WELCOME
The Connecticut Ceramics Circle is pleased to
announce our Speakers and Membership Plans
for the 2025-2026 lecture year.
Please join us for our next lecture:
November​​
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Becky MacGuire​
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Connections:
An Inaugural Exhibition of Chinese Ceramics and Asian Export Art
at the Albuquerque Collection​
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LIVE
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at the Bruce Museum​
Monday, November 10
2 pm ET
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and
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ZOOM
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Wednesday, November 12​
2 pm ET​
zoom registration required
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The Albuquerque Foundation opened its doors in late February 2025 with an exhibition celebrating the stories of cross-cultural encounter that are reflected in its magnificent collection. Known to many from its publication in six large volumes (The RA Collection, vols. I-VI, by M.A. de Matos et al, 2011-2022), the collection formed by Renato de Albuquerque over six decades focuses on Chinese ceramics, but also includes Japanese ceramics, paintings and lacquer; Chinese painted enamel, carvings and bronzes; China trade painting and works of Anglo-Portuguese art.
In this talk Connections guest curator Becky MacGuire will discuss how she drew from the more than 2500 diverse works of art in the collection for this inaugural exhibition. Aiming to introduce the collection to visitors both new to the field and experienced, the exhibition explores the many ways in which these objects speak to us of networks of influence – and of human commonality – in the early modern world.
A virtual tour of the exhibition will include views of the Foundation's home in Sintra, Portugal, where it is housed in an historic quinta with expansive gardens, now joined by state-of-the-art galleries and storage.
The talk will also make note of the contemporary ceramics program, which is an integral part of the Foundation's mission. Housed in a stand-alone gallery on the Foundation grounds, its opening exhibition is The Ever-Present Hand by Theaster Gates, in which the artist has incorporated a small number of pieces from the historic collection.
Becky MacGuire retired from Christie’s after a 30-year career as the firm’s senior specialist in Chinese export art. A senior vice president of the firm, Becky was also Director of the New York Exceptional Sale. After graduation from the University of California at Berkeley with honors in art history, Becky completed the program of the Study Centre for the Fine and Decorative Arts at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She was an original appraiser on the American Antiques Roadshow and among the earliest members of The Chinese Porcelain Company staff. Author of Four Centuries of Blue and White: The Frelinghuysen Collection of Chinese & Japanese Export Porcelain (Ad Illisum 2023), MacGuire has most recently been guest curator for the inaugural exhibition of the Albuquerque Foundation in Portugal. Her forthcoming book will cover the much overlooked and intriguing Chinese export enameled wares made in the first decades of the 19th century, the sunset years of the classic export trade.
December
Robin Osborne
Professor of Ancient History, Faculty of Classics, King’s College, University of Cambridge Fellow,
The British Academy
Painted Pottery and the Transformation of Athens
The pots painted in Athens in the middle of the fifth century BC depict different scenes from those painted at the end of the sixth century and depict them in a different way. This fact is so well known to scholars that it is taken for granted. In this lecture I look more closely at what changes occurred, and in particular at the changes in the scenes depicted. I argue that, rather than taking the changes for-granted, we should see them as the best evidence we have for the moral, political and aesthetic preferences that constituted and distinguished classical Greek culture. Athenian pottery, I shall claim, not only offers us an unparalleled window through which to view the transformation from archaic to classical Greece, but also an insight into why that transformation took place.
Athenian red-figure pottery offers unique possibilities for the sort of rewriting of art history that I am advocating because of the quantities in which it survives and because of the range of subject which it represents. Past scholarship has often concentrated on the artists, at the expense of the subject matter of their art, or, when analyzing subject-matter, has ignored the fact that the choice of scene changes over time; by contrast, this study takes diachronic change as its central problem.
I look in turn at various scenes that attracted the attention of painters of red-figure pottery, concentrating particularly on athletics and warfare, but casting a glance towards sexual relations too. My primary question is how the choice of scenes relating to soldiers, athletes, courtship and sex changed over time. I argue that the history of images of warfare or of athletics or of sexual relations is not determined by changes to fighting or what happened in the gymnasium, or to changes in how men and women related, but rather by a changed view of the world that encompassed all of these activities.
In conclusion, I explore the moral and political implications of the changes in the selection of scenes represented, and I make the case for the impact of aesthetic factors on how people saw the world and considered their own relation to it. I then discuss the ways in which the history of sculpture does and does not parallel the history represented in painted pottery.
Robin Osborne was introduced to both Classics and the History of Art at Colchester Royal Grammar School in the UK. He read Classics as an undergraduate at King’s College Cambridge (1976–79), stayed in Cambridge to write a Ph.D. on Classical Athens and Attica under the supervision of Anthony Snodgrass (1979–82) and was then elected to a Research Fellowship at King’s Cambridge (1982–86).
