Joan Takayama-Ogawa's ceramic history
Clip: Season 16 | 5m 4sVideo has Closed Captions
Artist Joan Takayama-Ogawa on her mentor, Ralph Bacerra and Joan's family history in ceramics
Artist and teacher Joan Takayama-Ogawa on her mentor, Ralph Bacerra and Joan's family history in ceramics. Bonus video from SCIENCE episode
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Joan Takayama-Ogawa's ceramic history
Clip: Season 16 | 5m 4sVideo has Closed Captions
Artist and teacher Joan Takayama-Ogawa on her mentor, Ralph Bacerra and Joan's family history in ceramics. Bonus video from SCIENCE episode
Problems with Closed Captions? Closed Captioning Feedback
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorshipI studied with Ralph Bacerra for three years.
He was a mentor, a friend and a taskmaster.
Ralph really instilled in all of us to be fearless.
Ralph taught us about glaze calculation or glaze chemistry and that would become critical to how I formulate colors in my studio.
What I want to do is create surfaces and forms that push the envelope for American ceramics.
I want to use technology and traditional skills.
[Music] In looking at the family collection down through the ages we think my family began ceramics in the 15th or the 16th century in Tokoname, Japan.
Ceramics is everywhere in the city of Tokoname.
When I visited I saw that they use old pots to serve as retaining walls.
You can see evidence of thousands of years of ceramics.
My family might have been Korean potters who were captured and brought to the kilns of Tokoname as slaves.
[Music] When I first touched clay as an extension ceramic student it really was the beginning of a very long love affair with clay.
My dad thought it was that a gene G-E-N-E had popped and that it was in my DNA.
My grandfather arrived in Pasadena in 1907 and he started working at the Gamble House but he realized I can make a lot of money by doing the laundry for the Gambles and other neighbors and so he bought a Chinese laundry and he renamed it Meiji Laundry.
By the time World War II broke out, they had over 300 employees.
[Music] War brings out the worst in people and often times the worst political decisions and I believe that America's relocation camps during World War II were a great betrayal.
The majority of Japanese people relocated during the war were American born citizens and that was the case with my mom's family.
They were relocated from San Diego and assembled at Santa Anita Racetrack in the horse stalls and they were not cleaned out so people were very upset about that.
Disgraced that they were living in horse stalls and then from Santa Anita, people were sent out to various relocation camps.
My mother's side went to Poston in Arizona and then my dad's side went to Gila River.
In the camps, many of the families made these beautiful birds out of scraps of wood and many would wear these pins or they would send their pins to other relocation camps and it was a social protest of freedom and flight.
The 9/11 attack changed all our lives and as we were recovering from that shock I could hear the beginnings of racism towards Muslim Americans so that started me on doing a piece about racial profiling.
There's a wooden sarcophagus box and inside is my grandfather's luggage tag and the luggage tag goes back to relocation camps when the elderly and the children were required to wear luggage tags to identify themselves.
On the outside of this barbed wire fence are the last names of all of my family members on my side as well as my husband's side also the families that were part of the Meiji Laundry that my grandfather and seven other families owned prior to World War II.
The Japanese American relocation established a dangerous precedent for all free people in America.
[Music]
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Video has Closed Captions
Artist Joan Takayama-Ogawa on her mentor, Ralph Bacerra and Joan's family history in ceramics (5m 4s)
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