Funk You Too! Humor and Irreverence in Ceramic Sculpture - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 3777440949 ISBN 13: 9783777440941

Publisher: Hirmer, 2023

Synopsis

The first book to connect the history of Funk Art to contemporary ceramic practice.

Funk You Too! arrives at a moment when clay has unprecedented currency in the art world as a sculptural medium. It is the first book to connect the history of Funk Art to contemporary ceramic practice through an exploration of the enduring role of humor in clay image-making. The founding generation of Funk artists used forms of subversion to deflate the power of the aesthetic hierarchy that dismissed ceramics as hobby art. Today, in the hands of a younger, more diverse cohort, the irreverent approach is a powerful tool of critique and personal expression and the “spoonful of sugar” to help discuss sociopolitical concerns of our time.

Showcasing over 50 works from a 2023 exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, this catalog addresses the historical context for the emergence of ceramic sculpture in 1960s Funk Art and applies a critical lens to work by its contemporary successors. The exhibition’s curator, Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy, conceptually frames the exhibition’s emphasis on humor as a tool for tackling personal and political themes. Garth Johnson contributes an essay on the impulse for humor in American ceramics that lead to Funk ceramics. The catalog also features biographies of the artists, color images, and a select bibliography.

About this title

About the Author

Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy is a Los Angeles-based independent curator and writer of contemporary art and craft.

From the Back Cover

Funk You Too!: Humor and Irreverence in Ceramic Sculpture is the first book to connect the historic Funk Art Movement to contemporary ceramic practice through the exploration of the enduring role of irony, absurdity, and a tongue-in-cheek approach to image-making with clay.

The essay contributors address the historical context for the emergence of ceramic sculpture in the Funk Art movement and apply a critical lens to the work of a younger generation working today who have redirected the sharply barbed irreverence of the historic Funk style to a broad exploration of social injustice and personal narratives. In their hands, irony and satire are tools for addressing inequality, and slapstick or gallows humour functions as a vehicle for the exploration of difficult subject matter or taboo issues surrounding race, gender, and sexuality.

Contributors include the exhibition curator Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy, who conceptually frames the exhibition’s emphasis on humour as a visual and rhetorical tool in ceramics to address themes of personal and political narratives; Garth Johnson (Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse), who contributes a historical essay on the Funk Art movement, its development over the years, and the important but often overlooked place of ceramic sculpture within it; and Andres Payan Estrada (Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles), who explores the zeitgeist of ceramics in the contemporary art world with particular attention to the new generation of artists included in the exhibition.

The book also includes biographies; full-colour, captioned images; and a bibliography. For many of the younger artists featured in the exhibition, it is their New York City debut, and this is the first scholarly examination of their work in print.

Edition details

• Publisher: Hirmer
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 3777440949
• ISBN 13: 9783777440941
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 112
• Editor: Vizcarrondo-Laboy Angelik