WebinART: Ever Risking: A Conversation with Hideaki Miyamura
Virtual event hosted by Pucker Gallery
This past weekend we hosted a conversation with Pucker Gallery Artist Hideaki Miyamura, Artist and Educator Franz Nicolay, and Director Bernie Pucker.
Brother Thomas once said, "Risking and dreaming are primary acts of creativity." Hideaki Miyamura has taken to heart these words as his vocabulary of glazes and forms continue to evolve and grow.
Hideaki Miyamura's exhibition, The Search Continues: Recent Work by Hideaki Miyamura will be on view at Pucker Gallery through 5 June 2022.
Franz Nicolay has been an artist and arts educator in New Hampshire for over 45 years. His specific areas of creative work are ceramics, photography, writing, and wood sculpture. His areas of long-term investigation are visual literacy, narrative, and expression, resulting from the creative process itself.
Franz Nicolay was also the director of the Edwards Art Gallery at Holderness School for many years prior to his retirement from teaching. In this position, Franz curated annual art exhibitions from Pucker Gallery's extensive collection of ceramics, painting, and photography.
Franz has degrees in Fine Art from Lesley University/Art Institute of Boston (MFA) and St. Lawrence University (BA). He designed his house based on the golden ratio, and he maintains a studio practice in Center Sandwich, NH. Franz has exhibited widely and has work in numerous public and private collections.
Hideaki Miyamura is a Japanese-born American studio potter working in New Hampshire. Born in 1955 in Niigata, Japan, Miyamura traveled to the United States to study art history at Western Michigan University. After college, he returned to Japan to pursue his interest in ceramics as an apprentice with master potter Shurei Miura in Yamanashi. During that five-year period, he experimented with over 10,000 test pieces, using countless formulas to develop original glazes.
Now well known throughout Japan and the United States for his experimental and illustrious glazes, Miyamura’s surfaces possess a stunning and unusual iridescent quality. Stemming from the artist’s interest in rare ancient Chinese tea bowl glazes, Miyamura seeks to create glazes that have a three-dimensional quality and convey purity and peacefulness. His forms can be characterized as classic, calm, and balanced in aesthetic.
His process of throwing, glazing, and firing is as refined and complex as the artwork itself. His vessels are pristine, disarmingly simple, contemplative objects whose finishes reflect the panoply of the natural world — geologic phenomena, star-filled nights, undulating ocean waves, and fiery sunsets. Porcelains created by Miyamura are included in numerous significant museum collections including the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Bernie Pucker is the director of the Pucker Gallery, which he founded with his wife, Sue, on Newbury Street in Boston in 1967. Pucker Gallery represents over fifty artists from around the world working in a approximately ten exhibitions annually, often paired with artist talks, virtual “WebinArts,” and Gallery dinners.
Bernie is currently a Board Member at the Japan Society, Boston, and the Jewish Publication Society. He also serves on the Leadership Council for Facing History and Ourselves as well as the Artistic Advisory Board for the Terezin Music Foundation. Previously, he served as: President of Solomon Schechter Day School; President of the Newbury Street League; and Board Member for the Friends of Copley Square and The Unity Project, among others.
Bernie received his MA in Modern Jewish History from Brandeis University and his BA in History and English Literature from Columbia College.