Blog Intro

       Identity is described as “how people define themselves as individuals and as groups” (DeFrancisco and Palczewski, 2007, p.61). One of the most important aspects of my identity is being an artist.  This one piece of my identity has influenced my life greatly thus far. The medium that I enjoy working with the most is clay. Therefore, I decided to base my gender identity project in the ceramics world. I would like to study the ways in which men and women create ceramic pieces and the ways in which they surface those pieces. I am curious to know if there is a noticeable difference in the way men and women make art. My assumption is that males tend to make larger pieces and decorate the surface less ornately than a female. I am interested to find out if my hypothesis is true. I make these claims from observations I have already made of some males in my previous and current ceramics classes.
I am in my third semester of ceramics at UNL. The class I am taking is combined with another ceramics class, Ceramics 232, the second semester of ceramics. The class I am in (Ceramics 331) contains only seven students. Six of us are female. The Ceramics 232 class has, I believe, five males out of a class of sixteen-ish. I will find out the exact numbers through my exploration of this topic. To my knowledge, it is primarily art majors, minors, and art education students that take these classes. I want to ask the College of Fine and Performing Arts about the exact number of male art majors and female art majors enrolled at UNL. My guess is that it is primarily females.
Traditionally, I feel like some areas of art are thought to be more masculine and some areas more feminine. For example, sculpture is viewed as more of a masculine art because of the use of power tools, welding, and maybe even that sculptures can be quite large. I would see ceramics as being more of a feminine art because it usually involves smaller pieces and many of them are beautiful and ornate.
In my ceramics class last semester we watched an interesting ceramics documentary titled “Revolutions of the Wheel.” In the late 19th century, pottery was still an industrialized art. Ceramics were made in factories and produced in massive quantities. In the documentary, Kenneth Trapp explains, “Women were often decorators. Men were glazers, throwers, the potters, the kiln men. They were the technicians as well as the administrators.” Women were not given many tasks during the production of the pottery. They were seen as capable of doing only one thing: decorating. I wonder if these historical assumptions have affected  today’s art. Are women more interested in surface decoration? Do they tend to make more ornate surfaces? Are men more concerned with the structure of the piece rather than its surface? bell hook states in Feminism is for Everybody that “Before women’s liberation, all females young and old were socialized by sexist thinking to believe that our value rested solely on appearance…” (hooks, 2000, p. 6). I question whether society’s emphasis on external beauty has affected the way artists surface ceramics. Is the goal of most artists to make their work beautiful? Would the value of a ceramic work that is deemed unbeautiful be less valuable?
To study the differences in the ceramics made by men and women, I plan to interview the students in my class (the 232 students as well as the 331 students). I might be able to find some grad students to interview as well. I will look at their work for similarities based on their sex. I will ask them why they make their work a certain way. It would also be interesting to show males and females the same picture of a ceramic artwork and ask them to describe it as well as what they like about it. I will note whether they focus more on the surface or the structure of the piece and what words they use to describe it.

Resources:
bell hooks. (2000). Feminism is for everyone. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.

DeFrancisco, V. P., & Palczewski, C. H. (2007). Communicating gender diversity: A critical
approach. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications.

(2011, December 5). Revolutions of the Wheel- The Tradition of No Tradition [Video file]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMaftTN7B0Q