“Centers and Edges: Modern Ceramic Design and Sculpture, 1880-1980,” featuring select works from several influential movements in the history and development of Twentieth Century ceramics and design, will be presented at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago from June 2 to September 18.

At the exhibition opening reception on Thursday, June 2, from 5 to 7 pm, Smart Museum senior curator Richard A. Born and ceramic artist and collector Mary Seyfarth, chair of the ceramics department at Columbia College, will introduce the exhibition and lead an informal gallery talk.

The exhibition, organized mainly from the museum’s collection, focuses on five key moments of influence, invention and impact that are marked by shifting geographical centers of creative energy – late-Nineteenth Century British and American Arts and Crafts pottery; functionalist designs from 1920s and 1930s Germany and Austria; the modernist figuration of Aristide Maillol, Henry Moore and other European sculptors; a widespread embrace of studio and folk pottery traditions in America, Europe and Japan after World War II; and an expressive reworking of vessel and sculptural forms from 1950s California to 1970s London, featuring pieces by such leaders in the field as the West Coast master Peter Voulkos and the émigré Chicago-based Ruth Duckworth.

These groupings offer insight into the medium through the social, gender, political and industrial histories that, over time, surrounded the production, marketing and use of such diverse works in clay.

The exhibition begins by addressing the Nineteenth Century phenomenon of historicism in England. Designers turned to past styles for inspiration and produced elaborately decorated ceramics in neo-Gothic, Orientalist and Eighteenth Century French rococo revival manners.

In the Twentieth Century, studio pottery developed in two directions. On one side were designers for industry who generally supplied working drawings of innovative products for assembly line production. On the other were studio potters who, working alone, undertook all phases of production. This exhibition section views important centers of design theory and practice in Austria and Germany.

The section on early modernist sculpture highlights the differing responses to clay by modern masters who worked in diverse mainstream styles, including Cubism and Surrealism, in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Alongside works by Maillol, Henri Laurens and Moore, the exhibition includes a casting in bronze after a clay original by Auguste Rodin.

Examining the relation of East Asian philosophy and ceramic traditions and Western practice and post-World War II experimentation are the themes examined in the exhibition’s other two sections. Drawing upon the Smart’s important concentrations in the former area are classic examples of the studio pottery movement’s leading practitioners, including the émigrés Marguerite Fried-länder-Wildenhain, Maija Grotell from Finland, and the Austrian husband-and-wife team of Gertrud and Otto Natzler, alongside American-born potters Edwin and Mary Scheier and Beatrice Wood.

The Smart Museum of Art is at 5550 South Greenwood Avenue. For information, 773-702-0200 or www.smartmuseum.uchicago.