Sequoia Miller is a historian, curator, and studio potter. He holds a PhD in the History of Art from Yale University; an MA from the Bard Graduate Center for Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture; and a BA in Russian from Brandeis University. As historian and curator, Sequoia specializes in modern and contemporary ceramics. He is the Chief Curator and Deputy Director at the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art in Toronto. Recent curatorial projects at the Gardiner include RAW and Ai Weiwei: Unbroken, and The Ceramic Presence in Modern Art at the Yale University Art Gallery. Sequoia has recently lectured on 19th century British transfer-printed ceramics with images of Canada and racialized porcelain figurines of the 18th century. Recent publications include "Majolica and Contemporary Ceramics" in the catalogue accompanying the upcoming exhibition Majolica Mania at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City. Sequoia has taught at Yale, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the University of Toronto. Sequoia was a full-time studio potter based in the Pacific Northwest prior to pursuing curatorial and academic work. His pots are typically wheel-thrown and altered, taking on an architectural aspect yet keyed to domestic and daily use. He exhibited widely and led workshops at craft schools, universities, and art centers in the U.S. and Canada. Born in New York City, Sequoia grew up largely in Maine and has long-standing ties to the artistic community here. He began making pottery at age 10 with Toby Rosenberg in Portland, and visited Haystack and Deer Isle frequently. His education as a potter unfolded after finishing university at Penland, Haystack, and other craft schools during the mid 1990’s. In 1995, he relocated to the Pacific Northwest and set up a studio in an abandoned boat shack, soon becoming a full-time potter. Sequoia's selected exhibitions and awards for his ceramics include the Smithsonian Craft Show, Washington, DC, 2006; “Teapots: Universal Adoration,” Pewabic Pottery, Detroit, MI, 2006; Philadelphia Art Museum Show, Philadelphia, PA, 2005; “Made in Clay,” Greenwich House Pottery, New York, NY, 2005; “Tea For Two,” Kentucky Museum of Arts & Design, Louisville, KY, 2004; and regular exhibitions at June Fitzpatrick Gallery, Portland, ME, in the 2000s. Sequoia has been showing with Turtle Gallery since 1996. He continues to make pots in a small studio in Toronto.

Sequoia Miller, on Cityscape/Statdbild:

I have lived until recently in the woods outside of Olympia, Washington making quiet pottery in a peaceful place. As a native of Manhattan, however, I find a persistant tension between participating in and withdrawing from the flux of culture. 

Making this work was a meditation of sorts on the relationship between my solitary, contemplative aspect and my incisive, engaged one. The boxes amass as the echo of a distant city, overlaid with the immediacy of a life surrounded by the forest. The streets are paved with clay, dug from the creek bed where I worked and saturated with the ash of incense. 

In the course of making this piece I decided to move back to New York for a few years. My apartment hunt, aided by Google street view and its novel representation of place, became an unexpected source for the work. I call it Statbild, German for Cityscape, because learning German become another unexpected yet integral aspect of my return to the city. 

Grouped as the boxes are, they step away from utility and explore issues typically sub-textual for a studio potter: How do we as makers create an understanding of ourselves through our work? How do we navigate imbalances of "nature" and "culture"? How do the environments we create impact the questions we ask?

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