?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
YVONNE TUCKER (1941 - ) Untitled (Vessel).
Raku ceramic, wheel thrown and slab built, 1981. Approximately 222x190x190 mm; 8 3/4x7 1/2x7 1/2 inches. Inscribed signature and date "2/81" on the underside.
Provenance: private collection.
Untitled (Vessel) is a keen example of Yvonne Tucker's ceramic practice. Wheel thrown and slab built, the work features intricate hand decorated details that invoke spiritual inspiration and cultural exploration. The work connects her investigation of Japanese and African ceramic studies.
Born in 1941 in Chicago, Yvonne Tucker has practiced art since her youth. Originally a painter, she studied at the South Side Community Art Center and the Art Institute of Chicago. Focusing on painting in college, she graduated from the University of Illinois at Urban-Champaign in 1962 and met ceramicist Curtis Tucker, who she eventually married. Tucker attended graduate school at the University of California, Los Angeles but completed her MFA in ceramics at the Otis Art institute in 1968. She studied under ceramicists Helen Watson, Michael Frimkess as well as with Charles White, Joseph Mugnaini, and Herman Kofi Bailey. "I fell in love with clay at Otis (Arts Institute) in Los Angeles," she said. "There was a very strong ceramic culture out west in the middle '60s. I went to a school that had several of the leading potters there."
Tucker and her husband both collaborated on ceramic works and maintained separate practices. They combined Eastern and African traditional methods with contemporary techniques and African American aesthetics that developed into a new form dubbed "Afro-Raku." Raku is the Japanese ceramic practice of hand-modeled pottery that is fired at a low temperature and rapidly cooled used specifically for a tea ritual that began in the 17th century. While studying Raku, Tucker was also studying Congolese, Ghanian, and Nigerian pottery for the range of materiality used and their functions.
Yvonne Tucker has lived and worked in Northern Florida for many decades. She has been an educator at Florida A&M University, Tallahassee since 1973 and has received many honors and awards including Anonymous Award for Ceramics, Otis Art Institute 50th Anniversary Exhibition, 1969, Blue Ribbon, Clay Glaze Miami, 1970, Best in Show Award, Florida International University First Annual Art Fair, 1973, Top Honors in Ceramics, North Florida Fair 1975, African American Institute and Howard University, Educators to Africa Grant, 1975, a National Endowment for the Humanities, Summer Seminar for College Teachers, 1978. She is profiled in Samella Lewis's African American Art and Artists. Lewis p. 230.
