November 11, 2000 through April 29, 2001
Fired by Ideals: Arequipa Pottery and the Arts and Crafts Movement
Art Special Gallery
Presented by the Art Department

Fired by Ideals: Arequipa Pottery and the Arts and Crafts Movement is the first major exhibition of pottery produced at the Arequipa Sanatorium in Marin County during the years 1911-1918. The exhibition includes more than 100 pieces in what is thought to be the largest showing of these works since the Arequipa studio exhibited at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 in San Francisco. A series of public programs about California pottery will complement the exhibition, which runs from Nov. 11 through April 29, 2001 at the Oakland Museum of California.

Vase, 1913; Madrona Vase, c. 1911-13, Bowl, 1912

Arequipa pottery, produced by tuberculosis patients at the sanatorium, is recognized today as among the most important California pottery of the Arts and Crafts period. This exhibition features examples of the wide variety of pottery designs and techniques that characterized the work of the studio. Also included are tiles from Casa Dorinda, a 65-room Spanish Colonial mansion near Santa Barbara that was designed by Carleton Winslow in 1916. In its largest and final commission, Arequipa produced 8750 tiles, based on Hispano-Moresque designs by Frank Ingerson, for the lower great hall and upper corridor of the mansion.

The exhibition tells two stories, that of the sanatorium itself and that of the pottery produced there.

THE AREQUIPA SANATORIUM
Following the 1906 earthquake and fire, dust- and ash-filled air contributed to a tuberculosis epidemic in San Francisco. A progressive San Francisco doctor, Philip King Brown, founded the Arequipa Sanatorium as a country retreat for urban "working girls" to recuperate from tuberculosis. The name Arequipa, taken from a city in Peru, was said to mean "place of peace." Brown acquired a tract of oak-shaded land outside of Fairfax in Marin County, donated by real estate developer and philanthropist Henry Bothin. There, with the help of local artists and members of the area's philanthropic community (including Phoebe Apperson Hearst, after whom Dr. Brown named his daughter), he created a campus, with emphasis on outdoor living, to house and care for tubercular women factory workers, store clerks and teachers. Besides bed rest, handcraft was deemed therapeutic in combating idleness and avoiding the stigma of charity.

The philosophy of Arequipa was a direct outcome of the Arts and Crafts movement, which, in a reaction to late 19th-century industrialization, advocated replacement of machine-made goods with handicrafts. The movement affirmed filling life with substance rather than superficialities, strove to eliminate what it saw as a false distinction between fine arts and the applied and decorative arts, and saw handicraft as having a curative value.

With origins in England, the movement spread throughout Europe and the United States, and was at its height in California from the mid-1890s to the 1930s. Arts and Crafts was a sensibility rather than a specific style, but in California as elsewhere it tended to employ motifs derived from nature, simple forms enhanced with complex details, and to celebrate the vernacular.

THE POTTERY
The Arequipa Sanatorium was directed by a succession of nationally known British ceramists: Frederick Hürten Rhead, Albert Solon and Fred Wilde. The basic shapes of the ceramics created there were the responsibility of the master potters, and surface decorations were added by the patients working in the studio or out under the oak trees. These decorations took the form of designs painted on the surface and patterns carved into the damp clay or applied in relief on the pots.

Because of the rate of turnover of both pottery directors and patients, a wide variety of designs and techniques characterizes the work of the studio. The directors experimented continually with glazes, Rhead developing a mirror black glaze, Solon bright blue-green glazes, and the studio using cratered glazes and running glazes. Rhead introduced slip trailing, the signature form of decoration of Arequipa pottery. The technique uses raised lines of clay, applied to the pots with a "squeeze bag" technique similar to that used by cake decorators, to define the design and hold the glaze in place, much as metal channels do in cloisonné.

The Oakland Museum of California has the largest existing holding of pottery and tiles from Arequipa, with more than 100 pieces in its collections. The majority of these are from the estate of Phoebe Hearst Brown, daughter of the sanatorium's founder, Philip King Brown. The exhibition includes pieces from the museum's art and history departments as well as from the holdings of private collections. Through photographs, letters, advertisements and other primary documents, the exhibition also examines Arts and Crafts philosophy as it intersects with social attitudes towards gender, illness and philanthropy.

Curator of Fired by Ideals is Suzanne Baizerman, the Imogene Gieling Curator of Crafts and Decorative Arts at the Oakland Museum of California.

The exhibition is accompanied by a 120-page catalog with 50 large color illustrations and 150 smaller photos, coauthored by Baizerman, Arequipa scholar Lynn Downey and California College of Arts and Crafts faculty member John Toki.

Fired by Ideals: Arequipa Pottery and the Arts and Crafts Movement is made possible by the generous support of the Oakland Museum Women's Board, Robert E. Hungate and H. Nona Hungate in memory of Alice Wolcott Hungate, The Bothin Foundation and the Friends of Arequipa Sponsors Group.

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