Katherine Choy: Radical Potter
Exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art celebrates 1951 Mills College alumna, Katherine Choy
By Mel Buchanan, RosaMary Curator of Decorative Arts & Design, New Orleans Museum of Art
An innovative artist in a number of mediums, Mills College graduate Katherine Choy (American, b. China, 1927–1958) developed ceramic work that was distinctively her own. A new exhibition and forthcoming catalog at the New Orleans Museum of Art seek to establish Choy’s reputation as one of the national leaders in evolving mid-century American ceramics from utilitarian objects into the purview of expressive fine art. On view until April 23, 2023, Katherine Choy: Radical Potter in 1950s New Orleans celebrates Choy’s remarkable life story, and her assuredness in a radical vision for artists working in clay.
Katherine Po-yu Choy was born into an affluent merchant family in Hong Kong in 1927. During her childhood in Shanghai, she experienced privilege and a fine education but also the upheavals of war, including the occupation by Japan. In 1946, Choy left her home to study in the United States, beginning her education at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia. In 1948 she transferred to Mills College to be near family in California, earning her Bachelors degree in 1950 and a Masters degree in 1951.
At Mills College, Katherine Choy had wide exposure to art theory and making, including weaving, jewelry, enameling, and metalwork. She studied painting with William Gaw (American, 1891–1973) and she learned sculpture with Zygmund Sazevich (American, b. Russia, 1899–1968). In the Mills College art department, she was introduced to ceramics at the moment the school began to foster an experimental environment in clay. It was Choy’s training with F. Carlton Ball and Antonio Prieto that formed the foundation for her later, radical work. On the staff at Mills from 1939 to 1950, Carlton Ball (American, 1911–1992) was a multidisciplinary artist who is known as an important educator that inspired a generation of experimental artists. Antonio Prieto (American, b. Spain, 1912–1967), whose personal ceramics collection was donated to the Mills College Art Museum in 1970, took over the Mills ceramics department when Ball left in 1950. Prieto encouraged students to bring an individual voice to their work, which would be an important factor in Choy’s mature artwork.
During the time that Katherine Choy was a student in California, she worked during her summers on glaze research in the San Francisco studio of potter Jade Snow Wong (American, 1922–2006). Choy was at Mills during a storied moment in ceramics history, Carlton Ball invited the internationally famous Bernard Leach (British, b. Hong Kong, 1887–1979) to give a workshop at the school. Leach and his collaborator, folk potter Shōji Hamada (Japanese, 1894–1978), together taught an ethos of function, simplicity, and how to incorporate Asian workshop traditions into modern ceramic studios. Their ceramics and Leach’s A Potter’s Book (1940) were enormously influential with American potters in the 1950s. Choy’s family retains her well-marked, personal copy of A Potter’s Book inscribed by Leach “with very many thanks for pot shop help.” Tucked inside the book are invitations to parties honoring Leach hosted by the Association of San Francisco Potters on May 4, 1950 and to his lecture at the Mills Art Gallery on May 2, 1950.
After graduating from Mills College, the Cranbrook Academy of Art awarded Katherine Choy a prestigious fellowship. In Michigan she pursued advanced study in sculpture, textiles, and in ceramics with Maija Grotell (Finnish-American, 1899–1973). In 1952, Choy, then a 24-year-old rising star of American craft, was hired to be director of ceramics at Newcomb College. The New Orleans school had a long history with excellence in ceramics. From 1895 to 1941, women graduates of the art department could join the celebrated Newcomb College Pottery, producing Arts & Crafts Movement ceramics from local clays in designs that reflected the local Louisiana landscape. Once established in New Orleans, Choy threw herself into the work of making art, operating kilns, and leading her students with “an eager spirit and probing mind,” in the words of her university colleagues.
In 1953, the New Orleans Museum of Art (then called the Delgado Museum) presented Ceramics by Katherine Choy, one of many mid-1950s exhibitions that showed her modern ceramics across the United States. Her work was also included in the Designer Craftsmen U.S.A. 1953 exhibition, organized by the American Craft Council and shown at institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and The San Francisco Museum of Art.
