Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name held at the Yale University Art Gallery, September 4, 2015-January 3, 2016.

For nearly a century British potters have invigorated traditional ceramic forms by developing or reinventing techniques, materials, and means of display. Things of Beauty Growing explores major typologies of the vessel--such as bowl, vase, and charger--that have defined studio ceramics since the early 20th century. It places British studio pottery within the context of objects from Europe, Japan, and Korea and presents essays by an international team of scholars and experts. The book highlights the objects themselves, including new works by Adam Buick, Halima Cassell, and Nao Matsunago, featured alongside works by William Staite Murray, Lucie Rie, Edmund de Waal, and others, many published here for the first time. Rounding out the beautifully illustrated volume is an interview with renowned collector John Driscoll and approximately fifty illustrated short biographies of significant makers. Published in association with the Yale Center for British Art and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge Exhibition Schedule: Yale Center for British Art, New Haven (09/14/17-12/03/17) The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (03/20/18-06/18/18)

"Glass can be decorative or utilitarian, and its forms often reflect technological innovations and social change. Drawing on an insightful selection from the Yale University Art Gallery and other collections at Yale, American Glass illuminates the vital and often intimate roles that glass has played in the nation's art and culture. Spectacularly illustrated, the publication showcases eighteenth-century mold-blown vessels, nineteenth-century pressed glass, innovative studio work, and luminous stained-glass windows by John La Farge and Louis Comfort Tiffany, the latter reproduced as a lush gatefold. These are considered alongside beguiling objects that broaden our expectations of glass and speak to the centrality of the medium in American life, including one of the oldest complex microscopes in the United States, an early Edison light bulb, glass-plate photography, jewelry, and more. With an essay on the history of collecting American glass and discussions of each object that present new scholarship, this engaging book tells the long and rich history of glass in America--from prehistoric minerals to contemporary sculptures"--Dust jacket front flap.

A landmark survey of the formative years of American studio ceramics and the constellation of people, institutions, and events that propelled it from craft to fine art

A collection of inspiring essays by the photographer Robert Adams, who advocates the meaningfulness of art in a disillusioned society In Art Can Help, the internationally acclaimed American photographer Robert Adams offers over two dozen meditations on the purpose of art and the responsibility of the artist. In particular, Adams advocates art that evokes beauty without irony or sentimentality, art that "encourages us to gratitude and engagement, and is of both personal and civic consequence." Following an introduction, the book begins with two short essays on the works of the American painter Edward Hopper, an artist venerated by Adams. The rest of this compilation contains texts--more than half of which have never before been published--that contemplate one or two works by an individual artist. The pictures discussed are by noted photographers such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Emmet Gowin, Dorothea Lange, Abelardo Morell, Edward Ranney, Judith Joy Ross, John Szarkowski, and Garry Winogrand. Several essays summon the words of literary figures, including Virginia Woolf and Czeslaw Milosz. Adams's voice is at once intimate and accessible, and is imbued with the accumulated wisdom of a long career devoted to making and viewing art. This eloquent and moving book champions art that fights against disillusionment and despair.

Sloppy Craft: Postdisciplinarity and the Crafts brings together leading international artists and critics to explore the possibilities and limitations of the idea of 'sloppy craft' – craft that is messy or unfinished looking in its execution or appearance, or both. The contributors address 'sloppiness' in contemporary art and craft practices including painting, weaving, sewing and ceramics, consider the importance of traditional concepts of skill, and the implications of sloppiness for a new 21st century emphasis on inter- and postdisciplinarity, as well as for activist, performance, queer and Aboriginal practices. In addition to critical essays, the book includes a 'conversation' section in which contemporary artists and practitioners discuss challenges and opportunities of 'sloppy craft' in their practice and teaching, and an afterword by Glenn Adamson.

Foreword by Bridget Moore. Text by Robert G. O'Meally.

This book investigates how British contemporary artists who work with clay have managed, in the space of a single generation, to take ceramics from niche-interest craft to the pristine territories of the contemporary art gallery. This development has been accompanied (and perhaps propelled) by the kind of critical discussion usually reserved for the 'higher' discipline of sculpture. Ceramics is now encountering and colliding with sculpture, both formally and intellectually. Laura Gray examines what this means for the old hierarchies between art and craft, the identity of the potter, and the character of a discipline tied to a specific material but wanting to participate in critical discussions that extend far beyond clay.

Essay by Robert Storr. Foreword by Glenn D. Lowry.

The sculptural object has spent much of the recent past being made to disappear from view. The word sculpture might still carry connotations of weight, scale and material, yet none of these things may necessarily be present in any particular work. Whether lost into a void, left behind in an expanded field or exploded to occupy the architectural space that once simply contained it, the sculptural object as the flotsam of an artist's engagement with process and materials, seems to have been in a continual state of crisis since first becoming detached from its plinth. As for the sculptor, the artist as maker, they can often be seen performing as magician, orchestrating events and actions which culminate in the object of our desire, the decorative assistant, simply vanishing from the stage. This book questions both the presence and absence of the object and its maker within contemporary British sculpture.