2025 NCECA Annual: True and Real

Life in these early years of the twenty-first century has witnessed enormous social change. While this may be the case for each generation, this moment, propelled by exponential technological advances, has been among the most destabilizing and disorienting.

The concurrent emergence of Artificial Intelligence, robotics, genetic engineering, environmental challenges, social media, and self-driving cars has contributed to emotional and physical upheavals on an unprecedented scale. New technologies have blurred distinctions between artifice and reality, making the artist’s authentic and courageous self ever more meaningful to that which is True and Real.

For millennia, clay’s steadiness has chronicled the human condition and its diverse expressions in largely unchanging ways. Seen in this light, ceramics holds a presence for expression in contemporary art that is intimately human, unassuming, and expressive.

The objects in this exhibition demonstrate superb narrative content, representation, and figuration, expressing the power of ceramic art to raise questions about the human condition. Who am I? What is it that I value? How can I be seen … heard … and understood against this background of change? In the quest to reveal the authentic self, what does it mean to be True and Real?

The 2025 NCECA Annual, True and Real, is one of three cornerstone exhibitions produced by the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts concurrently with its 59th annual conference, Formation. The works of five invited artists act as catalysts to resonate with the empathic voices of an additional 35 artists selected through an open call.

—Judith S. Schwartz, PhD, Curator