Louise Allison Cort | Studio Potter

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Louise Allison Cort

Louise Cort is Curator Emerita for Ceramics at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution. Her interests include historical and contemporary ceramics in Japan, Southeast Asia, and South Asia, Japanese baskets and textiles, and the Japanese art of tea (chanoyu). In 2012 she received the thirty-third Koyama Fujio Memorial Prize for her research on historical and contemporary Japanese ceramics, and the Smithsonian Distinguished Scholar Award. Cort can be reached at cortlo@si.edu.

Articles

The 1999 International Woodfiring Conference: The Death and Life of Woodfiring in Asia

By Louise Allison Cort

In this year when everyone seems to be talking about the millennium, it does seem meaningful to speak about a millennium-long span, between roughly the years 1000 and 2000 of our era, when woodfiring as an industry for producing wonderful pots attained its greatest development.

Looking at White Dew

By Louise Allison Cort

There are few American museums that do not have at least one, and some have dozens: the little, two- or three inch high, brown-glazed Japanese tea jars with ivory lids, huddled together on the shelf of a seldom opened storage case.

A Kenzan Incense Burner

By Louise Allison Cort

By adding words to his image, Kenzan transformed the reference of this conventional decoration, embedding it in history and deepening its resonance.

Decoration and Meaning in Chinese Porcelain

By Louise Allison Cort

Color in Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) Chinese imperial porcelain is a result of complex interactions among the requirements of ritual, the aspirations of taste, and the possibilities of technology.

Access to Pots: A Guide to Using Museum Collections

By Louise Allison Cort

Most museums, especially older ones with large cumulative collections, exhibit only a fraction of their holdings at any one time. Although this fact is sometimes cited as criticism of a policy of "secrecy," in reality it is a boon to the potter since pots are more readily removed from storage cupboards than from exhibition cases.

Crawling Through Mud: Avant-garde Ceramics in Postwar Japan

By Louise Allison Cort

The leading figures in this movement were a group of young Kyoto potters who looked not back - to historical models or an ideal of rustic simplicity - but outward across national traditions and boundaries.

Japanese Ceramics in America: the Early Years

By Louise Allison Cort

In short, the late nineteenth century was a time when categories of Japanese ceramics were not fixed. Japanese potters were redefining their positions. American and European patrons were groping toward definitions of quality and trying to sort out the differences among ethnographic specimens, pieces aimed at the foreign market, and objets d'art.

Looking with the Heart

By Louise Allison Cort

I asked him about how he had been taught to see, and he responded with a parable: "Look at things with the heart" (kokoro de mono we miru).

A Symposium on Woodfiring Aesthetics

By Louise Allison Cort

The rise of handcraft in our post-industrial society is a hopeful phenomenon. In the midst of high technology, it is an affirmation of the human touch.

The Peters Valley Woodfire Conference

By Louise Allison Cort

"What is it about woodfired pots that speaks so eloquently and to so few of us?"

Rice and Tea at a Special Station: Creating Memories of Train Travel in Japan

By Louise Allison Cort

In the summer of 1973, I was taking a walk with two young women who were apprentices at workshops in the pottery-filled town of Shigaraki, Japan, when we came across a small shed by the side of the road...

Shigaraki's Clay

By Louise Allison Cort

If we Iisten to voices of both the past and the present as they narrate Shigaraki's history, we often hear talk about clay–talk from the people who have dug, shaped, fired, used, or admired it.

Rereading Apprenticeship in Craft, Forty Years On

By Steve Théberge, By Louise Allison Cort

The possibility and potential of apprenticeship as a mode of training was of key interest to Gerry Williams, founding editor of Studio Potter.

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