"The Teabowl" with Meghen Jones

0:00-11:49: Wayne Higby, ACAM Director and Chief Curator
11:50: Meghen Jones, Associate Professor of Art History and Guest Curator, Path of the Teabowl exhibition


In Holmes Auditorium on September 28, 2021, Dr. Meghen Jones presented "The Teabowl," on the occasion of the Path of the Teabowl exhibition she guest curated for the Alfred Ceramic Art Museum. In this lecture, she addresses the central questions of the project: What is a teabowl? How did it become an iconic ceramic art form? Discussed are some of the exhibition's over one hundred East Asian and North American teabowls and related objects from the tenth through the twenty-first century.

Jones, Associate Professor of Art History at Alfred University, received her PhD in the History of Art and Architecture from Boston University, after completing a master's degree in Ceramic Craft Design at Musashino Art University in Tokyo. Her research centers on modern Japanese art, design, and the global flows of ceramics. For the preparation of this exhibition and catalogue, she received a seven-month research grant from the Japan Foundation, sponsored by the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto. Her recent publications include Ceramics and Modernity in Japan, co-edited with Louise Allison Cort; "National Treasure Tea Bowls as Cultural Icons in Modern Japan" in The Construction and Dynamics of Cultural Icons, edited by Erica van Boven and Marieke Winkler; and “Hamada Shōji, Kitaōji Rosanjin and the Reception of Japanese Pottery in the Early Cold War United States,” in Design and Culture.