This roundtable opens the two-day symposium “Ceramic Presence: Conversations on Making, Looking, and the Museum” with a discussion of the role of ceramics in California sculpture of the 1950s through the 1970s. John Mason, a Los Angeles–based sculptor, and Jim Melchert, a conceptual artist who works in clay and other media, discuss art and California culture with Neal Benezra, Director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Jock Reynolds, the Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Yale University Art Gallery and co-curator of the exhibition The Ceramic Presence in Modern Art: Selections from the Linda Leonard Schlenger Collection and the Yale University Art Gallery.