Margaret Carney, ceramics historian, will speak from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. March 10 (Wednesday) in Epperson Auditorium on the campus of the Kansas City Art Institute, 4415 Warwick Blvd. The auditorium is located in Vanderslice Hall, the college’s main administrative building. Carney is curator of the Blair Museum of Lithophanes in Toledo, Ohio. A museum professional for more than 30 years, she served as the founding director of the Museum of Ceramic Art at Alfred University in New York.
Carney holds a Ph.D. degree in Asian art history from the University of Kansas and a master of philosophy degree in art history, with an emphasis in Oriental Art, also from KU, where she studied with Laurence Sickman, former director of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and Dr. Chu-tsing Li. She also earned a master’s degree in art history and a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of Iowa in Iowa City.
She is a Fellow of the American Ceramic Society and an elected member of the International Academy of Ceramics in Switzerland. She has served as a Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American Art and the Renwick Gallery and has received grants from the Tile Heritage Foundation and the Cumming Ceramic Research Foundation. She has curated numerous exhibitions, lectured widely and written 60 books, catalogs and journal articles. She has taught ceramic world history at Alfred and Ohio State University, among others.
She recently completed the first book in 180 years on the topic of lithophanes (2008, Schiffer Publishing), and her most recently curated exhibition is “The Ironic Porcelain Fan,” featuring rare 19th century porcelain complexion fans and related hand screens, which will be on view May through October at the Blair Museum of Lithophanes.
About lithophanes
According to information published on the Blair Museum’s Web site, the Greek origin of the word “lithophane” means "light in stone" or to "appear in stone.” More from the Web site: “How beautifully this describes these porcelain castings which, in ambient light, seem only to be bumpy surfaces forming a vague picture and there is ‘really nothing to see,’ as Mr. Blair always said. But, when the ambient light is extinguished and the lithophane is back-lit, a beautiful, three-dimensional picture appears in incredible depth and detail. Popular in Europe in the mid-19th Century, lithophanes began their life as a thin sheet of beeswax. Artisans carved the pictures in the wax, a plaster-of-Paris mold was made from the wax carving and the porcelain slip was poured in this mold to dry. Removed from the mold, the porcelain was then fired. Where the picture is the lightest, the porcelain is very thin, and where it is darkest, the porcelain is very thick.”