Experience and environment molded the work of Alton artist Art Towata

Even after stopping for shrimp and a burger at Fast Eddie’s, where we looked more than somewhat overdressed alongside the jean jackets and leather, we were still a little early for the opening of the Art Towata exhibition at the Jacoby Arts Center in Alton. So, to kill some time, we drove up—and up—into the heights of the old town. 

Alton shares the same architecture and the same geography of a lot of other river towns. The houses there are like live-in architectural museum pieces. Italianate mansions with big, square, windowed belvederes on top afforded grand views of the river. Solid brick Federal houses and wedding cake-turreted Queen Anne places line broad, brick streets under the thick, spreading branches of maples and oaks. The grandest are always on hilltops and hillsides, safe from floods. 

Somewhere up in this elegant vintage neighborhood—we could never have found the exact house in the dark—the local potter Arthur Towata lived for many years. In the side of a steep hill behind the house, he excavated a deep tunnel, a traditional wood-fired Japanese anagama kiln, a cave where flames lick the raw clay shapes into hardness, a kind of subterranean goblin’s haunt. And where Towata, with his dagger-shaped beard and wild shock of hair, emerged from the ashes and brought forth his treasures from the earth.

Art Towata was, by turns, a taciturn and very private man and an enthusiastic advocate for art.  He taught art classes at local colleges and led a children’s Saturday class at the Alton Library.  For years, his booth, where Towata sat spinning out a bowl or a cup or a fat-necked jug, was a staple at the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Japanese Festival.

In the midst of students or crowds watching him work, though, a part of Towata always, to those who knew him, seemed apart, alone with his thoughts. He nourished his creativity and drew upon an apparently endless source of energy. He painted, stamped out prints; his heart, though, was in his pottery, and even there, it was a protean spirit that animated his work. Dishes, decorative plates, and vessels of every sort. His entire career in clay was an exploration.

Towata talked, if asked, about his inspirations. It was so often the river nearby.  He wandered its edges, tramped through the thick marl and weeds, and hiked the woods and marshes of the Mississippi around Alton in every season. All of it shaped his pottery. And there was, of course, Manzanar. Towata, his mother, and a brother were taken from their home in California when he was 8 and sent to the Manzanar War Relocation Center during World War II.

Towata spoke mostly in general terms about the experience. It was only in quiet moments when he was apt to become reflective, and sometimes, not often, he spoke about some of the darker shadows of those years and those places. It would take decades for him to return to Manzanar with a friend, who brought along one of Towata’s pots. The friend placed it on the high desert ground at the remains of the camp and showed him, he said, just how much the surroundings of that part of his childhood had weaved their rough and barren sentiments into his soul and into his work.

Art Towata died in 2019. This winter, for the first time, a retrospective of his work has been mounted at the Jacoby Arts Center in Alton. The volume of his legacy is such that the space will change out the exhibit three times between now and March. Several of the pieces on display are for sale.

The range of Towata’s oeuvre is displayed. Several of the ceramic pieces are decorated with his trademark dragonfly. Many are ash-glazed; Towata liked to use a bigger percentage of ash in his glazes, bucking the trend in more modern ceramics to reduce it to make the results more predictable and controllable. He liked the challenge, he once said, the excitement of opening the kiln to see what nature had worked.

What was always most compelling about the Alton potter’s talents, though, were the pieces that seemed most reflective of his personality. They stand out in the gallery, some reminiscent of primitive artifacts with prehistoric images. They are the color of ancient, dried mud, the mottled gray shades of a darkening winter sky, their texture crackled and rough.  

Towata was caught up with a ceramics movement that began in early post-war Japan. Tsuchi-aji is a beautiful and apt description: “the taste of earth.” Figures stand with hollow eyes and dangling arms, looking as if they were molded by some Neolithic artist. A long canoe carries a load of pots. A clump of tubular cones gather like a kind of weird, stone fungus alongside crusted amphora, squat jugs, and jagged, craggy spires.

Towata’s earth-tasting pieces manage to be simultaneously ancient and avant garde, timeless and fixed in some primordial space in the past. These, more than any of the rest of his voluminous and varied work, speak to the artistic vision and spirit of Arthur Towata.

One of the inspirations of the “earth-taste” ceramic movement was in the proto-historic pottery of Japan’s Jomon Period, more than 10,000 years ago. You can see it in these pieces. You can see too, the Mississippi and the wild around it. The combination, of the earliest civilization of Japan and the environment of Illinois’ riverine places, is thought-provoking and engages us on a deep and visceral level.  

Towata’s ceramics do not look as if they belong in a modern gallery. Instead, the habitat for these primeval shapes seem to be along the river. You can see them rising out of its muddy banks, squatting in the tangle of knotted root balls, perching in the twisted piles of driftwood out in the currents. There is an elemental energy in them, the meeting of fire and earth. They look as if they are paused here in their displays, only for a moment, soon to return to their native habitat. They are wonderful and an extraordinary legacy of a potter and artist.

Towata, A Celebration of Art will be on display until March 5, 2022 at the Jacoby Arts Center, 627 E. Broadway, Alton, Illinois. 618-462-5222. jacobyartscenter.org