Continuing through January 3, 2026

Fans, friends, and those fortunate enough to have been mentored by Jim Melchert (1930-2023) can finally observe the full range of his seven-decade career. Organized by Griff Williams, this retrospective brings into focus the work of a restless, boundary-crossing artist — also known as an educator and arts administrator — who transformed clay into a medium of conceptual and spiritual inquiry. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog, “Jim Melchert: Where the Boundaries Are,” tracing a complete chronology of Melchert’s life and work.

Melchert was often excluded from the Bay Area ceramic community for working between the ceramic and conceptual idioms. Ceramists often regard his conceptual shenanigans as distractions, while conceptual artists regarded his commitment to the craft medium of clay as anachronistic and wrong-headed. Sixty years beyond this battle of competing loyalties, Melchert’s pursuit of an independent, nonconforming middle way looks very different. He was a knowledgeable craftsman unburdened by the past and an intellectual who also liked working with his hands.

The earliest works in this exhibition reflect Melchert’s studies with Peter Voulkos, who revolutionized ceramics during the late 1950s by infusing it with Abstract Expressionist vigor and freedom. Voulkos’ twisted and slashed ceramic cylinders initially bewildered Melchert, but his intellectual curiosity led him to study with Voulkos at UC Berkeley.

While Voulkos’ aesthetic remained distinctly clay-centric, Melchert quickly began to push beyond the medium. He merged materials and disciplines, influenced by the West Coast assemblage scene pioneered by Wallace Berman, George Hermes, Bruce Conner, Betye Saar, and Ed Kienholz. Later, he associated with Tom Marioni’s Museum of Conceptual Art. A key early result of this interest in new approaches and materials was “Slow Boat” (1962), a hybrid work combining clay, wood and lead that redefined ceramics as a fusion of sculpture and concept.  

Soon, Melchert escaped Voulkos’ shadow to venture into ceramic forays unheard of at the time. “Earthdoor” (1965), an early but ambitious example of Land Art installed on the di Rosa preserve, was conceptual, site-specific, collaborative, and community-based (i.e., directed toward a local audience that would see the piece every day). After digging a trench into the clay soil of the property, Melchert cast concrete in a mold dug in the ground using the land to make the form.

Melchert’s most dramatic leap into the ceramic unknown was a performance titled “Changes,”(1972) with ten other artists that took place in Amsterdam. The artists became vessels after submerging their heads into a slurry slip fashioned by Melchert. They remained still as the clay hardened, cracked, peeled and shed, revealing the vessels within, like castings reloaded from a mold.

For Melchert, art was less about authorship than connection, a collaborative act of mending and repair. Photographing the faces of 162 artists in preparation for a slide projection scheme titled “Faces” (1972), Melchert spliced together the left and right half-faces and merged one identity with another, literally fusing the community.

Melchert’s freewheeling, ironic approach to form and content, style, and subject continued into the 1970s with his noted rubbings. These are mute gray rectangles on paper made from scraping photographs with graphite sticks so that the photos’ subjects, clearly named, are impossible to discern. While serving as Director of the American Academy in Rome (1985-1988), Melchert decided to draw ‘blind,’ averting his eye from the paper, and gazing instead only at a photograph he tried to replicate over and over. Large drawings in this vein, such as “Budapest” (1985), attain a tangled patina of overlapping and intersecting lines that emerge as atmospheric maps of perception rather than depiction.

After his three years in Rome, Melchert sought to rebuild his studio practice. Travels to Egypt, Istanbul, and Lisbon, with their myriad examples of ornamentation, inspired a turn to tile as both material and metaphor. Melchert embraced breakage as a guiding principle, with grids of square commercial tiles broken, reassembled, glazed, and refired, all according to self-imposed instructions. These broken surfaces explicitly embraced the process of destruction and repair without trying to disguise it, a reference to the Japanese practice of kintsugi.

“Alternating Current #4” (1985) represents an approach that would remain a constant in Melchert’s production for almost four decades. It consists of 81 painted, glazed tiles arranged like a game board. The composition evolved from a preselected set of rules applied to an electrical grid. Commercially produced porcelain tiles became Melchert’s medium of choice.

Melchert’s experiments with broken tiles continued in works like “Porto” (1995), in which he mended glazed, layered, broken and fired porcelain with scraps from the studio. These colorful works lacked the rigor that his reliance on sets of instructions would demand, but their joyfulness would never disappear completely, resurfacing in works like “What Begins as a Sound” (2022), bursting with color and reconstructed energy.

The “Constellations” series was produced by putting dots of glaze along the cracked edges of tiles, which Melchert would assemble as a unit. “Yield (In Red) #1” (1999) is composed of nine tiles, the results mimicking starlit skies or sprigs of budding flowers, yet their evocative appearance is purely coincidental. “Feathers of a Phoenix (Blue)” (2003-2004), composed of forty-two assembled tiles, is one of Melchert’s most arresting creations.

From 2005 to 2007, Melchert produced a series of works named after places he remembered with fondness. His self-imposed instructions were to apply blue bands of color tracing the tile’s fracture. Both individual and stacked tiles arose from the series. “North Atlantic” (2005), a grid of twenty tiles stacked four wide and five high, is a centerpiece of the exhibition and one of the masterpieces of Bay Area ceramic art.     

During the years of broken tile repair, Melchert’s community engagement remained constant. The “Repair” series was conducted in concert with studio visitors, who were asked to mend a broken tile with as little masking tape as possible. Glazing the tile except where the repair was made, Melchert fired each collaborative work based on concept, chance and community. “Min Nguyen Repair Series #1” (2003) expresses Melchert’s repression of ego and joyful embrace of discovery in the inventiveness of others.  

Reprising a mirrored box from a 1970 exhibition, Melchert placed a single tile constructed in the manner of his “Shards Speaking” series of the “Mirror Boxes,” wood boxes lined with mirrors reflecting infinite possibilities. The myriad permutations reflected from the mirrored walls feels like a guidepost to Melchert’s meandering path of discovery.   

These mirror boxes epitomize the lifetime of Melchert’s stacked, shattered, and socially engaged works. Always reflecting damage and repair, destruction and reconstruction, they remind us of the prominent position the Bay Area has had in mending the marginal and, in so doing, making it mainstream.