What can a humble pitcher reveal about American life? In this lecture, art historian and author Ezra Shales presents insights from his new book Pitchers of American Life: Art Within Reach, examining pitchers, jugs, and communal cups as evidence of how people work, worship, celebrate, and care for one another. Moving from long-standing rituals to the growth of mass production and today’s consumer habits, Shales shows how these everyday vessels act as historical documents in plain sight. Selected objects will circulate during the talk for close looking and discussion; no prior experience with ceramics is expected.
Co-presented by the Ceramics Program, Office for the Arts at Harvard and the Harvard Ed Portal. This lecture is free and open to the public, but advanced registration is required. Light refreshments will be served.
5:00pm - Doors open; enjoy light refreshments & tour the current exhibition in the Ed Portal's Crossings Gallery
5:30pm - Lecture followed by Q&A
A limited number of copies of the book may be available to purchase at the event, or consider ordering a copy via Molly's Bookstore, our new neighborhood shop.
Ezra Shales is Professor in the History of Art department at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, USA. He teaches craft and design history and is the author of The Shape of Craft (2017) and Made in Newark: Cultivating Industrial Arts and Civic Identity in the Progressive Era (2010). He has also contributed chapters to publications such as Craft Economies (Bloomsbury, 2018) and The Ceramics Reader (Bloomsbury, 2017). He has written widely on contemporary artists and modernist ceramicists, and his work has appeared in exhibition catalogues and journals such as Journal of Design History and Journal of Modern Craft.