Designed by Jonathan Louie and Marliis Newsome
Organized by Mingei International as the first major West Coast presentation of Eva Zeisel’s work, the exhibition drew on two large private California collections, those of Pat Moore and Dr. Gene L. Grobman in the San Francisco Bay Area and Jim Drobka in Los Angeles. From Mingei International, the exhibition traveled to the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles.
The exhibition was funded in part by The City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture and The County of San Diego Community Enhancement Program.
Eva Zeisel has had a 75-year career and, by her own accounting, has designed more than 100,000 objects centered on the home and table – dinnerware, vases, candlesticks, dishes, tea and coffee pots, pitchers, and salt and pepper shakers. She was the first designer in this country to produce an all-white dinner service, an event documented by a special exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1946. She was also the first to teach ceramics as industrial design for mass production rather than as handcraft. She has said significantly, “Everything I do is a direct creation of my hands, whether it is made in wood, plaster or clay.”
This exhibition of her lyrical, sinuous, sometimes whimsical work was the unfragmented creative expression of one human being – head, heart and hands, made available to a large public by machine production. In this, Eva Zeisel is a most important exponent of mingei principles for the machine age.
Eva Zeisel’s book, On Design, was available at the Collectors’ Gallery during the exhibition. The film _Throwing Curves_ played throughout the run of the exhibition.
An Eva Zeisel Symposium took place February 4, 2007. Topics and speakers were Eva’s Schramberg Years - Pat Moore, Co-President, Eva Zeisel Forum and lender to the exhibition; Russian Arts of Fire - Karen Koblitz, Ceramics Professor, University of Southern California; Eva’s California Connection: Riverside Ceramics - Jim Drobka, Senior Designer, Getty Publications and lender to the exhibition; Castleton China – Mary Davis, collector and Castleton expert; Eva's Extended Hallcraft Family - Margaret Carney, PhD, Curator, The Blair Museum of Lithopanes, Toledo, Ohio and Eva Bewitched and Beset by History - Joyce Corbett, Exhibition Curator.