Dallas Museum of Art Uncrated

Sofia Penny Curatorial Intern in the Asian art department at the Dallas Museum of Art

Tanaka Y?, Tsutsumimono (“Wrapped Item”), 2022. Glazed stoneware, 24 3/8 x 18 1/2 x 19 in. Dallas Museum of Art, Cecil and Ida Green Acquisition Fund, Susan Mead Contemporary Art Acquisition Fund, and Discretionary Decorative Arts Fund. 2023.71.

New to the Dallas Museum of Art collection, Tsutsumimono (“Wrapped Item”) by Tanaka Y? carries a deep history of the art of Japanese wrapping and connects viewers to its contemporary traditions. This ceramic glazed stoneware, measuring 24 3/8 x 18 1/2 x 19 inches, commands attention through Tanaka’s bold use of color. The work exudes a tangible presence, enhanced by the interplay of color and size. It contrasts weights—where a seemingly concealed object anchors against the light, fluid, and malleable imitation of fabric. The idea of fabric is communicated through the undulating forms that appear to ripple, roll, and curve, falling into the object, all working to conceal its form and essence from the viewer. The consistency of the clay further emphasizes the textile-like quality in its uniformity and texture. The sculpture captivates its audience as they navigate the work, allowing their imaginations to grapple with and attempt to unravel its mysterious nature.

Building on this interplay of material and illusion, contemporary third-generation Japanese ceramic artist Tanaka Y? creates clay objects resembling vessels wrapped in the traditional wrapping cloth, furoshiki. Furoshiki is a single fabric used to transport clothes, gifts, or other goods. Furoshiki enjoyed wide usage for over 1,200 years, continuing until the end of the Edo period (1615-1868 CE). The custom originates from the Nara period (710-784 CE), when it safeguarded the valuables of emperors. The oldest known wrapping cloth from the Nara period is preserved at the Shosoin, a wooden storage house at the Todaiji Temple in Nara. During the Heian period (794-1185 CE), furoshiki was used to wrap and carry clothes for the nobility. In the Muromachi period (1338-1573 CE), Shogun Ashikaga built a great steam bathhouse where noble guests used silk cloths with their family crests to keep their clothes separate while bathing. In the Edo period, public bathhouses (sento) became widespread, and furoshiki was used as a mat while undressing and as a wrapping cloth to carry clothes. The name furoshiki combines two words: “furo,” meaning “bath,” and “shiki,” meaning “to spread.” Before furoshiki became associated with public baths, people called it hirazutsumi, meaning “flat folded bundle.” Eventually, furoshiki became essential for merchants to transport their goods and served a functional role for the working class during the Edo period. Initially used to carry clothes, furoshiki evolved to wrap almost anything, symbolizing respect for others on gift-giving occasions and imbuing special meanings to the wrapping materials and the wrapped goods. Modern furoshiki are made from various materials, including silk, cotton, and synthetic fibers, with designs varying depending on their use. The most commonly used furoshiki are squares measuring 27 3/5 or 35 2/5 inches wide. While many people regard furoshikias unique to Japanese culture, similar traditions exist in other countries, such as Korea, where a patchwork wrapping cloth called bojagi has been utilized for centuries.

Modern furoshiki, Photo by Katorisi, 2007. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furoshiki#/media/File:Traditional_Japanese_wrapping_cloth,huroshiki,katori-city,japan.JPG

Furoshiki is a versatile medium for utility and personal expression and a sustainable alternative to plastic waste. After World War II, its usage declined with the rise of plastic shopping bags. However, with growing environmental awareness, furoshiki has regained popularity—compact when folded and reusable, furoshiki is an eco-friendly and convenient wrapping cloth. In 2006, Japanese Minister of the Environment Yuriko Koike introduced the Mottainai Furoshiki campaign, which loosely translates as “use a furoshiki to avoid waste,” to promote its use. Its adoption is believed to help reduce household waste from plastic bags.

The furoshiki can transform into whatever the user needs it to be. Just as the fabric can be wrapped and used in countless ways, Tanaka reflects the versatility by appearing to conceal the objects within this work, Tsutsumimono, even though the sculpture is empty inside. This deliberate concealment encourages viewers to use their imagination and speculate about what might lie hidden beneath the fabric. The artist elevates an everyday object often overlooked. Tanaka centralizes the furoshiki in her work, blurring the distinction between object and vessel. The furoshikielevates whatever it envelops, prompting consideration of its fabric and traditional significance as art in its own right. Examining the deliberate folds and Tanaka’s signature knot that sinks into the object draws one into a vision of the physical process of how the object was folded. If one knows how, almost anything can be wrapped in furoshiki, regardless of size or shape, with ingenuity and the proper folding technique. Each stage, from crafting the fabric to folding it over the object and transporting it to its destination, embodies elements of artistry and performance. With this work Tanaka brings attention to the often overlooked details. The furoshiki aligns perfectly with the Japanese cultural tradition of meticulously wrapping even the most seemingly insignificant objects, a practice that continues to thrive in Japan today.

