Laurent Craste Artist Talk & Reception

Thursday, February 5
6 – 7:30 pm | Pay-What-You-Wish Admission

In celebration of the featured exhibition Laurent Craste: Iconoclasts, we invite you to join us for a special conversation between Laurent Craste and Garth Johnson, the Everson’s Paul Phillips and Sharon Sullivan Curator of Ceramics, exploring Craste’s work and the history of porcelain. Then, continue to a special tour of the exhibition, followed by a light reception.

Iconoclasts marks the American museum debut for French-born Canadian ceramist Laurent Craste. Over the past decade, Craste has committed a wide range of indignities and abuse against his ornate vases and urns, including pummeling them with baseball bats and crowbars and piercing them with arrows. Despite the violence that runs through his work, Craste has a great passion for historical porcelain. Working with porcelain allows Craste to explore the prestige and power of upper-class society, but also inequality and the strain that is placed on working people. The anthropomorphic nature of Craste’s vases echoes the human body, making it no surprise that people feel strong emotions when seeing a helpless vase struck by a baseball bat. Triggering these strong emotions in his audience allows Craste to connect on a deeper level as he asks questions about class, money, and power.