Toshiko Takaezu

Toshiko Takaezu studied art at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and in 1951 enrolled in the Cranbrook Academy of Art where her teachers encouraged her to experiment rather than simply follow their instruction. During a visit to Japan in 1955, she spent time in a Zen monastery and with some of Japan’s most eminent traditional potters. Her future work, derived from natural forms, was strongly influenced by her study of Zen Buddhism.

Takaezu taught at the Cleveland Institute of Art for nearly a decade after returning from Japan and for 25 years at Princeton, where she helped to develop the visual art program. She retired from Princeton in 1992. Her work is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art among others and was the subject of a traveling retrospective that originated at the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto in 1995 and the exhibition "The Poetry of Clay: The Art of Toshiko Takaezu" at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2004. "The Art of Toshiko Takaezu: In the Language of Silence", edited by Peter Held, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2011.