This is a virtual event via Zoom hosted by Pucker Gallery.
This event will be recorded and uploaded to our YouTube channel.
Join us this Friday, 23 January 2026 at 10:30AM ET for a conversation with Pucker Gallery artist Hideaki Miyamura.
This conversation will be an opportunity to explore Hideaki's personal and artistic journey. Pucker Gallery has shown his work since 2002 and watched the continued evolution of his forms and glazes. In the beginning, he was carefully learning from others and now others are appreciating his command of forms and glazes.
Together with:
Hideaki Miyamura – Pucker Gallery Artist
Robert Mowry - Emeritus Alan J. Dworsky Curator of Chinese Art and Emeritus Head of the Department of Asian Art at the Harvard Art Museums
Franz Nicolay - Artist and Educator
Mara Williams - Brattleboro Museum Curator Emerita
Dr. Carl Herbert - Gallery Associate
Bernard Pucker – Gallery Director
The exhibition Form and the Spirit will be on view at Pucker Gallery from 31 January through 8 March 2026.
About Our Panelists...
Hideaki Miyamura was born in 1955 in Niigata, Japan, and traveled to the United States to study art history at Western Michigan University. After college, in 1987, he returned to Japan to pursue his interest in ceramics as an apprentice with master potter Shurei Miura in Yamanashi. Stemming from his interest in rare ancient Chinese tea bowl glazes, Miyamura seeks to create glazes that have a three-dimensional quality and convey purity and peacefulness. His vessels are pristine, disarmingly simple, contemplative objects whose finishes reflect the panoply of the natural world—geologic phenomena, star-filled nights, undulating ocean waves, and fiery sunsets. His work is included in numerous public collections, including the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Franz Nicolay has been an artist and arts educator in New Hampshire for over 45 years. His specific areas of creative work are in ceramics, photography, writing, and wood sculpture. His areas of long-term investigation are in visual literacy, narrative, and expression, resulting from the creative process itself. Franz Nicolay was also the director of the Edwards Art Gallery at Holderness School for many years prior to retirement from teaching. In this position, Franz curated annual art exhibitions from Pucker Gallery's extensive collection of ceramics, painting, and photography. He has degrees in Fine Art from Lesley University/Art Institute of Boston (MFA) and St. Lawrence University (BA). He designed his house based on the golden ratio, and he maintains a studio practice in Center Sandwich, NH. Franz has exhibited widely and has work in numerous public and private collections.
Now retired, Robert D. Mowry was the Alan J. Dworsky Curator of Chinese Art and Head of the Department of Asian Art at the Harvard Art Museums and also Senior Lecturer in Chinese and Korean Art in Harvard’s Department of the History of Art and Architecture. A specialist in Chinese art, he has also done considerable work with Korean art, publishing in the field and building a collection of Korean paintings and ceramics for the Harvard Art Museums. Although he majored in European art history, French, and medieval humanities as an undergraduate at the University of Kansas (BA, 1967), with plans to study late medieval architecture and manuscript painting, his two years in Korea as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer in the late 1960s sparked an abiding interest in Asian art and culture. Since his retirement from Harvard in 2013, he has been serving as a Senior Consultant in Chinese and Korean Art at Christie’s, working primarily with Christie’s New York offices, he also has responsibilities toward the London, Paris, and Hong Kong offices.
Mara Williams assumed Emerita status in 2021, after curating exhibits at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center for thirty-three years. Her area of expertise is modern and contemporary art. Recent solo exhibitions include: Gathering Light: The Art of Stephen Hannock; Wolf Kahn— Landscape of Light; Secrets by Gloria Garfinkel; Andy Warhol—Selections from the Jon Gould Collection. Group shows have included the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Janet Fish, Mary Frank, Keith Haring, David Hockney, Maya Lin, James McGarrell, David Nash, Robert Rauschenberg, Ursula von Ridingsvard, Michael Singer, Tseng Kwong Chi, and Barbara Zucker, as well as a host of regional and emerging talent.
Dr. Carl Herbert is a fourth-generation physician whose career has been devoted to helping infertility patients overcome a wide spectrum of obstacles to create their families. Early in his career he participated in the founding of one of the first eIVF centers in the United States. For more than forty years, Dr. Herbert has contributed to the growth and development of assisted reproductive technologies, continually implementing the evolving techniques and optimizing their clinical applications for care. The ambiguity of a socially awkward accolade, “You got me pregnant!”, has become a recurrent reward, both humorous and joyful. By serendipity, Dr. Herbert walked into Pucker Gallery for the first time in 1985 when visiting Boston for a medical conference. From this point on, his nascent interest in art grew under the generous tutelage and encouragement of Mr. Pucker. A close personal friendship evolved as they visited artists and exhibitions around the world; exchanged thoughts on the experience and intrinsic value that art, in all its many forms, can provide individuals and society; and shared writings which illuminated these principles.
Bernie Pucker is the director of Pucker Gallery, which he founded with his wife, Sue, on Boston's historic Newbury Street in 1967. Pucker Gallery represents over fifty artists from around the world, presenting approximately ten exhibitions annually, often paired with artist talks, virtual “WebinARTs,” and Gallery receptions. Bernie is currently a Board Member at the Japan Society, Boston, and the Jewish Publication Society. He also serves on the Leadership Council for Facing History and Ourselves as well as the Artistic Advisory Board for the Terezin Music Foundation. Previously, he has served as President of Solomon Schechter Day School, President of the Newbury Street League, and Board Member for the Friends of Copley Square and The Unity Project, among others. Bernie received his MA in Modern Jewish History from Brandeis University and his BA in History and English Literature from Columbia College.