Join us for “University City Ceramics: A Fresh Look,” a six-part online lecture series!

Led by SMCF Executive Director Jonathan Clancy, Ph.D., this series explores Edward Gardner Lewis’ ambitious University City Ceramics project and the pioneering artists he brought together, including Taxile Doat, Adelaide Alsop Robineau, and Frederick Hurten Rhead. Though the project was short-lived, it became a remarkable moment in American ceramics history and helped shape the future of ceramics education.

Session One: March 14, at 1:00 PM EDT via Zoom
Big dreams and bigger debts: the unlikely story of University City

Even today, Edwin Gardner Lewis’s ability to pull off a venture as improbable as University City and bring together Taxile Doat, Adelaide Robineau, and Frederick Hurten Rhead into a single school engenders a certain amount of grudging respect from his most ardent critics. A wildly unsympathetic protagonist, Lewis seems endowed with a preternatural ability to talk himself out of almost any problem. To his defenders he was the victim of malicious prosecutions by corrupt politicians and people in power, a charge which eventually proved true and helped earn him multiple acquittals. To his critics, he was a confidence man, a promoter of pyramid schemes, a smooth-talking deceiver who bilked thousands out of perhaps millions of dollars.  To us? We’ll just have to see where we land.

So what was University City and The American Woman’s League? How does one even afford to hire the most talented ceramists of the day, and–perhaps even more significantly–why were Edward and Mabel Lewis convinced a correspondence ceramics class would work? In this session we’ll take an unvarnished look at Lewis, examine the small surviving corpus of ceramics he and his wife made, and explore in depth how this Art Academy was formed and the degree to which it broke almost every norm.

A La Carte
Member Price: $30 / session
Non-Member Price: $35 / session

Full Course
Member Price: All 6 sessions for $150 (one session free)
Non-Member Price: All 6 sessions for $210

Registration is required. Once registered and paid, you will receive an email prior to each session with a link to join.

Do you have a scheduling conflict for the live session? You can still enjoy the program. Register and we’ll send you the recording! All paid attendees will be emailed a private link to the session recording when it is available, typically 6-7 days after the live program.

Missed us? You can also register retroactively. If you register for a session that has passed, you’ll receive access to the recording when it is ready.

Haven’t tried a session yet? Each session is planned as a “stand-alone” lecture, so you can take them all or attend the topics that interest you most.