Ezra Shales is Professor in the History of Art department at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, USA. He teaches craft and design history and is the author of The Shape of Craft (2017) and Made in Newark: Cultivating Industrial Arts and Civic Identity in the Progressive Era (2010). He has also contributed chapters to publications such as Craft Economies (Bloomsbury, 2018) and The Ceramics Reader (Bloomsbury, 2017). He has written widely on contemporary artists and modernist ceramicists, and his work has appeared in exhibition catalogues and journals such as Journal of Design History and Journal of Modern Craft.
A thoughtful book that looks with care at the overlooked. * Magdalene Odundo, OBE, artist and Emerita Professor, University for the Creative Arts, UK * Authoritative historical scholarship leavened by Shales’s connoisseurial passions and humor. * Juliet Kinchin, former Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design, Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA * Shales shows how humble wares can mean more than the most rare and exquisite, yet untouchable, of gallery exhibits. Art historians and museum curators, take note! * Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen, UK * No mean feat. You will never look at a Kool-Aid pitcher in the same way again. * Gerald W.R. Ward, Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture Emeritus, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA * An epic achievement for fictile scholarship. * Garth Clark, founder of Garth Clark Gallery and editor of C-File *