The first time I saw fireflies, I squinted to make sure I wasn’t imagining things. They twinkled in a tree outside my friend’s home in Princeton, New Jersey, flashing on and off to their own rhythm. Closing the car door behind me, I wondered if I was just tired from traveling. “Fireflies,” my friend confirmed, and I stood there, unblinking, in complete surprise.
I chase this feeling of awe in art. I gaze up at paintings, move through installations, and look closely at photographs. Time slows down in museums and galleries. I slow down, too. I look at the art in front of me—really look, away from the noises and distractions of my everyday routine. I chase something that takes me out of my usual settings. The fireflies did this. I remember the flutter in my chest, similar to the chill I get when I see an artwork that moves me.
I thought about the fireflies again while visiting Toshiko Takaezu: Shaping Abstraction at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, an exhibition that situates Takaezu’s work in the history of abstract art and ceramics, highlighting the significance of her contributions.
For folks used to seeing fireflies, maybe my experience sounds quaint, or naive. But in looking at photos of Takaezu with her art, and learning more about her process, it seemed the artist understood the weight of these small, natural wonders.
One image especially sparked my interest: Takaezu walking outside in the grass, past a row of large, ceramic works. Star Series (1999–2000) was installed outdoors as a way for viewers “to walk through and around the works,” as the MFA exhibition’s text explains. Even as I stood in the gallery space, I wondered what it might be like to encounter Takaezu’s works in an entirely different setting: outside, with the warm air surrounding me, the ceramic works standing tall, as if their roots extended into the ground beneath them.
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Born in Hawaii in 1922, Toshiko Takaezu began her artistic journey in the 1940s, working at a ceramic production facility and then studying at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. She mentored students throughout the decades, teaching at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Cleveland Institute of Art, and Princeton University.
The artist became known for her “closed form” ceramic pieces—works she sealed off at the top by pinching them closed. This small action moved her pieces from the functional to the decorative. While clay as a medium was traditionally tied to objects like vases and teapots (the latter of which she made herself in earlier years), the closed form turned each work into something else. With no discernible purpose, the works were instead three-dimensional canvases for Takaezu, who used dripping glazes and gestural traces to speak the language of abstract expressionism into the works.
Her works are a significant contribution to the conversations around what distinguishes “craft” from “fine art” that took place in the 1950s and 1960s; artists were pushing the boundaries of what handmade objects could be, beyond the purely functional.
But it’s the natural world, not just the studio space and the kiln, that fed her work. The landscapes of Hawaii and Quakertown, New Jersey, can be glimpsed in her compositions. Her Moons series, which began in the 1970s, features round ceramic works that nod directly at the celestial bodies they’re named after. Measuring anywhere from fifteen inches to nearly thirty inches in diameter, they range in hues from off-white, beige glazes with black brush strokes painted across the surface, as seen in Full Moon (1978), to white, green, and ochre tones that melt into dark brown and black, as seen in Eclipse (2003).
Takaezu’s “tree form” sculptures—large-scale, thin structures that resemble logs or tree trunks—measure around five feet tall and take inspiration from trees at the Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park. Sunsets, mountains and rain have also worked their way into her art. Takaezu took what the natural world offered up to her and paid homage to it.
While it’s important to see Takaezu’s work on display at major institutions, I couldn’t help but feel that a truer experience of her work and her process requires us, the viewers, to go outside. Rather than limit ourselves to the museum or gallery experience, Takaezu’s work and process encourage viewers to look—really look—at their surroundings. To sit under a tree and watch its leaves shake as a breeze passes through; to notice the many shades of brown in a single tree trunk.
A fuller understanding of Takaezu’s choices of color, glaze, and forms requires us to look at these elements with the same reverence as artworks on a pedestal, to hold on to that feeling of hushed awe even when we leave the museum’s doors.
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Takaezu’s close relationship to nature can be seen in her art—and life—practice. From 1967 to 1992, Takaezu was an art professor at Princeton University; by 1975, she had established her home and studio in New Jersey, where she invited students to complete live-in apprenticeships. Her garden, studio, and home all occupied the same space, and while she guided the creative visions of her students, she tended to her garden, too.
In documentary footage produced by a New Jersey television channel in the early 2000s, Takaezu trudges through the snow to a row of large bronze bells installed near her home and studio and strikes one gently with a mallet. Drawing on the aesthetics of bells at Japanese temples, Takaezu used lost-wax casting to craft these large works. Her art is part of her environment.
During the warmer months, the artist walks to her garden with a basket in hand, deftly plucking scarlet runner beans. Lettuce, tomatoes, winter squash, and zinnias grow nearby.
“I think everything you do is collaboration,” Takaezu explains, talking about gardening. “You can’t just throw the seeds and say ‘grow.’ ”
Takaezu calls vegetable growing “a mystery.” She calls working with clay “magic, in some ways.” Both require the right elements to thrive. The studio process and growing vegetables aren’t so different after all. Even as her work began to be displayed in more art institutions, Takaezu brought us back to the earth. In the documentary, she reminds us of the wonder of the vegetable.
“Sometimes I think the potato is more important than my pots,” she says.
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While researching Takaezu’s work, I came across Toshiko Takaezu: The Earth in Bloom (2007), a book of photographs by J. Stanley Yake, taken near Takaezu’s studio and home.
In one photo, six round ceramic pieces are clustered together on a brown patch of dirt, their surfaces painted with Takaezu’s signature abstract swoops of paint. They range from white with strokes of brown to expanses of blues and purples. The works are framed by blades of vibrant green grass; in the foreground, you can see five pink tulips.
Looking through the photos I am surprised by the play of light—the way that shadows form new patterns on the surface of Takaezu’s works. In an image of three taller works, cylindrical in shape, there are long shadows on the grass and across all the pieces; nature, here, is a collaborator, adding a few more brushstrokes to the surface of the works.
The elements in a museum space are more controlled, of course, than these natural scenes. The lighting is expertly installed, the temperature maintained at the right level. I’ve learned the rules of decorum in this space—gazing at artworks from the right distance, never moving my body too close to the pieces.
What would it have been like to enter Yake’s photographs? I wondered. And, then, a more urgent question that Takaezu’s work sparked: when was the last time I stood in the grass with my bare feet?
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Art appraiser and curator Peter Held writes that Takaezu “never deviated from her overriding vision: using monolithic shapes and a simplicity of form and surface treatment to make tangible connections with a broad audience at a primal level.” A sunset requires no curatorial interpretation.
Yake’s photographs capture how, without the language of abstraction and fine art surrounding the works, like a gallery text might, Takaezu’s works still vibrate with energy. We can sense their earthy references, and remember those quiet moments when nature surprised us. A firefly sparking against a dark evening sky.
There’s an image of the artist that has stayed with me: Takaezu kneeling on the grass near a few ceramic works. She places each hand on two pieces sitting on either side of her.
They almost look like bulbs sprouting from the earth—and the artist is their gardener, an earth-tender who can’t contain her excitement about what she has found.
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Toshiko Takaezu: Shaping Abstraction. An exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 30 September 2023–29 September 2024.