Ruth Duckworth Glazed Stoneware Wall Relief, Large-Scale, American Studio Ceramic
The wind through tall grass. The way a cliff face peels. Everything moving in the same direction at once.
ARTIST — Ruth Duckworth (German-American, 1919–2009)
PERIOD — 1970s
CATEGORY — Studio Ceramic / Sculpture / Wall Relief
MATERIALS — Glazed stoneware, unsigned
DIMENSIONS — 20 h × 41½ w × 5½ d in
CONTEXT — One of the world's foremost ceramic sculptors, Duckworth spent her most productive decades in Chicago, where she taught at the University of Chicago and pursued a fiercely personal vision that placed clay alongside stone and bronze as a serious sculptural medium. Influenced by Noguchi, Moore, and Brancusi, she built forms from the natural world outward — landscapes, atmospheres, geological forces translated into stoneware. This large-scale wall relief, with its fanning layered planes, jagged edges, and celadon ground punctuated by spherical nodes, is among her most architecturally ambitious work in this format — a category foregrounded in the Smart Museum of Art's 2023 retrospective Ruth Duckworth: Life as a Unity, the first major museum exhibition of her work in nearly twenty years. Her work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Provenance: Estate of Mr. Richard B. Cook, Crystal Lake, Illinois. Unsigned.