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Effective January 1: Masks are Optional in VisArts’ Classrooms and Studios
By Mark Jenkins
August 13, 2025
Handmade objects complement hand-drawn renderings in “Vessels & Voids: Architects and Ceramic Artists Explore Organic Spaces,” an ambitious show at VisArts. But at the exhibition’s center is a machine, a relatively recent invention that has already reshaped both architecture and ceramics: the 3D printer.
While the process is associated mostly with plastic, 3D printing has expanded to other materials such as clay. Thus Brian Peters, a Pittsburgh artist and architect, can employ the device to produce such pieces as “Triangle Twist,” a sinuous spire made of stoneware beads. Computer-aided design has encouraged architects to favor eccentric swoops over right angles, so the foot-high piece could be a prototype for a future skyscraper. (Peters will demonstrate the printer’s capabilities during an Aug. 29 evening reception at the venue.)
“Vessels & Voids” is in Kaplan Gallery, VisArts’ largest exhibition space, which is divided unequally by a partition. The show’s organizer, VisArts’ 2025 Mentoring Curator Rebecca Cross, has filled the smaller space with work by 13 Washington architects.
These are mostly drawings, although there are a few models and one set of videos. Michael Marshall supplements his lush renderings of the Howard Theater’s interior with computer-animated tours of proposed projects, including the Frederick Douglass Memorial Park on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
The larger area contains, in addition to Peters’s creations, objects fashioned by five ceramicists. (Among them is Barcelona-based Marissa McInturff, daughter of one of the architects, Mark McInturff.) Many of these pieces have an architectural quality, as their titles acknowledge.
Paul DiPasquale’s “Prayer Citadel, Ht. 22” suggests a stone outcropping while recalling the organic forms of Spanish architect Antonin Gaudi’s buildings. The same artist’s “Home, Ht. 9” looks a bit like a wasp’s nest, but also like Virginia Pates’s “Experimental Architecture,” an elementary domed hut modeled in earth-toned unfired stoneware. Both resemble the sort of African mud granaries elegantly drawn by architect Anthony “Ankie” Barnes, as well as David Jameson’s grander plan for a mountain-mimicking “Teton Residence.”
DiPasquale’s more explicitly architectural efforts are figurative sculptures, shown here as a maquette or in a photograph, such as the 34-foot-high King Neptune that towers over Virginia Beach’s boardwalk. While the artist mocks up his statues in clay, their final versions are made of such materials as bronze and fiberglass.
A few pieces could be either stylized forests or abstracted cathedrals. Jon McMillan’s “Catenary Arches” clusters overlapping curves into an airy mass that evokes a baobab tree’s exposed roots. The piece has a structural affinity with Peters’s more orderly “Aggregation 3.0,” which interlocks dozens of 3D-printed pieces in shades of purple that become lighter as they ascend.
Several other McMillan pieces are as notable for their glossy skins as their serpentine forms. Such spiraling earthenware towers as “Growth VII” are a loamy red, but flecked with light-green splotches. These marks individually suggest lichens growing on rocks, yet combine to give the surfaces a beguiling shimmer. Some of the entries, while fanciful, follow the basic outlines of traditional pottery. McInturff’s stoneware inventions are essentially beakers, albeit sometimes with elaborate nonfunctional details. Most of Pates’s creations are bowls of a sort, although notable more for their intricate textures and metallic hues than any likely practical use.
Robert Devers emulates natural objects more explicitly in stoneware and porcelain works that resemble stones, shells and fossils. A simulated starfish is at the core of his “Rock Flower Vessel,” which looks almost as much like a found object as a manufactured one.
Devers’s attention to organic archetypes mirrors those of architects Dhiru A. Thadani, who offers a drawing of a cellular-shaped arts center in Islamabad, Pakistan; and Melinda Humphry Becker, whose digital collage includes images of flowers, pine cones and such unusual mammals as armadillos and pangolins. These creatures, hard-armored yet supplely coiling, are ideal mascots for “Vessel & Void.”
Cross ran D.C.’s Cross Mackenzie Gallery from 2006 to 2022, and she often showed work by ceramicists and architects. She anticipates that materials and forms will continue to bring the two fields closer together. Essential to this is the appeal of non-Euclidean arcs and spirals. As Cross writes in her introduction to the show’s catalogue, “Curves are calling!”
Vessels & Voids: Architects and Ceramic Artists Explore Organic Spaces
Kaplan Gallery, VisArts, 155 Gibbs St., Rockville. visartscenter.org. 301-315-8200.
Dates: Through Sept. 28.
Prices: Free.
Read in The Washington Post
