In 1975, Toshiko Takaezu was doing an artist residency in Hilo, Hawaiʻi, when a group of journalists and VIPs came to her studio. At the time, the artist was making her closed or moon forms, large orbs of clay covered in bold brushstrokes and washes of color. When pressed to explain her work to the group, Takaezu surprised them by replying, “The most important thing about this piece is the dark space that you can’t see, the dark air that is in it that you can’t see.”
It may seem strange that Takaezu — a brilliant colorist, inventive sculptor, and extremely disciplined worker — would place the highest emphasis in her work on something invisible and beyond her control. But the story reveals how much the artist cultivated a sense of openness to her materials, her process, and how others interpreted her work. Throughout her long career, Takaezu strove tirelessly to uncover the sublime, even if she found it by accident. And in fact, the interiors of her vessels contained more than just air, as I’ll explain later.
Installation view of “Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston is an expansive survey of the artist’s life and work and is her first nationally touring retrospective in 20 years. Organized by the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum (which hosted the show March 20–July 28, 2024), the exhibition features some 100 artworks from the 1950s until her death in 2011, including Takaezu’s large-scale ceramics and her little-seen weavings and paintings. Worlds Within presents viewers with a rare opportunity to immerse themselves in this pioneering artist’s unique vision and hear her work, too.
Takaezu’s parents immigrated from Okinawa, Japan, to Hawaiʻi, where the artist was born in 1922. The sixth of eleven children, she grew up on her uncle’s watercress plantation in rural Maui, where she also did farm work between her studies. Takaezu’s introduction to clay came after she dropped out of high school to work as a housekeeper for a couple in Honolulu who owned the Hawaiian Potters’ Guild, the state’s first ceramics factory. Working there transformed Takaezu’s life. “Once I started touching clay, I loved it,” she later recalled. “I knew there was something much more than making commercial things.”
Installation view of “Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
The artist spent the war years working with clay and honed her skills at the University of Hawaiʻi. In 1951, she left home to study at the innovative Cranbrook Academy of Art near Detroit, Michigan. Despite the huge change in culture, geography, and climate, Takaezu thrived there, learning much from the stern but capable “Mother of American Ceramics,” Finnish artist Maija Grotell. “Hawaiʻi was where I learned technique,” Takaezu stated. “Cranbrook was where I found myself.”
Toshiko Takaezu, “Zeus,” 1995
After graduating, the artist made a pivotal eight-month-long journey to Japan, where she rediscovered her Okinawan roots and explored the state of the country’s ceramic arts. Women potters were practically unheard of in Japan when Takaezu arrived, but she was able to visit and even work under a variety of ceramicists, from generational practitioners to avant-garde artists. Takaezu also studied Zen Buddhism at a temple in Kyoto during this trip, though she would later reject the idea of her work being somehow representative of the West’s concept of Zen or Asian spirituality, as she found these associations to be reductive and exoticizing. Still, her time in Japan shaped her practice: Takaezu’s meetings with Kaneshige Tōyō, Kitaōji Rosanjin, Yagi Kazuo, and other Japanese creators taught her that artmaking was a holistic lifestyle that went far beyond technique alone.
These formative experiences and places feel present in the works on display. Takaezu’s gracefully layered glazes often evoke the colors of a Hawaiian landscape, and her gestural marks recall Japanese calligraphy. Her experimental forms emerged from the work she began at Cranbrook, but she was also in dialogue with currents in the New York art scene, especially after she moved to New Jersey and began teaching at Princeton University starting in 1967.
Toshiko Takaezu, “Closed Form,” 2004
The artist adamantly rejected labels, but movements like Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting come to mind, especially when viewing Takaezu’s canvases. However, these works’ powerful strokes and multidirectional drips are actually the result of Takaezu translating the processes that she used to glaze her vessels’ dynamic surfaces into acrylic on canvas rather than a result of her mimicking her painter peers. Ultimately, painting on canvas constituted a much smaller part of her practice than her work in ceramics. “I like the clay better because it is more alive,” she said.
Weavings were also a secondary way of working for Takaezu. She learned her preferred method, the Scandinavian rya hand knotting technique, from another Finnish Cranbrook instructor named Marianne Strengell. Worlds Within features archival photographs of exhibitions that were staged during Takaezu’s lifetime that show that she preferred to present her textiles together with her ceramics. Now as then, the artist’s weavings are displayed horizontally as substrates for her clay works and vertically as nonfunctional wall hangings. In both cases the textiles’ shaggy textures and rich colors compliment Takaezu’s earthy, painted vessels.
Installation view of “Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Although Takaezu largely stopped weaving in the mid-1970s, the practice connected her to Alice Kagawa Parrot, and Leonore Tawney, two renowned textile artists, lifelong friends, and collaborators. Takaezu and Tawney exhibited frequently and even lived together during their lifetimes, so it is fitting that a selection of Takaezu’s large-scale closed-form works are displayed with one of Tawney’s wall-sized weavings in the final gallery of Worlds Within.
Textiles and ceramics engage with our sense of touch, but Takaezu was also occupied with the possibilities of sound. The interest came unexpectedly: In the late 1960s, a small piece of clay fell inside one of her closed forms before firing, so that the piece became a kind of rattle once it came out of the kiln. Takaezu was so pleased with this unforeseen “message” — as she called these sounds — that she continued to include pieces of clay and even hidden carvings on the insides of her closed-form vessels.
Worlds Within grants visitors the rare opportunity to encounter this lesser-known side of Takaezu’s work thanks to videos by exhibition co-curator and sound artist Leilehua Lanzilotti, who gently activates Takaezu’s vessels individually by hand. Lanzilotti’s auditory interventions fill the exhibition with ethereal clinking and clanking noises that animate Takaezu’s works with an otherworldly liveliness.
The exhibition is a stunning aesthetic experience and very worthwhile, but it feels remiss to finish this review without mentioning the superb catalog as well. The book features ten fascinating essays exploring different facets of the artist’s life and work. These are thoughtful and necessary contributions to Takaezu’s artistic legacy, not least because her work has long been misinterpreted, underappreciated, or pushed between the worlds of fine art and craft.
In the catalog, we also find selections from Takaezu’s spirited interviews and writings, along with intimate recollections from her former students and apprentices. These stories — where we learn about Takaezu as an artist, gardener, cook, teacher, and even as an impromptu, late night field hockey player — really help us get to know her on a much deeper level. It’s a privilege to learn about Takaezu and to enjoy her excellent art.
Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston through May 18, 2025. The exhibition will travel to the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison September 8–December 23, 2025 and the Honolulu Museum of Art February 13–July 26, 2026.
