Image Caption: Calvin Ma

2021 Cultivating Community

Cultivating Community is a week-long series of pre-recorded and live online content being shared by the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts. When NCECA was established in the mid-1960s, founding president Ted Randall shared that his hope for the council would be to overcome a sense of isolation that ceramic artists and educators experienced in their careers and home institutions when working with the medium as a form of creative expression.

The past 18 months of the pandemic have introduced us to experiences of isolation that we might not have considered even a short time ago and precipitated profound changes in how we create, teach, learn, and share our work. Cultivating Community will highlight presenters and issues that are engaging with how to work collectively and effectively through and with ceramic art and education to sustain and generate a field that consistently strives to be more accessible, inclusive, diverse, and respectful. This autumn event will be provided at no cost, though donations will be welcomed. We look forward to welcoming you to the 2021 NCECA Fall Symposium.

Making Cups with Calvin Ma

Join artist Calvin Ma as he guides us through his entire creative process from his studio based in the Bay Area.

In this video series Calvin Ma demonstrates the step-by-step process of the creation of two of his beautifully designed cups. We follow Calvin from the initial slip casting through detail oriented glazing and firing as he works with his remarkable studio assistant Rocket to complete these unique pieces donated to the 2021 NCECA Virtual Exhibition & Cup Sale.

Calvin Ma is a ceramic sculptor born and raised in San Francisco, California. He received his BA in Industrial Arts from San Francisco State University and MFA in Sculpture from the Academy of Art University. He has exhibited nationally and internationally; his most recent solo exhibition Blend In: The Little Things took place at the Modern Eden Gallery in San Francisco.

NCECA Green Task Force
Dig It - Wild Clay

The NCECA Green Task Force is delighted to share Dig It – Wild Clay, a webinar where three practicing artists present their research and studio practice using wild clay.

Please join Josh DeWeese (Director, International Wild Clay Research Project), Nicolle Hamm (artist, USA), and Yuliya Makliuk (artist & environmentalist, Ukraine), for an informative and inspiring journey into global geology, sustainability research, and mindfulness. Moderated by Dr. Wendy Gers and Julia Galloway.

Syd Carpenter, An Artist’s Journey

Join Syd Carpenter as she discusses the unique places we call our own and the history of African American Farms and Gardens.

Syd Carpenter is a sculptor working primarily in clay. Her work is included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Michener Museum and the Fuller Craft Museum. She is a professor of studio art at Swarthmore College.

Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy, Curator
2022 NCECA Annual, Belonging

Produced in cooperation with the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California, the 2022 NCECA Annual exhibition, Belonging will run February 20-May 8, 2022. A New York and Los Angeles-based curator, writer, and arts administrator of contemporary art and craft, Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy's current research focuses on the subversive power of humor, cuteness, and leisure as tools of protest.

Amplifying the voices of BIPOC artists is central to Vizcarrondo-Laboy's practice. She serves as Assistant Curator at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), New York where she has helped the curatorial team organize over twenty exhibitions since 2016, including 2021’s Craft Front & Center. She also oversees MAD’s Burke Prize, a prestigious contemporary craft award.

  • Vizcarrondo-Laboy's vision for the exhibition...A sense of belonging implies an affinity or connectedness with a place, social or cultural group. Belonging is survival. It is a powerful feeling that shapes our identity. While achieving a sense of belonging is fulfilling when realized, it can be a laborious and even painful endeavor otherwise. Belonging strongly signifies spatial relationships, from navigating new territories to remaining rooted in formative places long vacated. Efforts to balance attachments to past and present spaces may evoke nostalgia and dissonance. Many also seek a connection to their ancestors and their land despite distance. Voluntary and involuntary migration has profoundly impacted millions’ sense of belonging through disrupted lineages, loss of material culture and narratives, and disconnection from land. Belonging explores the intangible and tangible approaches we engage in developing and maintaining our sense of connectedness across time and space. Belonging also relates to ownership or possession, an interpretation that has caused much harm to humans, non-human species, and natural resources. This exhibition seeks to upend normalized power dynamics by prioritizing humans’ desire to belong to something instead of things belonging to them.

NCECA Green Task Force | FLOW: Ceramics, Water & Community Impact

This co-lecture on sustainability focuses on water conservation and preservation in the ceramics field with Brian Kohl from Riverside, California, representing the NCECA Green Task Force and Nienke Hoogvliet sharing her research project in the Netherlands on sewage waste in partnership with the Dutch Water Authorities.

Brian Kohl is an Assistant Professor of Art at Riverside City College, serves on NCECA’s Green Task Force, and was the Communications Director for NCECA 2009-2013. The imagery and inspiration for his ceramic objects and installations evolved from experiencing the impact of water issues apparent to an artist guiding whitewater.

