Continuing through November 9, 2025
“What if we are each beautiful, even if we are strange?” asks exhibition curators Kelly Sicat and Judy Koong Dennis. Or as Andy Warhol once said, “If everyone is not a beauty, then no one is.”
What is beauty? A quality, a trait, a value, an identity, or all of those things? “When the World is Beautifully Strange” brings a coterie of contemporary ceramic artists to Villa Montalvo’s expansive grounds, either to address that question or to thoughtfully expand upon it.
Mixing work by some of today’s leading ceramic sculptors with others made by innovative regional practitioners, “When the World is Beautifully Strange” presents twelve artists who vigorously materialize thought into sculpture. Manual crafting processes, personal idiosyncrasies, distilled presence, and the physicality of handmade things over immaterial ideas are consistent attributes here. Large-scale ceramic sculpture finds temporary habitats within and around walkways and glades, frequently serving as analogies for human consciousness. They present a cast of characters that are, indeed, beautifully strange. Gluttons, imps, primordial watchers, and ageless witnesses populate shady nooks or stand on the open lawn.
Timna Naim, Niki Ford, and Woody De Othello deploy charm and whimsy to dislodge the grip of aesthetic sanctimony. Naim artlessly jams together globs, splats, and chunks of clay in toy box colors to create zany abstract sculptures that celebrate the urgency of creative production. “Creation Playground” breaks the rules of purity and authorship in a gesture of democratic inclusivity by inviting us to attach our own ad hoc chunks to the works. Ford’s “Child on High” is a folkloric suggestion of a house or tiny temple propped on sturdy toddler legs to embody a fairytale allegory. Surrounded and dwarfed by plants in a terrace garden, this colorful shape-shifting truant from binary consciousness hacks apart stereotypical representations and expectations of self. De Othello’s seven-foot-tall bronze figure, “seeing both sides,” is no shrinking violet and confidently declares a refreshing sweetness. Dark bronze limbs face in four directions, legs bent into a ballet demi-plié second position. Its arms are cocked upward, with outstretched hands grasping a platter for its head, ears in full sail, the essence of wide-eyed, life-affirming good humor.
Through intuitive explorations of ceramics’ expressive potential, Cathy Lu and Ashwini Bhat examine ancestral memory and displacement. Located between tragic climate trends and a playful universe, their seductive biomorphic forms induce both contemplative and queasily unsettling reverie. Bhat’s stretched and elongated sculpture has precedence in termite mounds, which in India are thought to house the Cobra God. But its pocked nodules and bulbous leaking protuberances intimate a giant, disembodied lung, an organ both resilient and impermanent that sags and heaves, eloquent with breath. The subject of Lu’s monumental “Untitled (Peach Incense Holder),” has long been regarded as a symbol of longevity, prosperity, and good luck in China. Lu mounds deliberately imperfect peach-like orbs or seed pods into one mother of a peach, bloated and grotesque, harpooned with a panoply of clay joss sticks. The ginormous incense holder/peach is pure absurdist theater: a funny/not funny corporeal metaphor of Asian identity swallowed whole by the lascivious rot of commodity fetishism.
Moving inside from the grounds, a group of small to medium sized sculptures is housed in the Cottage Gallery. Elisa D’Arrigo’s set of small biomorphic works are odd little things. Minimal yet funky metamorphic organisms pitted with speckles of spattered glaze implicate the body. “Googler 1” is all gawky, floppy gestures of struggle that capture the unguarded moment, exposing the effort to sit up, or having done so to remain upright. The artist creates unguarded forms that are poignantly human in their defenseless states.
Annabeth Rosen and Linda Sormin mix disciplined gestural abstraction with an ardent lust for feral spaces. Committed to their own sense of beauty, they are really working to be present in the dirt, where noise and meaning slip away. Fractured, sliced, rolled, and pinched, they pull glittering amalgamations and engrossing heaps from the sprawling wreckage of their working process. Sormin’s constructions combine glazed paper, found figurines, and cannibalized chunks of existing work. She erects fragile scaffolds piled high with back steps, detours, and renegade musings. To Sormin’s seemingly impossible translucence, Rosen posits with muscular coils, tubes, and bulgy bits bound together with bailing wire in nonhierarchical compositions. Repetitively kneading what’s hidden in nature, Rosen scrambles the inside and outside, what’s mobile and what’s not, packing and stuffing innumerable small acts into dense stacks, bountiful yet obstinately ambiguous.
Though the creative aims of all twelve artists may not be predicated on the exhibition’s argument against beauty as a quality granted to a favored few, placing their work in this context is an example of curatorial generosity, free of aesthetic dogma. As the country lines up either for or against such foundational principles as freedom of speech and due process and takes sides over whose civil liberties are a right and whose are not, the rich diversity of “When the World is Beautifully Strange” offers an invigorating antidote to the anemia of intolerance.
