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Vase, 2006-2010
slab-built stoneware
6 x 6.5 x 4 in.
On Our R a d ar
One A rtist,
Two Lives
c u o n g t a ’ s c e r a m i c s w o u l d
look right at home on the set of
MaclMen.
With their playful,
abstract surface designs, these
primitive-modern forms exude
retro cool, yet appear fresh and
contemporary.
While Ta does like mid-cen-
tury style, his work isn’t con-
sciously an homage to an era.
His own aesthetic is more Peter
Parker than Don Draper. “As a
kid I always sketched. I loved
comic books, Marvel super-
heroes,” says the California
artist. “In some ways, I feel the
graphic nature of the work I do
now goes back to that.”
In true superhero fashion,
Ta has something of a dual iden-
tity. By day he teaches math at
a high school in the San Fran-
cisco Bay area. Evenings and
weekends he’s in his studio in
the Berkeley Potters Guild
building, crafting earthenware
vases, mugs, and decorative wall
“buttons” that are sold in galler-
ies around the country, and at
the American Craft Council
Show and similar events.
“For me, they’re two very
separate lives,” he says. “When
I do clay work, I’m in my own
head, doing it for my own plea-
sure and satisfaction. When
Vase with Cutouts, 2006-2010
slab-built stoneware
12.5 x 8 X4in.
I’m teaching, I’m more in the
community, interacting with
students and parents. It’s a nice
balance.” Like math, creativity
is essentially problem-solving,
he says, in teaching as well as
in art. “Every kid is different,
and how you break through
to them is an inherently cre-
ative process.”
Born in Vietnam, Ta was 9
when his family fled Saigon in
1975, days before the city fell.
They settled in Los Angeles,
where he thrived academically.
Though math came easily to
him, he was more fascinated by
the English language, and ma-
jored in rhetoric (the study of
“how persuasion happens,” as
he puts it) at the University of
California, Berkeley. He won a
scholarship to the University of
Michigan’s graduate school of
public policy and was on track
for a career in politics, but en-
joyed his teaching-assistant
duties so much that he chose
education instead.
Along the way he took an
evening class in pottery, just
for relaxation. “I became ad-
dicted to the wheel, to the point
where I got tendinitis,” he re-
calls. “I loved clay, the imme-
diacy of it.”
Spotted Vase, 2004-2010
slab-built stoneware
6 x 6.5 x 4 in.
These days Ta builds his
forms out of slabs, then uses
resist and masking techniques
to decorate each surface before
glazing and firing. Drawing
from a vocabulary of lines and
shapes, he’s able to design an
endless variety of free-form
geometric compositions in
light/dark color pairings (often
tan and black), all meant to illus-
trate “the play of positive and
negative space and the tension
between boundary and flow,”
he explains.
People who know about his
day job tend to “see math in my
work,” says Ta - who doesn’t,
not really. Nature is his main
inspiration, especially land-
scape and topography. His pat-
terns might be interpretations
of a pebble walkway, rocks on
a beach, the silhouette of a hill-
side, or kelp in the waters at
Monterey. He envisions his
vases filled with reeds, leaves,
and blossoms, and sometimes
adjusts a design to hold stems
more securely (“I think of flow-
er arrangers when I do these”).
Form and function, plus fun:
It all adds up, beautifully.
-JOYCE LOVELACE
cuongta.com
Joyce Lovelace is
American
Craft
’s contributing editor.
014 american craft fcb/m arn
Ceramics photos: Cuong Ta
