Why make ceramic protest signs? Because we will be protesting these things for a long time to come….This proposition informs the CCVA summer Display Case exhibition CCC (Ceramics Club Cambridge) featuring an installation of objects and signage created by open ceramic sessions with 2017 Josep Lluis Sert Practitioner Trisha Baga. Open to students and the general public at the Ceramics Program, Office for the Arts at Harvard, the workshop began with a prompt to make what one wished to see in the world. Baga continued to ask participants to use clay to think through the current political climate and potential futures. The CCVA Display Case, arranged by the artist, is an amalgamation of this material, alongside Baga’s own work in clay and video, and presented as a free-associative visual field by which the hierarchies of text and image are redefined.

The program was an off-shoot of the New York-based, Ceramics Club or CC, a loose artists’ organization, founded by Baga and artist Pam Lins. Since 2011, CC uses ceramics as a way to socially interact, make material, collaborate, and see what happens from there. The group models itself on propositions gleaned from amateur “clubs” that organized in the interest of dismantling and opposing professionalism, as well as withdrawing distinctions regarding quality, institutions, and representations. Since its inception, the group has met and been generously supported by Greenwich House Pottery in the West Village.

In the spirit of Ceramic Club, the artwork on view showcases a long list of artists who participated in the project and is meant as a collaboration between Baga and the participants work.

Trisha Baga

Baga is best known for immersive installations that project video through fields of hand-wrought objects that consider the operations of looking as an embodied experience. Her work follows the aggregate and distracted logic of internet browsing and scanning, fusing screen and space in a scattered yet fluid gestures.

Baga was born in Venice, Florida in 1985 and lives and works in New York. She received her BFA at Cooper Union in 2007 and her MFA at Bard College in 2010. She has had solo exhibitions at 359 Mission, Los Angeles, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Vilma Gold Gallery, London, and the Kunstverein Munich, and has shown her work at Greene Naftali Gallery, EAI, PS1, Johann Koenig Gallery, Performa09, The Housatonic Museum, LAXART, and El Centro Cultural Montehermoso.

Josep Lluis Sert Practitioner in the Arts

The Josep Lluis Sert Practitioner is an annual invitation to a distinguished artist to spend several days in residence at the Carpenter Center, engaged with students and other members of the academic community in a variety of possible activities. Founded in 1986 the program is supported by a generous gift of the late Robert Gardner, former director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, director of the Film Study Center, and chair of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies. The residency includes both close engagement with a small group of students (acting in a collaborative way) and also some occasion open to a larger invited group of faculty, students, and the general public. This larger occasion includes a lecture-demonstration, talk, or rehearsal-performance, depending on both the art and practices involved, and the wishes of the Practitioner.