Still from Interiors: Mysteries in Clay by Tanaka Yu, 3:25 minutes. https://www.mirviss.com/artists/tanaka-yu

While Tsutsumimono may appear slab-built, Tanaka coil-builds her forms using Shigaraki-blended clay. This method provides superior porosity and plasticity, granting her greater artistic freedom. Additionally, Shigaraki clay further infuses her work with historical depth. Shigaraki, one of Japan’s Six Ancient Kilns, is among the oldest pottery-producing regions in the country. Located at a crossroads for transportation between Nara, Yamashiro in the central Kinai region, and the Tokai region (Nagoya area), Shigaraki has continuously produced pottery from the 13th century to the present. Throughout its 800-year-old tradition, Shigaraki has primarily focused on creating utilitarian vessels. While the forms have evolved and glazes have become increasingly refined, most Shigaraki products share a common characteristic: they are large, sturdy containers meant for storage or other practical functions. Shigaraki clay underscores a continuity with the past, creating a dialogue between traditional and contemporary Japanese art. By incorporating this clay into her art, Tanaka creates an intersection of utility and beauty, compelling attention to everyday materials.

The artist’s choice to use turmeric yellow is steeped in historical significance. In Japan, people have traditionally used ukon-nuno (turmeric cloth) to wrap antique crafts because they believe turmeric repels worms and insects. Tanaka uses this same deep yellow hue to wrap her ceramic work, paying homage to the tradition. For surface treatment, Tanaka smooths the surfaces with a sponge and then applies a thin layer of clay slip using either a brush or airbrush. To achieve its distinctive deep yellow color, she applies two coats of pigment before the initial firing, repeating this process up to four times until reaching the desired hue.

She cleverly manipulates and folds her clay to imitate a textile, creating her representation of furoshiki. By doing so, she mimics the traditional process of wrapping a furoshiki around an object, blending clay sculpting techniques with the art of fabric folding. This approach combines two histories of techniques while paying homage to the cultural significance of furoshiki.

Tanaka’s works are celebrated both within Japan and internationally. They have been exhibited in several institutions and museums, garnering significant accolades for a relatively young artist in the Japanese ceramic industry. As a Kyoto Saga University of Arts student, where she earned a B.F.A. in ceramics,Tanaka initially studied oil painting but soon switched to ceramics because she enjoyed the physical demands of working with clay. She then went on to earn an M.F.A. in ceramics from Kyoto City University of Arts. Tanaka currently lives and works in Kyoto.

It is essential to recognize the broader context of the Japanese ceramic field, which has historically been dominated by men. Like many other arts and crafts in Japan, the ceramics field was often passed down through male lineage within families. Men typically held the prestigious positions of master ceramists and were the primary figures recognized for their contributions to the art form. However, the landscape has been changing, particularly since the mid-20th century. Women have increasingly entered the field, gaining recognition and acclaim for their work. Despite ongoing challenges related to gender roles and societal expectations, female ceramists have made significant contributions and continue pushing the medium’s boundaries. Notable contemporary female ceramists, such as Tanaka Y?, reflect this shift and women’s growing presence and influence in the Japanese ceramic art field.

Tsutsumimono not only honors the rich history and cultural significance of furoshiki but also reimagines it through the medium of clay. Tanaka’s innovative approach and artistic craftsmanship bridge traditional Japanese practices with contemporary art, inviting viewers to engage with the work on multiple levels. As environmental consciousness grows, the revival offuroshiki underscores the importance of sustainable practices, making Tanaka’s creations both a nod to the past and a beacon for the future. Tsutsumimono is currently on view in the Japan gallery on the Level 3. Visit the Dallas Museum of Art to experience this remarkable artwork for yourself!

Sean Earley (1953–1992) was born in New Orleans and raised in Hurst, Texas. After studying at the University of Texas at Arlington and exhibiting in Dallas at galleries such as 500X, he moved to New York to pursue painting, making a living as an illustrator on the side. Earley went on to attain a residency at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, Italy, and gallery representation at Bridgewater Gallery, rising to relative success in his budding career through numerous group and solo shows. However, these professional achievements were followed by an HIV and consequential AIDS diagnosis, pushing Earley to amass his legacy through painting for the remainder of his life. He moved back to Texas in his final years to be near family and fell in love with his home state, creating artwork that focused on Texas iconography and narratives. Being a queer artist himself, Earley also assisted in the DMA’s first Day Without Art, a nationwide day of mourning and activism for the AIDS crisis in 1989. He died three years later, in June 1992, due to complications from AIDS. 

