CURATOR TALK

Forming Narratives around Clay: Perspectives from Hollis Goodall and Kaoru Kuribayashi

7:00 - 8:30 pm (PST), Tuesday, September 1, 2026
ONLINE Zoom Webinar
(Link to be provided)

RSVP HERE
Free, RSVP Required
This program will not be recorded

Join curators Hollis Goodall and Kaoru Kuribayashi as they introduce and discuss their respective exhibitions at American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA) and The Japan Foundation, Los Angeles (JFLA), during a special online conversation.

Tōgei: Contemporary Japanese Ceramics, curated by Goodall for AMOCA, features 106 works presented categorically in zones dedicated to modern precursors, utensils for tea, sake, dining, incense, vase forms, and then non-utilitarian boxes and pure sculpture. Each zone explicates the aesthetic range from traditional, wabi-sabi style, to contemporary interpretations of utilitarian form, made expressive through form, gesture, and creative reengineering of pre-modern glazes.

Kinetic Stillness: Sculptural Ceramics, curated by Kuribayashi for JFLA, brings together seven Japanese and Japanese American artists who approach ceramics not as vessels for utility or tradition, but as sculptural sites of flux. Through bending, pressing, collapsing, and building, their works foreground the artists’ physicality and material processes, capturing the moment where form holds movement and stillness pulses with memory, while also pointing to a deeper temporal condition within clay itself. Each form bears the imprint of motion and history, embodying what we call kinetic stillness, an energy suspended in silence.

Participants are encouraged to ask questions that invite both curators to provide their insights. Their unique considerations of ceramics, art, and the intersection of aesthetics and functions underly their curatorial approaches to these incredible exhibits.

This event is co-presented by American Museum of Ceramic Art, with community support from Japanese Art Society of America (JASA).

CURATORS

Hollis Goodall

Hollis Goodall retired in 2023 as Curator of Japanese Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where she worked for 42 years and curated 276 exhibitions and installations. Her exhibition on contemporary Kyoto ceramics is currently being installed at LACMA. Prior to curating “Tōgei: Contemporary Japanese Ceramics,” which is open until January 3, 2027, at the American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA) in Pomona, Goodall curated “Rising Sun/ Falling Rain: Japanese Woodblock Prints from the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts” at the Hammer Museum for the autumn of 2025. Her recent publications on Japanese ceramics include “A Brittle Bounty: Ceramic Works by Mishima Kimiyo” for the exhibition and catalogue Radical Clay: Contemporary Women Artists from Japan, which debuted in 2023 at the Art Institute of Chicago, and “Radiating Beauty: Sculpture by Shozo Michikawa” for the catalogue Shozo Michikawa, produced by Hostler Burrows Gallery in Los Angeles in 2022.

Photo by Ryo Kawano

Kaoru KURIBAYASHI

Kaoru Kuribayashi is an interdisciplinary artist whose work engages with traditional forms as living, evolving practices. She holds master’s degrees from Goldsmiths, University of London (2020), and UCLA (2024), where she researched how Japanese traditional culture articulates mindfulness, ritual, and transcendental experience in a global contemporary context. Her practice spans tea, fabric, performance, and meditative installation, and is rooted in her training in Chanoyu (Japanese tea ceremony), which she began at age ten. She focuses on micro-gestures and sensory precision, exploring how traditional arts can prompt slowness, embodied attention, and cross-cultural resonance. Rather than preserving tradition in a fixed form, she approaches it as a porous system—open to reinterpretation and quiet intervention.

Related Exhibition

KINETIC STILLNESS: Sculptural Ceramics (on view through September 19)

Tea Ceremony with Pacific Plastics (on view through September 19)