The Art of Vivika and Otto Heino - softcover

From an exhibition organized by the Ventura County Museum of History & Art and the Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles. 

Featuring works from the collection of Forrest I. Merrill.

Otto Heino: Celebrating 90 Years, Ventura County Museum of History & Art, March 4 - May 22, 2005.

Ceramic Masters: The Art of Vivika and Otto Heino and Their Contemporaries, Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles, March 10 - July 3, 2005

• Collector's Foreword by Forrest L. Merrill
• The Art of Vivika & Otto Heino by Kevin V. Wallace
• Otto Heino - An Appreciation by Tim Schiffer

The Art of Vivika & Otto Heino documents the lives of two leading figures in 20th-century ceramics. As teachers, they exerted a major influence on the work of generations of makers. As artists, their work has been prominently featured in hundreds of exhibitions, honored with innumerable awards, and now forms an essential part of the craft collection in dozens of museums. But, as Eudorah Moore, Founder and Director of the California Design Exhibitions, has pointed out, "Over and beyond their work, their great distinction was the early visibility they gave to the crafts, revealing the crafts as a way of life." As Vivika Heino once explained:

"True craftspeople do much more than just make things. They live within their work, formulate a philosophy about the field, feel the aliveness of the materials, and are aware of the qualities possible in the medium."*

Thinking of the years of their lives fused together with their work in that happy valley of Ojai, California, the simplicity and directness of the pots, the daily involvement in every aspect of their craft - preparing clay, coiling pots, throwing on the turning wheel, creating and experimenting with glazes, firing the kilns and leaving the indelible presence of their hands and fingers - they worked in ancient ways, rooted in the far distant reaches of human history. Still dependent on those four elements essential to every work of ceramic art - Earth, Air, Fire, Water - their work recalls the words of the old Shaker Hymn:

'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free

'Tis the gift to come down where you ought to be

And when we find ourselves in the place just right

'Twill be in the valley of love and delight

When true simplicity is found

To bow and bend we shan't be ashamed

To turn, turn will be our delight

'Till by turning, turning we come round right.

And, Otto is still there, turning and turning, as he comes round right, in that wonderful valley of love and delight.

James Goodwin, Director, Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles

*Vivika Heino: On Pottery, Ceramics Monthly, March 1996, p.40

Ventura County Museum of History & Art, 2005, softcover, 9.25 x 9.25 inches, 87 pages / 72 color plates.