In her 1986 essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin reimagines human history not as a tale of conquest, but as one of containment. She proposes that the first human tool was not a spear, but a vessel—a bag, a bowl, a bottle. If stories are “carrier bags,” containers for experience rather than arrows of action, then ceramics—cups, plates, teapots—tools designed to hold, not to puncture, are their material analogs. Essentially, before we were hunters, we were gatherers, and in order to gather, one must have a container.
Seen through this lens, “Hot! & Ready to Serve: Celebrating Functional Ceramics,” on view at the American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA) from March 29 to September 28, 2025, functions like a carrier bag of its own. The exhibition presents more than 150 artists in a dense visual chorus of utilitarian forms: shelves of teapots, vitrines of vintage production dinnerware, and pedestals of hand-built serveware. Another section is dedicated entirely to sculptural ceramics, which are “inspired by function.” It’s a show worth seeing not only for its scope, but for how it draws your attention to the glorious ordinary, encouraging you to look again at the things you use every day. The included works hover between sculpture and kitchenware, though not quite settled into either category. All together, it is easy to forget that dinnerware exists not just to be looked at, but to be filled with the food and drink that nourish, sustain, and connect one another. Some pieces in the show were made to be touched, sipped, or heated, while others were designed for permanent display, but most oscillated somewhere in between.
The museum itself, a former bank in Pomona’s historic district, adds to the show’s sense of strange recontextualization. Tiled floors, drop ceilings with fluorescent panels, and mahogany trim recall a more corporate kind of institutional past, which makes the space feel more like a provisional museum inside of a long-abandoned office. Ten tall wooden and glass displays punctuate the space like oversized cabinets of curiosity, each presenting a different vignette of ceramic history. One contained a suite of traditional Japanese tea bowls, and another, a personal favorite of mine, was dedicated to Arcadia Ceramics’ novelty salt-and-pepper shakers shaped like snowmen and toasters.
There’s a compelling historical throughline running from the handmade studio ceramics of artists like Shoji Hamada and Warren MacKenzie to the mass-produced factory wares of Hall China and Gladding McBean. The work of artists like Peter Shire, Betty Woodman, and Ron Nagle hovers between design, sculpture, and the funky West Coast formalism of the 1960s to ’80s. Peter Shire’s contribution, a toy-like, angular black teapot, with a tilted spout and a pink ceramic disk for a handle, feels more like a Bauhaus puppet or tabletop sculpture than a vessel for pouring tea. Along the wall, large plates and platters are hung salon-style, their surfaces treated with painterly glazes or graphic illustrations. Norman Schulman’s platter from 1980–1986 features four soft quadrants of blue, pink, yellow, and grey overlaid with four loosely rendered faces outlined in black, which reads like a three-dimensional painting. Down below, low plinths hold casserole dishes, pitchers, and teapots that seem poised for use but remain frozen mid-function.
Something strange and slightly tragic happens when a bowl is placed on a pedestal or a cup is locked inside a vitrine. A container, designed to be cradled, filled, and washed, suddenly becomes untouchable. “Hot! & Ready to Serve” doesn’t attempt to resolve this tension between use value and display value, but rather seems to lean into it, inviting viewers to consider how meaning accumulates in objects largely not meant to sit still. The section of the exhibition dedicated to production pottery was particularly interesting in this regard. Many familiar candy-colored dinnerware sets, like the famed Fiestaware I’ve grown accustomed to coming across in thrift stores and estate sales, I learned, originated in California, with major production potters such as Vernon Kilns and Gladding McBean. On Etsy, a listing titled “Vintage Large Collection Of Fiestaware Dishes From The 60s Not the New Fiesta Items Priced Individually” sells for about $35 a piece, and so it is endearing, if not a bit silly, to see the nearly identical dinnerware on such dignified display, complete with a lengthy wall text of historical contextualization. One begins to imagine that almost anything in their home could be successfully recontextualized in this way, and this is a wonderful thing.
I was also particularly enamored with the section titled “Butter churn, Jugs & Storage Containers.” Besides being visually remarkable, each standing about two feet tall and bearing what Walter Benjamin might have described as the aura of their use value, these largely undated objects by unidentified artists (save for the five-gallon butter churn, Brumbeloe Family, circa 1900) exhibit a quiet monumentality that I attribute to their embeddedness in some kind of originally intended tradition or ritual. The butter churn, tall and cylindrical with a glossy chocolate brown, almost indigo weathered glaze, stands with a long wooden dasher extending from its narrow opening like a relic of kinetic utility. A nearby section, “Exploring Containment and Lidded Jars,” presents more contemporary, artistic interpretations of these ancient, once essential forms through increasingly complicated degrees of glazes, linework, and patterning. The phrase “exploring containment” stands out to me here as a funny combination of words that seems to encompass the entire spirit of the show. For all its variety and curiosity into the formal and historical lineages and limitations of functionality, “Hot! & Ready to Serve” is ultimately an exhibition about the forms we use to hold, preserve, and carry. But this also made me think: What were we, as a species, before we had cups and plates? Before we had a vessel to hold water, which would otherwise just fall all over the place?
Rather than valorizing the spear as a symbol of narrative conquest, Le Guin elevates the container as humanity’s first and most essential tool. If Le Guin’s theory holds true—and I believe it does—then everything really is a carrier bag: life, stories, casseroles and snowman salt shakers. The cumulative effect of the exhibition is the strong sense that meaning clings to things long after their purpose has shifted.