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PRESS RELEASES
• Museum to Present Design Award to Eudorah Moore, July 12, 2003
• The Museum of California Design Brings California Pottery: From Missions to Modernism to the Autry Museum
• California Pottery Publication Honored in PRINT Magazine
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 12 May 2003 • For Immediate Release
The Museum of California Design’s California Design Award
The Museum of California Design’s California Design Award will be given annually in recognition of outstanding contributions to California design by an individual, company or institution. The honoree will be selected by the museum’s Board of Directors.
This year’s award will honor Eudorah Moore in recognition of her many years of dedication to the appreciation of California design and its unparalleled contributions to American culture. This outstanding curator and author was responsible for four landmark California Design exhibitions held at the Pasadena Museum of Art between 1962 and 1971, and the final exhibition in the series that was held in 1976 at the then newly-opened Pacific Design Center. Ms. Moore was Curator of Design at the Pasadena Museum of Art from 1962 to 1977, is the author of The Furniture of Paul Tuttle and edited (with Timothy J. Andersen and Robert Winter) California Design: 1910, the catalog for the 1974 exhibition of the same name. The award will be presented to Ms. Moore at the Museum of California Design’s first Award Benefit which will be held on Saturday, July 12 at the Autry Museum in Griffith Park, Los Angeles.
The award itself—an example of the yellow flashing roadside barrier light created in 1967 by Henry C. Keck of Keck-Craig, Inc, of Pasadena—is one of the many outstanding works of commercial design that were displayed in Ms. Moore's remarkable exhibitions; it is also one of California’s most ubiquitous contributions to American design.
The barrier light has been in use throughout the United States for more than three decades. Its elegant functionality—clean lines and freedom from decoration—makes it a paragon of the modernist aesthetic. And even though Keck’s design is one of the most familiar objects in America, few realize that it was designed in California.
the Lucite case in which the award will be presented was designed for it by Charles Hollis Jones whose widely acclaimed Lucite furniture was featured in the California Design exhibitions.
The award will be given to Ms. Moore at our first annual Award Benefit and Silent Auction on Saturday, July 12, 11:30 AM to 2:30 PM, at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Los Angeles. A limited number of tickets, at $100 each, are available.
LINK to Upcoming Events for further details on the Silent Auction.
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 For Immediate Release
The Museum of California Design Brings California Pottery: From Missions to Modernism to the Autry Museum
The Museum of California Design announces that its first travelling exhibition, California Pottery: From Missions to Modernism, will be on view at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, from July 4, 2003 through January 25, 2004.
This exhibition will present an unprecedented survey of aesthetically inventive and historically significant commercially-produced tiles, tableware, garden wares and accessories made between 1900 and 1955 by forty-seven of the hundreds of commercial potteries that once flourished in California. The designs for these everyday objects range from color-splashed interpretations of traditional forms to radical innovations that changed the way we live. The exhibition, which was drawn from forty-four California collections, was curated by Bill Stern, executive director of the Museum of California Design.
Practical pottery was first made in California by indigenous peoples, but the first pottery multiples were formed from local red clay at Spanish colonial missions and military outposts toward the end of the eighteenth century. This same type of clay was used by the commercial pottery industry that burgeoned—along with the state’s population—in the first decades of the twentieth century. It was then that California pottery producers began freeing themselves from the European ceramic traditions that had dominated American taste since the founding of the republic. Their fresh contributions to American design were strongly influenced by the cultures with which only California has had the most interaction: Mexican, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese. The first great revolution in California pottery–-the introduction of geometric designs— grew out of the Hispano-Moresque-style tiles used in the construction of San Diego’s 1915 California-Panama Exposition and was augmented by the addition of Mexican saturated color glazes.
By the 1930s, when California pottery’s solid-color revolution swept America from west to east, the state already enjoyed an unparalleled reputation for innovation. California’s commercial potteries became renowned for remarkable shapes and decorations designed not only by such recognized figures as tile maker Ernest Batchelder, painter/illustrator Rockwell Kent, and ceramic designers Edith Heath and Beatrice Wood. They, of course, are represented in this exhibition, but also on view are designs created by numerous heretofore unheralded talents, among them Daniel Gale Turnbull, Jane Bennison, Frank Irwin, Barbara Willis, George James, Malcolm Leland, and LaGardo Tackett.
Between 1941 and 1945, some of California’s large commercial potteries were focused on the defense effort, while hundreds of smaller producers imitated the English and Japanese dinnerware and decorative items no longer available on the American market.
The immediate post-World War II decade, however, was a time of extraordinary innovation out of which came much of the subsequent good design in American ceramics. In this period J.A. Bauer, Gladding, McBean/Franciscan, Metlox, Vernon Kilns, and other California potteries added modernist designs to their lines. But even before this development, the new era was heralded by two young ceramists— Barbara Willis and Edith Heath—who would make lasting contributions to the quality of commercial ceramic design in America. Their work, as seen in this exhibition, is notable for its unprecedented introduction of studio pottery techniques and aesthetic standards into commercial pottery production.
This overwhelmingly colorful exhibition ends with some strikingly color-free work by a company whose fifty-year-old designs seem remarkably modern even today. Ever since Architectural Pottery was established in Los Angeles in 1950, its white cylindrical planters and other ceramic forms—and their imitators—have greeted us in office buildings, banks, and other public places, as well as in private homes. Unlike other commercial California potteries, Architectural Pottery was honored right from the beginning: products from its very first catalogue were selected for inclusion in the 1951 Good Design exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Although the production of some of the pieces in this exhibition involved varying degrees of hand finishing, they were all made as multiples for commercial distribution and are not artworks in the conventional sense of the term. It is no surprise, however, that even when the creator of an individual commercial piece cannot be identified, his or her mark is inherent in its design. What is surprising is that many of these works had never been exhibited publicly before their inclusion in this exhibition.
California Pottery: From Missions to Modernism was organized by the Museum of California Design, based on the exhibition originally designed and presented by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in collaboration with the Museum of California Design.
For additional information about this exhibition and the Autry Museum go to: www.autry-museum.org
For additional imagery of California pottery also see Traveling Exhibitions.
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 December 2002 • For Immediate Release
California Pottery Publication Honored in PRINT Magazine
We are pleased to announce that California Pottery: From Missions to Modernism, by Bill Stern, photographs by Peter Brenner, design by Laura Lovett, is featured in PRINT Magazine's 2002 Design Annual. The Design Annual selects the most creative and compelling print communications produced in the U.S. in a given year, and organizes the presentation of the materials by geographic region. California Pottery: From Missions to Modernism is honored along with other outstanding work produced by California designers.
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