Katherine Choy showed tremendous productivity in the mid 1950s. She built up a career as a nationally-exhibiting ceramic artist, served as juror at craft competitions, worked as a textile designer for Isabel Scott Fabrics in New York City, and received praise from her colleagues and students for her leadership at Newcomb. In 1954, Choy invited her former Mills College professor Carlton Ball to Newcomb for a workshop, resulting in a collaborative vase now in the collection of NOMA. She became an early member of the Orleans Gallery, a 1956 collective of like-minded artists who supported contemporary work in New Orleans.
Artistically, Katherine Choy’s early ceramics show inspiration from Asian clay traditions, as was popular among American potters in the 1950s. She mastered classic forms, applied calligraphy-like brushwork, and developed lush glazes sometimes with the help of her family, who sent ingredients from China. However, as a Craft Horizons review in 1961 noted her “ceramics show a startling transition in a relatively short, concentrated ten-year period … the earlier pieces suggest forms clad in ordered robes, but the later ones expose the flesh.”
During her time working in New Orleans, Katherine Choy increasingly expanded from Asian clay traditions to make work that was her own. Her jagged, painterly vessels were as artistically advanced as any made elsewhere in the United States during the 1950s. A considered departure from the refinement of her training at Mills and Cranbrook, her pots sprouted additional necks, could be aggressively large or asymmetrical, and had glazes that intentionally left parts of the raw clay exposed for all to see. Her modern pottery conveyed — in a new idea from the world of contemporary painting — that ceramics, too, could be a canvas for emotional expression.
I believe that the artist-potter should question life. This requires a continuous breaking down and summarizing to express, to relate, to find one place and move with one’s own time, yet keep a universal entity.
— Katherine Choy, Craft Horizons, March 1957
The Artist’s ambition led her away from Newcomb College in 1957. With the financial support of her family and New Orleans patrons, and with a few industrious friends including celebrated California artist Viola Frey (American, 1933–2004), Katherine Choy founded a communal working ceramics studio in Port Chester, New York. The Clay Art Center still operates today, advancing her vision as a place for ceramic exhibitions, workshops, and exposure to the rich world of handmade clay art.
While organizing the early days of the Clay Art Center, showing bold new pots in the traveling Now in New Orleans exhibition with the Orleans Gallery, and preparing work for the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, Katherine Choy died unexpectedly at age thirty in February 1958. It was a shock that broke hearts in her wide network of family, friends, and colleagues.
She left us at the peak of her creative output … but she bequeathed a body of work and ideas whose germination will see flower in the many with whom they had contact.
— Oppi Untracht, for a 1961 memorial exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Craft
She was honored with an exhibition in New York City at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in 1961, and Katherine Choy’s artist friends in New Orleans mounted The Katherine Choy Memorial Show at the Orleans Gallery in 1959. Her former students and colleagues coordinated with the Clay Art Center in New York for the loan of her most recent work. The Orleans Gallery installation images show pottery forms that were enlarged, deformed, and abstracted— a bold new direction in expressive ceramics that put her at the vanguard of mid-century clay artist. After more than sixty years, many of those exact pots have again traveled from New York to New Orleans for NOMA’s Katherine Choy: Radical Potter in 1950s New Orleans exhibition.
Though her career and life were unfairly short, her powerful ceramics remind us we should not remember Katherine Choy’s story with melancholy or reduce her career to one of only promise. Her significant body of work was revolutionary in the 1950s, and it still looks fresh today. This, together with her biography, remind us to celebrate Choy’s wide accomplishments and assuredness in her radical vision for what artists working in clay could contribute to the world.
The New Orleans Museum of Art’s Katherine Choy: Radical Potter in 1950s New Orleans is on view May 6, 2022 – April 23, 2023. The show is curated by Mel Buchanan with Winston Ho and is supported by the Elise M. Besthoff Charitable Foundation, George Dunbar, and Charles L. Whited Jr. Special thanks to the artist’s family, Reena Kashyap and the Clay Art Center, and the Newcomb Art Museum.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mel Buchanan is the RosaMary Curator of Decorative Arts & Design at the New Orleans Museum of Art, and previously worked with the decorative arts collections at The RISD Museum in Providence, Rhode Island and at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Buchanan earned degrees from Yale University and from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware. She lives in New Orleans with her husband and two small children.
