Gray+Checks+with+Oranges+and+Grapefruit

Date: 1991
 * [[image:http://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?id=http://americanart.si.edu/images/2001/2001.28_1a.jpg&max=460 width="298" height="279" link="@http://www.americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=62436"]] || Title: **Gray Checks with Oranges and Grapefruit**

Artist: **Rebecca Cross** Born: Washington, District of Columbia 1954

Medium: cast and glazed earthenware Dimensions: 17 1/2 in. (44.5 cm) diam. Smithsonian American Art Museum Museum purchase through the Richard T. Evans Fund

Accession: 2001.28 || Husband & wife team, Rebecca Cross and Max MacKenzie operate gallery in Canal Square in Georgetown: cross mackenzie ceramic arts exhibits both sculptural and functional artwork from some of the most accomplished and challenging artists working in the medium of clay today…to fill a void they see in the ceramics marketplace.
 * Biographical Information: **

"It's not like no one shows ceramics," Cross says. "I'm just making a bigger venue for it."

Their new spot -- complete with bright orange walls -- is one of the changes that have hit galleries clustered in Georgetown's Canal Square.

Cross and MacKenzie define ceramics in the broadest sense, ranging from the sculptural to the functional; they want to address the split between art and craft with shows that don't shy away from presenting serving platters in the company of unusual clay firings. "I just like the idea of shrinking the divisions between fine art and functional art," Cross says.

The first show was aptly titled "Clay" and included six artists' works, one of which was in progress…local sculptor Margaret Boozer, started a piece in the narrow storefront of the gallery. She took off her shoes and socks to walk barefoot on thick masses of clay. Then she poured liquid clay into a large pool in the middle of the piece. She shook the wooden base to help spread the liquid and sprinkled a bit of dusty red clay on top -- like a dash of cayenne.The piece will take more than a week to dry, during which it will crack like a piece of parched earth. MacKenzie plans to film a minute of the drying process each day, so that folks can see the sculpture's evolution at the opening.

"The clay is doing a little performance piece," Boozer says. "It's evocative of some geological formation. . . . It is earth."- [Nicole M. Miller (Sunday Source, March 12, 2006)]

[|Artist Biography] SAAM Collections Page
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