Earley’s work employs a distinctly medieval sense of depth and composition, stacking people against one another as their elongated, flat bodies and dreary faces set an uneasy pace. The medieval inspiration furthers the stagnant dread of his subjects in both historical associations and scenery. Intentionally combining postmodern ideation with an ever-present archaic angst, Earley’s subjects embody modern mundanity and other timeliness simultaneously. 

The Rapture reflects Earley’s deep sense of unnerving detail as people ascend into the heavens from tasks left unattended at particularly inconvenient times. Scenes such as people mid-drive in downtown Dallas alongside a dog being dragged up by its leash from its owner’s enrapturement mix discomfort into closure. The consequences of the rapture, a Christian end-time belief in which God will raise his believers into heaven, are as uniquely curious as they are unsettling. As someone who spent the majority of his life during the Cold War, Earley developed a fascination with the motionless angst of the time and the looming threat of nuclear war during an otherwise calm postwar American dream. Earley found what he called a “distant kinship” with medieval art, which was made by men caught in a similar perpetual fear, even if for different reasons. This is profoundly evident in The Rapture as Dallas residents move upward in the final moments of Earth, leaving behind their mortal lives in a vibrant yet devastating display. 

Situated in downtown Dallas’s converging highways, these enraptured Dallas residents above Dealey Plaza underscore an infamous part of the city’s history: the JFK assassination. Earley parallels the shock and fear of this historical event with the angst-ridden mundanity of postwar American life that was so prevalent for the Baby Boomer generation. The angst, melded into departures and closures, endings and beginnings, is met in equal part by Sean Earley’s uncanny sense of humor and playfulness. A vibrant, orderly Dallas is pulled at by its threads with a certain absurdity—as seen in a woman crashing through the ceiling of a building, the petrified and expressionless ascension of each person, and even the vibrant retrofuturistic cars—preluding a future not too far from the painting’s creation in 1982. Earley depicts the everyday fears of American life—and Dallas life, in particular—in a melting pot of emotions from all corners of suburbia using an unseen higher hand, and, to some extent, he plays God as he whisks his subjects upward across the wooden panel. 

Julia Garrett is the 2023–2024 McDermott Intern for Contemporary Art at the Dallas Museum of Art. 

Image: Sean Earley, The Rapture, 1982. Oil on wood, 49 3/4 × 49 1/4 × 1 1/2 in. (126.37 × 125.1 × 3.81 cm), Dallas Museum of Art, gift of Paul Bridgewater, 2022.90.5. © Estate of Sean Earley.

The following is an excerpt from the exhibition catalogue for Octavio Medellín: Spirit and Form, opening for free at the Dallas Museum of Art on February 6, 2022.

In 1978, the artist Octavio Medellín (1907–1999) wrote a short text that appears to have been the beginning of a book project that he later abandoned. Opening with a poem, The Masterpiece, presumably by the artist, … it reads as a stream of consciousness, unedited and without paragraph breaks. At times the text seems akin to an artist’s statement…. On the third page he writes:  

“…we think of materials as purely a medium, I personally believe that materials have a soul of their own particularly if you are to work directly with them, each one is different than the other. My mission was to search in them their behavior so that I communicate with them and develop a sensitive feeling and become part of them, not to take for granted their natural formation but to be inspired and invent a form that is not entirely what’s there, but a mixture of both.” 

Medellín’s artistic practice was defined by his exploration of the duality that he alludes to in this unpublished text. He demonstrated a drive to understand and master new materials, beginning first with wood, stone, and clay, later expanding to include various forms of glass and metalwork. At the same time, regardless of facture, Medellín’s work can be characterized by its animate qualities—pose, movement, etc.—that the artist harnessed to provoke an emotional response. This “spirit” comes in part, as Medellín points out, from the materials themselves. 

Given his view that an artist’s spirit contributes to an object’s ability to engage its viewers, Medellín was understandably cognizant of the role of his own personal history and identity in his work and its reception. Throughout his almost seven-decade career, he utilized pivotal events in his life as sources of inspiration for his work, such as his experiences of the Mexican Civil War or his transformative trip to Yucatán to study Maya ruins.  

Medellín’s philosophies were … also at the heart of his approach to teaching. Over the course of his career, he taught at numerous institutions across Texas, his repertoire of classes expanding alongside his own artistic practice…. Stories and anecdotes abound of his legendary ability to guide students, and of the lingering impact of their interactions with him. Within the city of Dallas, Medellín’s legacy as a teacher has in some senses overshadowed his importance as an artist, but in fact the two roles are intertwined and inseparable—his connections to his students were an important source of inspiration and creativity.  

