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Excerpt from "Izinkamba/Onda Yaki: Conversation Pieces" essay by Jonathan Shirland, Assistant Professor of Art at Bridgewater State College, Massachusetts and Visual Arts Director of Violence Transformed:
Izinkamba and Onda Yaki are able to engage in an inter-cultural dialogue. Both embody utilitarian beauty transmitted between a limited number of potters using natural materials near at hand, who leaven creative expression with the ballast of restraint and proscribed limitation to ensure the maintenance of formal integrity and the perpetuation of group identity.
Ceramics have been produced in the region of kwaZulu-Natal since the second century BCE, but the history of Izinkamba begins in the mid-nineteenth century when they replaced tightly woven baskets as the main vessel for drinking utshwala (sorghum beer). Global appreciation for these vessels has grown steadily since the last years of the Apartheid era. The genesis of Onda Yaki dates to 1705, when Yanase San’uemon was sent from an older pottery village in Koishiwara to settle in the area. Onda Yaki’s fame spread following its “discovery” in 1927 by Yanagi Soetsu, who felt it embodied the ideals of what came to be known as mingei (“art of the people”). The visit by famous English potter Bernard Leach to Sarayama in 1954 further fueled the “folk craft boom”.
But it is really in the last 40 years that the two traditions have been transformed into iconic ‘national’ cultural symbols. Recognized as an “Intangible Cultural Asset” in 1970, Onda Yaki was designated as an “Intangible Cultural Property” by the Japanese Government in 1995, the only stoneware pottery to be selected. In 2010, South Africa’s Department of Arts and Culture (DAC) worked to establish celebrated Zulu potters as “Living Human Treasures” of the country’s “Intangible Cultural Heritage”, drawing on the terminology first used in Japan.
Andrea Dezsö’s work encompasses drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, public art, embroidery, cut paper, and artists’ books. Born in Romania where travel was restricted during communism, Dezsö took to traveling through her imagination, and as an artist her work explores terrain including issues of: authoritarianism and freedom; gender; myth, superstition and wisdom; folk art and craft; and designing art for public spaces. Dezsö exhibits nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, the Rice University Art Gallery in Texas, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut, Museum Bellerive in Switzerland, the Fujikawa Kirie Art Museum in Japan, the Cheongju International Craft Biennale in South Korea, Art Basel in Miami, and The Armory Show in New York. Her work was also recently included in the exhibition Dread & Delight at the Akron Art Museum alongside Ghada Amer, David Hockney, and Carrie Mae Weems, among others. Dezsö’s award-winning public art has been installed in three New York City subway stations, the United States Embassy in Bucharest, Romania, and the Borough of Manhattan Community College Fiterman Hall in New York. Dezsö has received numerous fellowships and awards, including recognition from Americans for the Arts, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, the MacArthur Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Center for Book Arts in New York, Six Point Foundation, and the Ucross Foundation; she has been awarded artist residencies at the Guanlan Original Printmaking Base in Shenzhen, China, Tamarind Institute in New Mexico, Museum of Glass in Washington, and Kamiyama AIR in Japan. Her work has been featured in Artforum, ARTNews, The New York Times, Village Voice, Wall Street Journal, NPR, New York Magazine, Print, Fiber Arts, Hand/Eye Magazine, and numerous books. Dezsö is a Professor of Art at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.