From 1986 to 2001 he taught in Oxford as a Fellow of first Magdalen College and then Corpus Christi College, being promoted to a titular Professorship in Ancient History in 1996. In 2001 he returned to Cambridge to the established chair in Ancient History, from which he retired in 2024. He has published widely on Greek History and Greek Art and Archaeology, including Archaic and Classical Greek Art in the Oxford History of Art series (1998), Greece in the Making 1200–479 B.C. (1996, 2nd ed. 2009), Athens and Athenian Democracy, (2010) and The History Written on the Classical Greek Body (2011). He is a past President of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies and of the Classical Association, a former Chair of the Council of University Classical Departments, and he was Chair of the Classics Sub-Panel in the 2014 UK Research Excellent Framework exercise. He has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 2006.
January
Lucía Abramovich Sánchez
Carolyn and Peter Lynch Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture
at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
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Common Languages, Distinct Accents: Mexican Ceramics in Dialogue at the MFA Boston and Beyond
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In this presentation, Lucia Abramovich Sánchez will explore the distinct regional accents embedded in Mexico’s long and diverse history of ceramic production. She will convey how these are distinguished — or overlooked — in their presentation within museum exhibitions and collections, particularly in U.S. and European institutions. Beginning with a brief overview of pottery traditions in pre-contact Mesoamerica and the Viceroyalty of New Spain, this presentation will trace the aesthetic evolution and material practices of ceramic production in two regions — Puebla and Jalisco — whose rich legacies are the most prominently represented in international museum holdings. Puebla’s Talavera Poblana, with its cobalt blue glazes and iconography shaped by Asian and Islamic influences, and Jalisco’s burnished redwares, known for their aromatic clays and sculptural forms, will serve as primary case studies.
Through recent advances in scholarship on 17th-century Talavera Poblana, as well as an analysis of recent exhibitions and permanent displays that reexamine colonial ceramics across the Americas, Sánchez will illustrate how narratives around Mexican ceramics are being reshaped within global art history. She aims to highlight these gaps in the research of historical ceramics, such as the overlooked biographies of potters, intergenerational technical knowledge, and the histories of lesser-known centers like Natá, Panamá, and Santiago de Chile, and argue for a more inclusive and nuanced interpretive framework.
Finally, Sánchez will propose curatorial strategies to increase the visibility of these works in underrepresented collections, especially interpretive models that frame Mexican ceramics not only as works of decorative art, but as objects of cultural memory that speak across time and place, telling stories that connect people around the world through the universal language of clay.
Lucía Abramovich Sánchez is the Carolyn and Peter Lynch Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She previously served as Associate Curator of Latin American Art at the San Antonio Museum of Art in San Antonio, Texas, and has also held curatorial positions at the New Orleans Museum of Art and at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian. At the MFA, she works with a wide range of artwork that includes decorative arts and sculpture from North America and Latin America, spanning over 3,000 years of history. Among her projects in development is a major reinstallation of the first floor of the MFA’s Art of the Americas wing, which will reopen in June 2026 to mark the U.S. Semiquincentennial. Dr. Abramovich Sánchez earned her B.A. from the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia and received her M.A. from the Sainsbury Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, United Kingdom. She holds a Ph.D. from the Latin American Studies & Art History joint doctoral program at Tulane University, New Orleans.
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COMING SOON
February: SEMINAR
Lark Mason
A Guide to Chinese Ceramics Ancient and Modern and How to Navigate a Complicated Market
March
Bernard Dragesco
An Introduction to French Soft-Paste Porcelain Factories of the 18th Century
April
David Rago
Rago/Wright’s Greatest Hits of American Pre-War Ceramics
May
Michael Eden
3D-Printed Porcelain: Exploring the Intersection of Technology and Handcraft
June
Nick Stagliano
Hanns Weinberg and The Antique Porcelain Company
Previous Lectures
recordings available for members
October
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Jeffrey Ruda
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Modernism and Historicism:
A French State Gift of Sèvres in the Early 1920s
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Monday, October 13
2 pm ET
via Zoom
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zoom recording available for members
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In tribute to the 1924 opening of San Francisco’s new art museum, a namesake and reduced replica of the Palace of the Legion of Honor in Paris, the French government sent a large group of Sèvres ceramics. The gift divides into three groups: Two big vases show the most difficult glazing techniques the factory had mastered; twenty-some cabinet-sized pieces show the most advanced fashion in design as of the early 1920s; finally, thirty-one biscuit sculptures, ranging from table-sized to very small, show a surprising range of subjects. Some are clearly appropriate to a war memorial and others to Franco-American friendship, but other selections are harder to understand. Even the obvious commemorative subjects involved meaningful expressive choices.
The Sèvres factory became a government agency early in its history, producing state gifts and public imagery and working in multiple styles for diverse audiences. This background helps to clarify some of the choices in the museum’s founding gift. Others benefit from a close look on their own terms.
Jeffrey Ruda is a Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University of California, Davis, where he served three terms as head of the Art History faculty. He is now on the Board of the American Ceramic Circle, where he serves as managing editor of the ACC Journal and a member of the Grants Committee.