This catalogue, and the exhibition … seeks first and foremost to draw attention to Medellín’s work and his unique place within mid-twentieth century art in North America. A pivotal individual within a network of artists and cultural figures that contributed to the development of modern art in Texas, Medellín also had significant connections throughout the wider field of “American” art, as well as to leading figures within Mexican Modernism.  Despite his position at the intersection of so many important groups, Medellín’s work remains relatively overlooked.… This project represents the most expansive assessment of the artist’s career to date.

Dr. Mark A. Castro is The Jorge Baldor Curator of Latin American Art at the DMA.

In anticipation of an upcoming Arts & Letters Live event with author Kaitlyn Greenidge, I had the opportunity to chat with her recently about her new novel Libertie. Deemed one of the most-anticipated books of 2021 and the May pick for Roxane Gay’s Book Club, Libertie is a fictionalized account rooted in women’s history.

In the novel, Libertie Sampson, a young Black woman in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, feels confined by her mother’s stringent vision for her future. Libertie is to go to medical school and practice alongside her mother. However, the independent-minded protagonist finds herself being drawn more to the arts than science and longs for adventure.

Greenidge told me how she got the idea for the character while running the oral history program at the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn, which preserves one of the largest free Black communities in pre-Civil War America. There, Greenidge interviewed Ellen Holly, a TV soap actress who shared stories of her family heritage which included Dr. Susan Smith McKinney Steward (1847–1918), Brooklyn’s first Black woman physician, and the third Black physician in the U.S. Dr. Steward’s renown as a doctor and founder of medical clinics and her work for suffrage and civil rights were not the only thing that caught Greenidge’s attention. She learned from the oral history that Dr. Steward traveled to Haiti to rescue her daughter from a failed marriage. And thus the character of Libertie was born.

Like the historical figure on which she is based, Libertie follows her husband to Haiti. Greenidge found inspiration in Hattian art. “I loved the blending of history and current events into art, and how people use fine arts to document history,” she told me.

She also conducted meticulous research on a number of topics including homeopathy. In Greenidge’s novel several pivotal moments occur in Dr. Sampson’s (the fictional version of Dr. Steward) home garden, which flourishes with medicinal plants. John Gerad’s work (below) mirrors the bountiful uses of plants as medicine. Throughout the novel, Greenidge intertwines the lives of the characters and the purpose and magic of plants.

Dr. Steward’s passion for healing extended beyond the walls of the hospital into the social, intellectual and artistic health of her community as she fostered racial inclusion, women’s rights, and local art exhibits. “What’s interesting about the period of Reconstruction, is that you have Black people creating communities whole scale from scratch,” Greenidge told me, “and what was really striking to me was how revolutionary their ideas of care were.”

Greenidge described her fascination upon discovering that African American newspapers serving newly freed Black people dedicated half of their space to news and half as a literacy primer. The consideration demonstrated in this—a paper both for those who can and those who are still learning to read—struck Greenidge as genius.

“The novel is really looking at the politics of care, and how communities decide who is worthy or unworthy of care,” Greenidge explained.

In Jacob Lawrence’s The Visitors, above, loved ones offer consolation to the bedridden. The theme of care, as seen here and in Greenidge’s novel, resonates today.

Cristina Carolina Echezarreta is the 2020-2021 McDermott intern for Adult Programs/Arts & Letters Live at the DMA.

Dolores Velásquez Cueto, better known as Lola, began taking drawing and painting classes at the National School of Fine Arts in 1909, when she was just 12 years old. Two years later, against the backdrop of the Mexican Civil War, she became a student at the school full time, taking classes alongside such notable artists as David Alfaro Siqueiros, who himself was only one year older than her. Cueto was a voracious student, studying printmaking and other mediums at the National School, while also studying painting at the Open-Air Painting School in Santa Anita under the acclaimed painter Alfredo Ramos Martínez. She also began to teach drawing at a night school for workers, and her interest in education would continue throughout her life.

Cueto’s early work was praised by critics, raising her profile in the flourishing art scene in Mexico City. In 1919 she married fellow art student Germán Cueto Vidal, who would become one of the most well known experimental sculptors of the period. Their home was one of the city’s cultural hubs, where prominent artists and other cultural figures came to socialize.

Although Cueto continued to work in other mediums, she was increasingly drawn to tapestries, no doubt influenced by a childhood passion for embroidery. At the same time, she was part of a contemporary international trend—inspired in part by the Bauhaus—that sought to modernize historic artistic traditions using new techniques and technology. In her early tapestries, for example, Cueto used a sewing machine to create dense, precise embroidery with mercerized and silk threads.

Dr. Mark A. Castro is The Jorge Baldor Curator of Latin American Art at the DMA.