Diving Into Hidden Universes: Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within at the MFAH

MICHAEL MCFADDEN·
HoustonVisual Art
·

When an artist allows it, their practice can become all-encompassing, blurring the lines between practice, spirit, and the world around them. Beauty is found in the everyday: the preparation of a meal, a mother reading to her child on a porch, a bird lifting from a branch.

Toshiko Takaezu (1922 – 2011), a Hawaii-born Japanese American artist, had an artistic practice rooted in nature and informed by both Western and Eastern traditions.

In a 1975 issue of Ceramics Monthly, she wrote, “You are not an artist simply because you paint or sculpt or make pots that cannot be used. An artist is a poet in his or her own medium. And when an artist produces a good piece, that work has mystery, an unsaid quality; it is alive.”

Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within is an ambitious traveling retrospective of the artist’s work, on view at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston from March 2-May 18, 2025.

“This is the first major retrospective of her work in 20 years,” said Elizabeth Essner, Windgate Foundation Associate Curator of Craft at the MFAH. The show debuted at the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, co-curated by Glenn Adamson, Kate Wiener, and Leilehua Lanzilotti, but the MFAH’s relationship with Takaezu goes back to 2002 when the museum first acquired a piece of hers.

“The exhibition is not only a look at her ceramics but the entirety of her practice: fiber, painting, bronze casting, and work on paper,” Essner explained. “It became an investigation of those who knew her work and a revelation for younger generations who do not know it.

At Takaezu’s death in 2011, the artist was revered by ceramicists but remained relatively unknown to anyone outside that sphere. Her work languished between the zones of craft and visual art, a margin in which many women thrived as men cast a looming shadow over paint and sculpture.

In 2023, Takaezu’s career took center stage with several exhibitions to celebrate the innovative nature of her artistic practice, including Shaping Abstraction at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Takaezu & Tawney: An Artist is a Poet at Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.

“There’s long been a question of what modern American art is,” Essner reflected. “Her work meets this moment and answers in a way that opens up the way that we view it.”

Worlds Within pulls its title from Takaezu’s own description of a universe within a pot; specifically, the closed forms that became a critical part of her practice. With the form completely sealed, Takaezu fostered a sense of mystery in her pieces, often claiming to have written messages on the inside or included writings on paper that would burn in the process.

“She thought about it as a dark space that we cannot see,” Essner explained. “The idea of interiority related to these cosmic, metaphysical ideas invisible to us, and over the course of her career it became a means of exploration.”

In this vein, co-curator Glenn Adamson posed the idea that you can see her work as single pieces but also in these installations and as a lifetime of achievement, each piece relating to the one prior and the one after.

For Essner and the museum, the installation process and the structure of the exhibition are a means to encapsulate and translate the aura and history of Takaezu.

“Installation is really essential to understanding this exhibition,” she said. “We will have black sand as a central component of displaying her work, referential to her life in Hawaii, but we also looked to her own approach to installing her works and installations to develop re-creations that honor her vision.”

The exhibition will include the Star Series, several monumental pots developed later in her career, on black sand with a sky-blue wall behind it. “This will serve as an introduction and end to the show—a closed form that itself becomes one of her closed forms, a closed vessel with a spout.”

Takaezu’s closed forms became 360-degree canvases for expression in glaze, offering the artist a deeper means of exploration that she continued to refine throughout her life. She closed the shapes to take the practical use out of her works, leaving a small, spout-like pinch at one end. These vessels would become cocoons, snails, and pods, some of which fit in the palm of your hand while others, like the Star Series, were over 7 feet tall.

In a 2003 interview with Gerry Williams for the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian, Takaezu described the process of creating these giant forms as “very slow but it’s moving, and I felt all this beckoning to drop into the pot.” When Williams asked whether she felt she herself would drop into the pot, she responded, “Yes, I wanted to go in the pot itself. You can feel the pounding of your heart. It was beating, because it’s a frightening experience that, you know, you want to move with the form going, and then, you know, you get dizzy, you want to go in.”

For those familiar with her work, the exhibition is an opportunity to gain a new understanding of its impact. “For those that do not know her work,” Essner mused, “I think they’ll find it revelatory. The meaning, vitality, beauty, and the multisensory relationship one can have with her work is something I am so looking forward to bringing to Houston audiences.”

—MICHAEL McFADDEN

MICHAEL MCFADDEN

Michael McFadden is a Houston-based writer and arts administrator. He holds an MA in Arts Leadership from the University of Houston's College of the Arts and has worked extensively with the Houston arts community. Learn more about him at pugintheair.com.