In the upstairs galleries of the Isamu Noguchi Museum in Queens, New York, ceramic vessels cast playful shadows resembling snail heads or a flock of birds. Clustered on a white table, these double-spouted vases by Toshiko Takaezu, created in the 1950s, look like precursors to Ghibli spirits. But their cuteness belies their significance to American ceramics.
On view in New York now until July 28, “Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within” is part of a resurgence of interest in Takaezu, a Hawaiian artist of Okinawan descent, in the decade following her death in 2011. Shown at the museum dedicated to the works of sculptor Isamu Noguchi, who was a friend and mutual admirer of Takaezu, the exhibit will tour cities across the U.S. until July 2026.
The nearly 200 works from 52 lenders show how Takaezu played with form across a wide range of mediums, including ceramics, painting and textile. At first glance, the pottery feels Japanese, until it doesn’t — bright, bold colors, like deep purple suggesting the flowers and ocean of Hawaii, and bold yellow, reminiscent of sand on the beach.
Takaezu was the sixth child in a family of 11 — she called herself the “navel child,” right in the center — and grew up speaking neither English nor her parents’ Okinawan dialect at home; rather, the family spoke standard Japanese. Though she and her siblings were each given both English and Japanese first names, Takaezu was the only one who opted to go by her Japanese one. Unlike Noguchi, she never made it big in Japan, but her heritage informed her work at a time when ceramics played a key role in the post-war diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Japan.
In 1955, Takaezu was 33, growing disillusioned with ceramics and close to giving up her craft. That year, she, her mother and one of her sisters sailed to Yokohama and spent eight months in Japan. Though the artist’s family were laborers in Hawaii, she was still taken aback by the destitution of her relatives in then-U.S.-controlled Okinawa.
Japanese ceramists at the time looked down on their American counterparts — and what’s more, Takaezu was a woman. Nonetheless, she was invited to make pottery in Okinawa and developed relationships with influential potters like Kitaoji Rosanjin and Toyo Kaneshige.
In Ai Fukunaga and Nonie Gadsden’s article, “Toshiko Takaezu and Japanese Ceramics, 1955-56,” the artist says that on her trip she “discovered that ceramics was a way of life, that Mr. Kaneshige’s approach to pottery was neither purely as art nor as craft. ... I realized that one's deep spiritual resources were the wellspring in the making of a bowl, not merely refinement of technique.”
When she returned to the U.S., she was reenergized to take up her work again. “I put into practice what I had learned of the artistry of Japanese ceramics with my own perspective of the Western world,” she said at the time. From there, she would go on to develop what she called “closed forms,” a style of ceramics that departed from functionality and moved closer to abstraction. Takaezu closed up the shapes, taking the practical use out of the vases and bowls and leaving the tiniest nipple-like pinch at one end. They became cocoons, seedpods and snails — some that could fit in the palm and some bigger than 7 feet tall.
Many of Takaezu’s ceramics were impressive in size, as large as the artist herself, and creating them were feats of kinetic energy and raw power.
“I remember her being very soft spoken,” says Amy Hau, director of the Noguchi Museum, speaking of her early days at the museum when Takaezu would come by with her students. “But when you look at her works and you look at the size of the sculpture — she must have been a powerhouse.”
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