Studio Nienke Hoogvliet is a design studio for material research, experimental and conceptual design. They see design as a tool to shape new perspectives to contribute to a more holistic world. Their projects have been exhibited worldwide in institutions like Cooper Hewitt Design Museum and Victoria & Albert Museum.

Student-Focused Community Discussion | Ins and Outs: Moving Forward in Your Career


  • Whether you have just completed a degree, an apprenticeship or are a self-taught artist, this community discussion with current and recent students will shed light on some of the “next steps” to pursuing a career in ceramics. Join moderator Nicole James, a current graduate student at Florida State University, Iren Tete, sharing an insider's view on navigating residencies and Aaron Caldwell sharing thoughts on effective strategies for marketing yourself.

  • Nicole James is currently a Master’s in Fine Arts candidate for Studio Art at Florida State University. Her work utilizes video, digital software, and archival material to examine the performative acts of identity, content virality, and constructed fictions surrounding womanhood, whiteness, and the duality of occupying positions as oppressor and oppressed.

  • Iren Tete is an artist originally from Sofia, Bulgaria who is currently based in Gainesville, FL. Tete is Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Florida and was recently Visiting Faculty in Ceramics at the Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary, Canada. She earned an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2019.

  • Aaron Caldwell received his BA in studio art from SIU Carbondale, and is completing his MS in Art Education from Illinois State. He was chosen as a 2021 Ceramics Monthly Emerging Artist, and organizes for Queeramics, a platform dedicated to bringing visibility/opportunities to queer ceramicists.

Fran Sepler, Cultivating Creative and Respectful Workplace Cultures

Fran Sepler will conduct a presentation on creating and sustaining respectful workplace cultures. The session will focus on the cultural attributes of psychological safety, respect, and fairness and identify concrete steps that organizations can take to improve their climate and organizational performance. This presentation would involve both lecture and interactivity, such as a review of case studies in break-out groups.

For thirty years, Fran Sepler has assisted public and private organizations throughout the country create comprehensive initiatives to understand, prevent, identify, investigate, and remediate misconduct in the workplace and the academy. This has included hands-on leadership development and implementation of large scale culture-based initiatives focused on creating psychologically safe, respectful workplaces.

Sharif Bey and Rachel Delphia, Sharif Bey: Excavations

Artist Sharif Bey and Curator Rachel Delphia discuss Excavations, Bey’s new project at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Sharif Bey: Excavations presents new works by Sharif Bey inspired by the artist’s ‘excavations’ of the museum collections that first piqued his interest as a youth visiting Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History. On view are mask-like forms, necklaces made from pinch pot-style vessels as beads, and site-specific temporary installations that incorporate Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s broad collections of artifacts and specimens. By returning to these spaces with the eye of a mature artist, Bey offers visitors a glimpse into the self-reflective nature of his artistic practice. Objects he encountered from West Africa such as a Guinean D’mba headdress and a Kongo Nkisi nkondi power figure continue to hold sway over his work in recent years. While Bey celebrates the themes of these objects, such as power, ritual, motherhood, community, and the awesomeness of nature, his work also touches on modern questions such as “Who has creative agency? Who gets to speak through an artistic platform?” Sharif Bey: Excavations is organized by Rachel Delphia, Alan G. and Jane A. Lehman Curator of Decorative Arts and Design, with Alyssa Velazquez, Curatorial Assistant for Decorative Arts and Design, and Kiki Teshome, Margaret Powell Curatorial Fellow.

Sharif Bey is an Associate Professor at Syracuse University. Bey studied sculpture at The Academy of Fine Arts and Design-Bratislava, Slippery Rock University and received his MFA from the UNC-Greensboro. Inspired by modernism, pottery and Art of the African diaspora, his work is featured in public collections throughout the U.S.

Rachel Delphia is the Alan G. and Jane A. Lehman Curator of Decorative Arts and Design at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Her recent curatorial projects include Extraordinary Ordinary Things and Sharif Bey: Excavations. She holds a BFA and MA degrees from Carnegie Mellon and the University of Delaware.

Ronald Rael, Rasquachando!

Ronald Rael, draws, builds, writes, 3D-prints and teaches about architecture and craft as a cultural endeavor deeply influenced by a unique upbringing in a desolate alpine valley in southern Colorado. As the San Francisco Chronicle writes, "[Rael's] imagination is audacious. He speculates on the implications of the border wall, building with mud and using 3D printers to create buildings -- as seen in his books Borderwall as Architecture, Earth Architecture and Printing Architecture.

Rael is a professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley and is a founding partner of the Oakland based Make-Tank, Emerging Objects. You can see his drawings, models and objects in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.