In the spring of 1957, Chinese-born ceramic artist Katherine Po-Yu Choy (1927-1958), a rising talent in the field of American studio art pottery, gathered a small group of passionate like-minded artists in the working class New York City suburb of Port Chester, New York. Under Choy’s leadership this group founded the “Clay Art Center for Advanced Study in Ceramics and Sculpture”―known more familiarly then and now as simply Clay Art Center―a cooperative studio dedicated to creative ceramic art.

Clay Art Center was one of the first studio spaces devoted solely to the study and practice of artistic ceramics in the United States. Buoyed by Choy’s growing celebrity for her boundary-pushing sculptural clay vessels, Clay Art Center’s reputation quickly grew among American potters. Meanwhile its artists put down roots in the communities of Port Chester and neighboring Greenwich, Connecticut.

The ceramic art world and Clay Art Center community were rocked by Choy’s unexpected death in 1958 at the young age of 30, less than a year after the center was founded. However, in the decades that followed Clay Art Center’s mission endured thanks to the oversight of Choy’s co-founder, Japanese-American potter Henry Okamoto (1922-1988). Today, Clay Art Center is the largest and most active ceramic facility in the tristate area and a nationally recognized non-profit dedicated to the advancement and practice of ceramic art. Meanwhile, Katherine Choy’s pioneering ceramic works―which in 1958 were the subject of two major retrospective memorial exhibitions―continue to find resonance among potters and scholars of American studio pottery.

Featuring ceramic works and archival material drawn from Clay Art Center’s collections, Radical Pots & Cooperative Hands will feature a number of Katherine Choy’s dynamic, genre-defining ceramic pots presented alongside letters, photographs and archival material that tell the story of Clay Art Center’s remarkable presence in the mid-century artistic community of New York and southeastern Connecticut.