American artist Toshiko Takaezu was born in Pepeekeo, Hawaii to Japanese immigrant parents Shinsa and Kama Takaezu. One of eleven children, she was raised in a traditional Japanese household whose values, as well as the surrounding Hawaiian landscape, strongly underscore her artistic practice. During her five-decade-long career, the artist worked in many media including painting, fiber, and bronze. However, her primary medium, and that for which she is best recognized, was ceramics. Takaezu was instrumental in the post-war reconceptualization of ceramics from the functional craft tradition to the realm of fine art. Her signature “closed form” merged the base form with glazed surface painting to create a unified work.
Prior to exploring clay’s aesthetic potential, Takaezu first encountered the material in a utilitarian context in 1940 while working at a commercial ceramic studio in Honolulu, the Hawaii Potter’s Guild. There, she not only honed her technical skills but also met Lieutenant Carl Massa who served in the in Special Services division of the US Army. Massa gave her sculpture lessons and inspired her to read, attend cultural events, and open herself to a creative life. After attending painting classes at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, Takaezu studied ceramics with Claude Horan at the University of Hawaii (1945–47). She moved to the mainland to attend Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan (1951–54), where she studied with Maija Grotell, an acclaimed Finnish artist. Grotell was an influential figure in the development of Takaezu’s rigorous artistic practice and teaching philosophy. Grotell instilled in her the importance of the individuality of the artist’s self-discovery and self-expression, principles that Takaezu carried through the entirety of her life’s work. With the intention of connecting with her Eastern heritage, in 1955, the artist traveled in Japan for eight months. This proved to be another formative experience for her artistic development as she was impressed by both traditional and avant-garde ceramic techniques and aesthetics, meeting eminent artists Toyo Kaneshige and Yagi Kazuo, among others. While there, Takaezu also studied the tea ceremony and Zen Buddhism.
Takaezu’s formal and informal education fostered myriad themes that repeatedly emerge in her work, including the intersection of East and West as well as tradition and innovation, the Japanese tea ceremony, nature, and the seamless integration of art and life. They are most perceptible in the formal qualities and titles of her ceramic works. At times wheel-thrown or hand built, stoneware or porcelain, her sculptures range in form, size, and color. Following the utilitarian vessels and pots of her early years, the artist progressively abstracted her forms to arrive at her signature rounded, closed form. With only a nipple-like opening at their top to allow gases to escape during the firing process, Takaezu rendered these forms non-functional. The result is a sculptural form than can be appreciated strictly for its aesthetic value. The initial closed forms inspired a range of sculptural investigations such as her Moon and Tree series.
Many of these works are intimately scaled to the human hand while others soar up to six feet in height, necessitating the use of scaffolding to build them. Takaezu generated a complex relationship between the volume of three-dimensional form and the wrapped exterior surface by experimenting with glaze, which she applied freely via dripping, splashing, pouring, and brushing. The resulting painterly marks exhibit at once a deliberateness as well as an openness to chance. Additionally, they are a record of the artist’s movement as Takaezu physically circumvented the large works and manually rotated the smaller ones while she painted with glaze, a technique that the artist herself likened to dance.
The artistic principle of integrating form and glaze also relates to that of balancing the interiority of the object with its visible façade. Despite the painted surfaces’ vivid colors and complex compositions, the dark interiors were just as important and intriguing to Takaezu. The enclosed space—as metaphor for the human spirit, or as an evocation of its own micro universe—is unseen yet still has a powerful and mysterious presence. It is literally amplified by the small clay beads that the artist often placed inside the form, which musically rattle when one handles the artwork. In this way, Takaezu’s work engages multiple senses simultaneously, which was a predominate concept in the Cranbrook curriculum while she was a student there.
This emphasis on sense of self and personal expression undergirded the artist’s creative practice and teaching career. For decades, Takaezu nurtured students’ processes of self-discovery. Beginning with teaching summer sessions at Cranbrook (1954–56), at the invitation of Grotell, Takaezu proceeded to hold positions at University of Wisconsin, Madison (1954–55), Cleveland Institute of Art (1955–64), and Princeton University (1967–92). Upon establishing her Quakertown, New Jersey studio in 1975, Takaezu began formally mentoring young artists through an immersive, live-in apprenticeship. During the year-long experience, she would instill in the apprentices her technical rigor, aesthetic principles, and synergistic approach to art and life. Today, her home is preserved as the Toshiko Takaezu Studio and continues to be used as a creative workplace by students and artists alike.
Throughout the artist’s lifetime, her work was exhibited widely in the United States and Japan, including a solo exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2004) and a retrospective at the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, Japan (1995). Takaezu was the recipient of a McInerny Foundation Grant (1952), Tiffany Foundation Grant (1964), National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1980), Watershed Legends Award (2007), and Konjuhosho Award (2010). Additionally, she was named a Living Treasure of Hawaii in 1987 and received the National Living Treasure Award from the University of North Carolina in 1994. Takaezu received honorary doctorate degrees from Lewis and Clark College (1987), Moore College of Art and Design (1992), University of Hawaii (1993), Princeton University (1996), and Skidmore College (2004). The artist is the subject of numerous publications including journal essays, exhibition catalogs, and monographs and her work is represented in many museum collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, DeYoung/Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, Honolulu Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Smithsonian American Art Museum. Takaezu passed away in Honolulu on March 9, 2011.
Source: www.toshikotakaezufoundation.org
