As a ceramic artist, Harue McVay has been difficult to categorize throughout her career. Her work is founded on traditional forming techniques, but she expands simple structures into complex amalgamations of clay, resins and metals that often become more like experimental installations.
McVay has wheel-thrown a clay pot bigger than her 5-foot-tall body. She has made a gigantic bowl that’s the size of a truck tire. She has incorporated cement into large-scale sculptures, but she also has made many delicate teapots, bowls and plates. The 88-year-old’s innovative artwork has been selected for a variety of juried and invitational exhibitions in Hawaii and on the mainland, including the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York and the Honolulu Academy of Arts (now the Honolulu Museum of Art).
Starting today, audiences will get the first chance to see the range of McVay’s work all in one place during a career retrospective at the Gallery ‘Iolani at Windward Community College.
“I’ve been a teacher my entire life — busy, busy, busy all of the time,” McVay said. “If I participated in a show, it always was a group show or a small show. Nothing this size.”
The retrospective will include about 100 of her contemporary pieces from the past four decades, mixing Western with Asian art and cultural influences, including abstract and figurative work. The pieces have been kept in various locations over the years, so even the people closest to the collection, such as McVay and her family members, have never seen them assembled together in this way.
After studying art at UH under the legendary Claude Horan, considered the “father of ceramics” in Hawaii, and then earning her master’s degree at Ohio State University, McVay returned to Oahu to work with Horan to develop the local ceramics community. She taught for 43 years at UH before retiring in 1993, and she has stayed involved with the arts community as a professor emeritus and by serving on the board of Hawai‘i Craftsmen.
Tom Klobe, a fellow professor emeritus of art at UH, and founding director of the University of Hawaii Art Gallery, curated this show. He said McVay “really was one of the major figures in the establishment of ceramics in Hawaii. She had that kind of impact for a generation. She and Claude Horan changed the nature of how ceramics was looked upon as an art form; it was no longer just a craft. Her ceramics show the diversity of what is possible.”
Her son, Kurt McVay, a glass-fusing artist who now lives in Washington state, has returned to Oahu to help with the organization of this expansive exhibit.
“What was intimidating and amazing to me about my mother’s artwork was that each of her shows was completely different than the one before it,” he said. “This one has little samples from all of those shows, and it is even more impressive than all of the individual ones beforehand, sampling an incredible diversity of styles and experimentations.”
From Harue McVay’s perspective, that was all just a part of the job: “I was a teacher. I had to constantly remind the students what it was all about, being an artist. You couldn’t keep doing the same thing. You had to demonstrate that you could experiment and be successful. … That was what I was all about.”
‘Harue McVay, A Life Flowing’
A career retrospective of the artist, a professor emeritus of art at the University of Hawaii
>> When: 1 to 5 p.m. Mondays to Fridays and Sundays to Nov. 25 (except Veterans Day); reception 2 to 4 p.m. today
>> Where: Gallery ‘Iolani, Windward Community College, 45-720 Kea‘ahala Road
>> Info: 236-9155, gallery.windward.hawaii.edu
