Opening Sept. 5 at the CU Art Museum, ‘Shaping Time: CU Ceramics Alumni 2000–2020’ focuses on themes including the environment, domesticity and rituals of home and material connections

The joy—and sometimes frustration—of ceramics may be found in its contradictions: its fragile strength, its rough refinement, its elastic rigidity. Drop it and it might shatter, or it might survive millennia.

“It’s a material that’s about so much transformation,” says Jeanne Quinn, a University of Colorado Boulder professor of art and art history. “It goes from being very plastic and malleable to something that’s more like stone. And embedded in ceramics is all kinds of material meaning. Our students who are trained in ceramics are really trained to dig into technical mastery with the material but also dig into how you find meaning in the material itself, how you’re using the material as metaphor.”

 

Myers Berg Studios, United States, …in plain sight, 2025, ceramic, maple, "Shaping Time: CU Ceramics Alumni 2000–2020," CU Art Museum, Sept. 5–Dec.19, 2025. (Photo Rachel Sauer; © Myers Berg Studios)

For students in the CU Boulder ceramics program, the material also represents connection to an artistic lineage that has grown in breadth and renown through successive cohorts. It is a lineage nurtured by ceramics faculty Quinn, Scott Chamberlin and Kim Dickey, who have been teaching together and broadening the program for 25 years.

It is the length of those associations, in fact, that planted the seed of what has grown into the exhibit “Shaping Time: CU Ceramics Alumni 2000–2020,” kicking off with an opening celebration Sept. 4 at the CU Art Museum and opening to the public Sept. 5.

“CU has a really long history of investing in ceramics and having a very strong ceramics program,” Quinn explains. “Kim (Dickey) had this idea that it’s our silver anniversary of teaching together, we have this incredible group of alumni, so many amazing artists who have come through, as undergrads, as post-bacs and as grad students, so we should create an exhibit to celebrate that.”

A ceramic tradition

CU Boulder has long championed the arts and supported artists, including ceramic artists who have created a student-focused program that prioritizes learning, technical mastery and artistic exploration. The ceramic program was significantly bolstered by Betty Woodman, an internationally renowned artist whose 2006 retrospective show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City was the first such show by a living female ceramicist, and who taught at CU Boulder for 30 years.

Chamberlin was a colleague of Woodman, and Quinn was a student of both Woodman and Chamberlin before joining the ceramics faculty in 1997.

“In this program, there is a real commitment to ceramics and its incredibly rich history,” Quinn says. “Every civilization from the beginning of time has had ceramics, so it’s an incredible kind of medium to work with and have the opportunity to reference all that. But I also feel like we have a very non-dogmatic approach to teaching—there’s so much history, but also so much space for experimentation and invention.

“Ceramics is a very demanding material. Anybody who’s ever sat down and tried to throw a pot on the wheel realizes oh, you don’t just toss this off. Every step requires real skill, real technical skill, but we’ve worked to build a program where students receive this amazing education in learning how to learn and learning how to grapple with the material and how the material can offer so many different avenues of expression.”

Erica Green, a post-baccalaureate student in the program between 2011 and 2013 and one of the exhibit’s 30 featured artists, credits the ceramics program’s emphasis on exploration with helping her forge her path as an artist.

“Ceramics is always my first love, but the nice thing about this department is you’re encouraged to follow the idea and not just the material,” Green says. “One of my professors in the program suggested I set clay to the side and focus on fiber and being more in tune with the material.”

Green’s work in the exhibit, “California King,” centers on a bed covered in a blanket of knotted felt and wool-blend fibers. “I work a lot in knots as a metaphor for mending and repair and healing.”

Artist Lucero Aguirre, who earned an MFA in the ceramics program, created the quilted tapestry “Mije” to include thousands of iridescent ceramic sequins—bringing together “the spaces of brownness and queerness in its sequined message,” Aguirre explains. “The term ‘mije’ is a gender-neutral version of the often-used Spanish term of endearment ‘mija,’ or daughter.”

In transforming “mija” into “mije,” Aguirre considers the “affective labor of navigating brownness as a queer subject. The piece responds to the way that intimacy is often gendered in Mexican and Latine spaces, leaving queer Latine bodies at once inside and outside.”

 

Erica Green assembles her work "California King" (2022, knotted fibers on mattress) for the "Shaping Time: CU Ceramics Alumni 2000–2020" exhibit opening Sept. 5 at the CU Art Museum. (Photo Rachel Sauer; © Erica Green)

‘You can do anything with clay’

Quinn emphasizes that even though the exhibit celebrates the ceramics program, it also includes textiles, video works, photography, live performances and other media. “(The exhibit) runs the gamut of materials, but the unifying piece is that you can see that sense of commitment to the craft, to really handling a material with authority and also expressing something beyond the material.”

The hardest part, she adds, was choosing exhibit participants “because we’re in touch with all of these alumni, we’re following what they’re doing, they’re sending us updates.”

At the same time the exhibit participants were being chosen, Quinn and her colleagues were working with CU Art Museum staff to envision and plan the exhibit—a time-intensive but rewarding process, says Hope Saska, CU Art Museum acting director. Saska also partnered with Quinn, Dickey and Chamberlin to organize an all-day symposium September 5 celebrating the exhibit; it will include performances, conversations and in-gallery artist talks.

“You say ceramics and people have this idea of, ‘Oh, you’re making pots on the wheel,’” Quinn says. “And ceramics certainly fits in this kind of lane, that is absolutely part of what we teach. But you also have an artist like Casey Whittier, who made thousands of ceramic beads and then strung them together into this gorgeous textile piece that hangs on a wall. Casey has taken ceramics, which you might think of as fixed and static, and then created this piece that hangs and moves and is as much a textile as it is ceramics.

“So, we want people to come to the exhibit, and especially we want students to think, ‘Oh, you can do anything with clay.’”

Lucero Aguirre, mije, 2024, handmade and lustered ceramic sequins, thread and batting and fabric, "Shaping Time: CU Ceramics Alumni 2000–2020," CU Art Museum, Sept. 5–Dec. 19, 2025. (Photo: Rachel Sauer; © Lucero Aguirre)

Linda Nguyen Lopez, United States (1981), Gummy Worm, Ombre Dust Furry, 2021, porcelain, "Shaping Time: CU Ceramics Alumni 2000–2020," CU Art Museum, Sept. 5–Dec. 19, 2025. (Photo: Rachel Sauer, © Linda Nguyen Lopez)

Joanna Powell, United States (1981), Flower Vessel no. 1, 2019, earthenware, majolica, gold luster, "Shaping Time: CU Ceramics Alumni 2000–2020," CU Art Museum, Sept. 5–Dec. 19, 2025. (Photo Rachel Sauer; © Joanna Powell)

Sandra Trujillo, United States (1967), Mosaic - Yellow, 2024, Mexican Smalti (glass), Wedi (polystyrene board), wood, steel, "Shaping Time: CU Ceramics Alumni 2000–2020," CU Art Museum, Sept. 5–Dec. 19, 2025. (Photo: Rachel Sauer; © Sandra Trujillo)

Julie Poitras Santos, United States (1967), The Conversation, 2019, single channel video, "Shaping Time: CU Ceramics Alumni 2000–2020," CU Art Museum, Sept. 5–Dec. 19, 2025. (Photo: Rachel Sauer; © Julie Poitras Santos)

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