Ceramic artist Richard Notkin’s small-scale teapots sell for thousands of dollars, and are in museum collections around the world. But after more than five successful decades working in clay, Notkin has made a practice of returning to the school that launched his career.
Beginning in February, he taught a five-week workshop at the Kansas City Art Institute called “Creating the Ceramic Narrative: Big Idea — Small Scale.” The goal is to inspire young students to make art with meaning.
"When I was at their stage in my education here at KCAI, back in (1966), ‘67, I was pretty much at the same stage they were,” said Notkin, who now has work in the collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, just across Oak Street.
But school is an opportunity to try different things, find out what works, and explore unexpected surprises, he said. It was key to finding his way into ceramics. So, about every six or seven years, Notkin said, he returns to Kansas City to pass along what he's learned.
“(I) had no idea I would wind up in clay,” Notkin said. “Had no idea I would become so passionately involved in social and political commentary, although my activism during the Vietnam War really set the stage for that for the rest of my life as an artist.”
Notkin’s teapots, shaped like skulls, hearts, and symbols of the nuclear age, hold big messages for the next generation.
“Seeing his arsenal of pieces was just inspiring,” said Z Zabukovec, a freshman from Longwood, Florida, and one of about 20 students in the class.
“I think the narrative that he presents in his work is so strong that it compelled everybody else in the class to match his enthusiasm,” they said.
Zabukovec’s own work explores the subject of habitat destruction in a series of 3-inch square tiles. Their project imagines a world where humans must live underground or attempt to escape the planet in rockets.
“My theme was just thinking about where the human race is going next, like, what the next age of man is going to look like,” Zabukovec explained. “Cause it freaks me out a little bit, where we’re at right now. And I try not to think about it too much, but I did.”
For Notkin, confronting that fear is part of the point — a clash that helped activate his generation.
"What really motivated us was that it was our asses that were on the burner,” Notkin said. “We had a draft, and our friends were being drafted and sent to Vietnam, and we were losing friends there.”
“We didn't want to go. We didn't believe in that war,” he said.
Notkin infused that spirit into his work, said William Keyse Rudolph, deputy director of Curatorial Affairs at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.
“People often just assume that the decorative arts has to stay functional, you know — a teapot serves tea, right? But what I love about Notkin's work is that he is bringing ideas into those works,” Rudolph said.
Take “Double Cooling Tower," one of five Notkin ceramics in the Nelson-Atkins’ collection. The unglazed red-brown stone clay teapot forms twin hyperboloids that resemble a nuclear power plant. To complete the look, Notkin sculpted finials at the top of each tower in the shape of a mushroom cloud.
“So there's a sort of shock and surprise,” Rudolph said. “Notkin finds a way to make an object be intellectually stimulating and terrifying, aesthetically beautiful and frightful. And he does it with something that seemingly can be so innocuous, like a teapot.”
At 75 years old, the tension between the decorative and the political continues to drive Notkin’s work.
"I've chosen material that I really love,” he said. “I love to carve and sculpt. So if I'm making a mushroom cloud, I'm not thinking about the fact that it's a mushroom cloud,” Notkin said. “I'm just having a ball, just carving.”
“I'm actually a pretty happy person, because I feel like I’m making that difference that I want art to make,” he said.
While Notkin’s students grapple with another set of challenges these days, his lessons could help them create new art that shapes the modern world.
