width="325" height="260" link="@https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/plate-179-36790"]] || Title: **Plate #179**

Artist: **Robert Sperry** Born: Bushnell, Illinois 1927 Died: Seattle, Washington 1998

Medium: wheel-thrown and glazed stoneware with gold luster Dimensions: 2 5/8 x 15 7/8 in. (6.7 x 40.3 cm) diam. Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of Donna and John Donaldson in memory of Jean and John Michael on the occasion of the Fifteenth Anniversary of the James Renwick Alliance and the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the Renwick Gallery

Accession: 1997.109.25 || The late Robert Sperry, long-time head of the University of Washington School Of Art's ceramics department, and mentor to a generation of potters, underscored the link with Asia by studying with traditional potters in Japan. His ultimate aim was to use their time-honored techniques as a springboard for new directions in stoneware. In 1963, after spending three months with Japanese folk potters, he made a film, "Village Potters of Onda," which was hailed as a classic documentary of a vanishing culture.
 * Biographical Information: **

Particularly in his later years, Sperry liked the strong contrast of black and white, which he felt lent a naturally abstract quality even to symmetrical, utilitarian work. That affection is shared by Reid Ozaki, whose white decorations on matte-black vessels and platters have the look of instant classics, and Paddy McNeely, who clings to satin black glazes for containers which lend elegant simplicity to arrangements of flowers and fruit. Sperry used black and white when he pioneered the use of ceramic sculpture for large-scale public commissions. In the 1980s, the large stoneware platters he had been making metamorphosed into round or square tablets, often mildly concave. Sperry covered the pieces with black stoneware glaze, fired them, then applied thick white porcelain slip by pouring, painting, or brush-mopping it on in calligraphic loops and splashes. When the piece was fired a second time, the slip shrank and crackled into crusty mazes that had visual kinship with Abstract Expressionist paintings.

Sperry's large ceramic murals are on view in front of the Safeco Building in the University District, the IBM Building, and the King Country Administration Building.

Artist Biography SAAM Collections Page
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