Ceramics, Colonialisms, and Collective Futures

A pitcher seen in profile, with its handle at left and its spout at right. Both the handle and spout take the form of animals. On the body of the pitcher is a scene of a man grabbing another man with his left hand while wielding a knife with his right. Small playing cards surround them.

Karl L. H. Mueller, modeler, Union Porcelain Works, manufacturer, Heathen Chenee Pitcher, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, 1875–85. Porcelain with overglaze painting and gilding. Yale University Art Gallery, Bequest of Doris M. Brixey, by exchange

Join Ekalan Hou, Ph.D. student, American Studies and History of Art, for a discussion of ceramic works in the Yale University Art Gallery’s collections of modern and contemporary art and pre-1900 American decorative arts, with attention to Asian-Indigenous relations under racial-capitalist settler colonialism. In addition to examining intersecting histories of colonialism in the United States, Hou speaks to the imagination of a collectively livable future, the blueprints for which are always already laid out in ancestral technologies. Generously sponsored by the Martin A. Ryerson Lectureship Fund.

Gather by the Public Programs sign in the Gallery lobby. Space is limited.