Have you ever wanted to create your own ceramics but had no idea how to begin? Expert ceramicist Melisa Dora teaches you everything you need to know to make exquisite ceramic tableware. Step-by-step instructions clearly outline the techniques for forming and building your pieces, throwing the clay, firing, and glazing. Explore the best practices for using clay and different glazes -- and even how to make your own glazes. Discover how to reuse, recycle, and reclaim your materials. Learn tips for troubleshooting and advice for photographing and selling your finished work. Once you've mastered the techniques, use them to create mugs, plates, bowls, serving dishes, vases, and more. Melisa Dora makes it easy for you to design and create ceramic pieces that will adorn your home and brighten your life.

People collect to connect with the past, personal and historic, to exercise some small and perfect degree of control over a carefully chosen portion of the world. The Grain of the Clay is Allen S. Weiss's engaging exploration of the meaning and practice of collecting through his relationship with Japanese ceramics. Weiss unfolds their world of materiality and pleasure and the culture and knowledge that extends out of their forms and uses.Japanese ceramics are celebrated for their profound material poetry, especially in relation to the natural world, and they maintain a unique place in the history of the arts and in the lives of those who collect and use them. The Grain of the Clay deepens our appreciation of ceramics while providing a critical meditation on collecting. Weiss examines the vast stylistic range of ceramics, investigating the reasons for viewing, using and collecting them. He explores ceramic objects' relationship with cuisine as an art and as a part of everyday life. Ceramics are increasingly finding their rightful place in museums and Weiss shows how this newfound engagement with finely wrought natural materials might foster an increased ecological sensitivity.The Grain of the Clay will appeal to the collector in every one of us.

Petrography is the minute examination by microscope of rock and mineral samples for the purpose of determining precisely their mineralogical composition. In this groundbreaking work, James B. Stoltman applies quantitative as well as qualitative methods to petrography of Native American ceramics. As explained in Ceramic Petrography and Hopewell Interaction, by adapting petrography to the study of pottery, Stoltman offers a powerful new set of tools that enable fact-based and rigorous identification of pottery. Stoltman's subject is the cultural interaction among the "Hopewell interaction sphere," societies of the Ohio Valley region and contemporary peoples of the Southeast. Inferring social and commercial relationships between disparate communities by determining whether objects found in one settlement originated there or elsewhere is a foundational technique of archaeology. The technique, however, rests on the informed but necessarily imperfect visual inspection of objects by archaeologists. Petrography greatly amplifies archaeologists' ability to determine objects' provenance with greater precision and less guesswork. Using petrography to study a vast quantity of pottery samples sourced from Hopewell communities, Stoltman is able for the first time to establish which items are local, which are local but atypical, and which originated elsewhere. Another exciting possibility with petrography is to further determine the home source of objects that came from afar. Thus, combining traditional qualitative techniques with a wealth of new quantitative data, Ceramic Petrography and Hopewell Interaction offers a map of social and trade relationships between communities within and beyond the Hopewell interaction sphere with much greater precision and confidence than in the past. Ceramic Petrography and Hopewell Interaction provides a clear and concise explanation of petrographic methods, Stoltman's findings about Hopewell and Southeastern ceramics in various sites, and the fascinating discovery that visits to Hopewell centers by Southeastern Native Americans were not only for trade purposes but more for such purposes as pilgrimages, vision- and power-questing, healing, and the acquisition of knowledge.

The leaded and cemented stained glass of the workshop of Heinrich Staubli (1926-2016), St. Gallen, which is integrated into churches, restaurants, and schools, continues to shape the built environment of Eastern Switzerland today. The output of the workshop is characterized by relations among stained glass, murals, and graphic, textile, and funerary arts. This is the first analysis of the artworks and the estate from the perspective of intermediality and within the framework of modern art history. The study offers a systematic contextualization of Staubli's work within the history of stained-glass art in German-speaking countries, elucidating not only the operations of the artistic workshop but, more broadly, the artistic-social relevance of stained glass far beyond Switzerland in the 20th century.

In the last two decades of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century, glass manufacturing was a unique enterprise in Canada. Beginning with the founding of the Nova Scotia Glass Company in 1881, the glass factories of Nova Scotia made clear tableware at a time when it was not made anywhere else in Canada.

By the 1800s, people had been making glass for more than 4,000 years. Before that, however, the mass production of glass was not technically possible. Pressing machines to produce glass shapes were invented in the 1830s in New England. As mechanization improved, decorated glassware could be produced relatively quickly and affordably. By the late 1880s, moulded and pressed glass was produced in Pennsylvania and Ohio, in New England, and, perhaps not surprisingly, in Nova Scotia.

In this beautifully illustrated book, featuring photographs of the highly collectable patterned tableware produced during this 40-year period, Deborah Trask tells the story of Nova Scotia glass during this golden age of pressed-glass production.

Employing her skills as a curator and a detective of sorts, she tells the story of the major glass factories -- the Nova Scotia Glass Company, the Humphrey Glass Company, and the Lamont Glass Company -- and provides crucial information on patterns and moulds, allowing readers and collectors to identify what remains of this glittering enterprise.

One of the premier private collections of contemporary craft, the Nancy and David Wolf Collection features outstanding creations by the foremost artists working in craft media today, including Howard Ben Tre, Dale Chihuly, William Morris, Wendell Castle, David Ellsworth, Virginia Dotson, Michael Lucero, Michelle Holzapfel, Theman Statom, Ginny Ruffner, Akio Takamori, and Betty Woodman.
"Outside the Ordinary: Contemporary Art in Glass, Wood, and Ceramics from the Wolf Collection "introduces audiences to sixty-seven masterworks selected from this vast collection, carefully documented and photographed in full color. At the heart of this seminal publication are an in-depth interview with collectors Nancy and David Wolf conducted by Amy Miller Dehan and a scholarly essay by contemporary craft authority and critic Matthew Kangas. Dehan's interview reveals the collectors' impetus and strategies for assembling this important collection, and Kangas's essay addresses the history, growth, and future of the contemporary craft movement -- with a particular focus on glass, wood, and ceramics.
"Outside the Ordinary" focuses on the role, development, and perspective of the private collector within the context of the ever-evolving contemporary craft movement. With more than sixty-seven color plates of artwork from the highly regarded Wolf Collection, it makes a significant and stunning addition to any library.

With contemporary advertising and sales catalogues as its sources, this book represents the first exhaustive survey of the Ikora and Myra lines in glass produced between the 1920s and 1950s by the Wurttembergische Metallwarenfabrik AG (WMF) at Geislingen/ Steige. At the instigation of the then WMF director general, Hugo Debach, WMF had been making high-quality art glass (called "Unika pieces", indicating that they were one-of-a-kind) as well as lines in mass-produced art glas (Ikora and Myra). First presented to the public to great acclaim at the Wurttembergisches Landesmuseum in Stuttgart by museum director G. E. Pazaurek, these pieces are now much sought after as valuable collector's items. Ikora and Myra Glass by WMF not only deals exhaustively with the history of this glass but also provides aficionados and collectors of Ikora and Myra glass for the first time with a complete catalogue of WMF products. The availability of this information makes it possible, first, to distinguish from the original later glass made as imitation of WMF glass by rival competitors and, second, to identify accurately each piece of Unika, Ikora or Myra glass.

"Reconstructing Tascalusa's Chiefdom" is an archaeological study of political collapse in the Alabama River Valley following the Hernando de Soto expedition.
To explain the cultural and political disruptions caused by Hernando de Soto's exploration deep into north America, Amanda L. Regnier presents an analysis of ceramics and a novel theory of cultural exchange, which argues that culture consists of a series of interconnected models governing proper behavior that are shared across the belief systems of communities and individuals. An approach not often applied to archaeological research, ceramic study serves as a test of whether historic cognitive models can be extracted from ceramic data via cluster and correspondence analysis. In addition, the summary of Late Mississippian sites includes a chronology of the Alabama River from approximately AD 900 to 1600, which previously has only existed in manuscript form, and a summary of excavations at major Late Mississippian sites along the Alabama River.
The results of the study demonstrate that the Alabama River Valley was settled by populations migrating from three different geographic regions during the late fifteenth century. The mixture of ceramic models associated with all three traditions at Late Mississippian sites suggests that these newly founded towns had a distinct mix of ethnically and linguistically diverse populations. Based on the archaeological record, the polity controlled by Tascalusa appears to have been both multiethnic and newly formed. Perhaps most significantly, Tascalusa's chiefdom appears to be a pre-contact example of a coalescent society that emerged after populations migrated into a new region from the deteriorating Mississippian chiefdoms in their homelands.

How Venetian glass influenced American artists and patrons during the late nineteenth century Sargent, Whistler, and Venetian Glass presents a broad exploration of American engagement with Venice's art world in the late nineteenth century. During this time, Americans in Venice not only encountered a floating city of palaces, museums, and churches, but also countless shop windows filled with dazzling specimens of brightly colored glass. Though the Venetian island of Murano had been a leading center of glass production since the Middle Ages, productivity bloomed between 1860 and 1915. This revival coincided with Venice's popularity as a destination on the Grand Tour, and resulted in depictions of Italian glassmakers and glass objects by leading American artists. In turn, their patrons visited glass furnaces and collected museum-quality, hand-blown goblets decorated with designs of flowers, dragons, and sea creatures, as well as mosaics, lace, and other examples of Venetian skill and creativity. This lavishly illustrated book examines exquisitely crafted glass pieces alongside paintings, watercolors, and prints of the same era by American artists who found inspiration in Venice, including Thomas Moran, Maria Oakey Dewing, Robert Frederick Blum, Charles Caryl Coleman, Maurice Prendergast, and Maxfield Parrish, in addition to John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler. Italian glass had a profound influence on American art, literature, and design theory, as well as the period's ideas about gender, labor, and class relations. For artists such as Sargent and Whistler, and their patrons, glass objects were aesthetic emblems of history, beauty, and craftsmanship. From the furnaces of Murano to American parlors and museums, Sargent, Whistler, and Venetian Glass brings to life the imaginative energy and unique creations that beckoned tourists and artists alike. Published in association with the Smithsonian American Art Museum Exhibition Schedule Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC October 8, 2021-May 8, 2022 Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas June 25-September 11, 2022

It begins with the history of the site, recounting how, as J. Paul Getty's art collection grew, he chose to house it in a replica of the ancient Roman villa at Herculaneum now known as the Villa dei Papiri. The second chapter chronicles the destruction of Herculaneum in 79 CE during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, the Villa dei Papiri's rediscovery in the eighteenth century, and more recent archaeological discoveries at the site. The third chapter leads readers on a tour of the Getty Villa, from the cobblestone "Roman road" through the outdoor theater, atrium, peristyles, and gardens; it includes detailed descriptions of special rooms such as the Basilica, the Room of Colored Marbles, the Temple of Herakles, and the Tablinum. The final chapter recounts how Getty began collecting art in the late 1930s, how the collection grew in the decades before and after his death in 1974, and how the displays at the Villa have evolved along with the collection. This edition includes a new director's foreword, as well as revised and refreshed main text, new photography and also includes updated floor plans of the newly reinstalled Villa.