CERAMIST DORA DE LARIOS’ LEGACY IS WELL FORMED
Los Angeles artist Dora De Larios melded Mexican, Japanese and Modern influences into her works.
Just about every corner of Dora De Larios’ home appears to be inhabited by a magical being. A whimsical feline figure peeks out from a dining room cabinet. Wideeyed owls etched onto tin observe the kitchen from cabinet doors. In one corner of the living room, a helmeted figure from an indeterminate era sits atop a regal horse.
They are works by the Los Angeles ceramic artist, who for more than six decades has made art that eludes easy categorization. During a period in the 20th century when other ceramicists were exploring the abstract, De Larios was creating curious creatures. Where others went minimal, she composed rich mosaics of intricate color and form. She created work inspired by pre-Columbian pottery and ancient Japanese funerary sculpture, yet her work felt resolutely Modern.
“I had to follow my own dream,” she stated matter-of-factly, in an interview conducted at her home late last year. “I really didn’t care what others were making.”
De Larios, 84, passed away last week after a four-year struggle with ovarian cancer — just weeks after The Times interviewed her for this profile.
But her legacy remains alive and well.
Her singular path as an artist will be traced in a solo exhibition at the Main Museum in downtown Los Angeles. “Dora De Larios: Other Worlds” (Feb. 25-May 13) will gather works from throughout her career — sculptures, mosaics and functional tableware, including a set of majolica dishes she created for the White House in 1977. The show will also inaugurate the museum’s newly renovated 2,800square-foot mezzanine gallery.
“What’s so special about her is that she is forever learning,” said Main Museum director Allison Agsten early last month. “There is such a vulnerability to the way she presents her work. She says, ‘I only got great at this in my 70s.’ She never stopped working — it’s a career marked by unflagging activity.”
In fact, the artist continued to work while in hospice, designing a permanent outdoor piece for the Main Museum — a design that will be etched into a concrete access ramp to be added to the building sometime this year.
De Larios worked on all of this despite her declining health. She conducted our interview stretched out on a recliner in her Culver City home, surrounded by the myriad artifacts of her storied life: books, works of art, family snapshots taken on jaunts around the world.
But even as her body failed, and her phrases were punctuated by occasional breathlessness, De Larios’ mind and wit remained sharp. She was concerned that I have something to drink. She debated glazes with her daughter, Sabrina Judge, with whom she ran the ceramics company Irving Place Studio. She asked for paper to sketch a bird that had popped into her imagination.
At one point, I gently asked if she’d mind revealing her age.
“I’m 84!” she replied enthusiastically. “I know I look good for my age . .... It’s my Hispanic genes!”
She looked damn good: closecropped gray hair frame an elegant mestizo profile and a toothy grin — a Mexican American woman who single-handedly willed her career into existence in the ’50s displaying resolute strength to the end.
De Larios’ basic biography has by now been relatively well-documented: Born in Boyle Heights in 1933 to a pair of Mexican immigrants, the artist went on to attend USC, where she graduated with a degree in ceramics in 1957.
Two things shaped her youth in indelible ways: her family and art.
Her father, Elpidio De Larios, was a turbulent presence. “In Spanish, they have that saying, that he was the light of the street and the darkness of the house,” she explained. But he was a lover of culture — and he passed on this affinity to his daughter, taking her on regular pilgrimages to see artifacts and monuments.
This included a trip to the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, where the 6-year-old Dora was seduced by a 13th century monolith bearing an Aztec calendar (a piece known as the “Piedra del Sol,” or rock of the sun). And there was the ride up to the De Young Museum in San Francisco in the late 1940s to see an exhibition of works that had once been secreted away by the Nazis.
“It was the first time I saw Rembrandt,” De Larios said with wonder. “It was fabulous, fabulous.”
She came to clay in a ceramics class at Dorsey High School in South Los Angeles.
“I liked that you could smash it up,” she said, “and then as long you didn’t fire it, you could reuse the material over and over again.”
Her enthusiasm for it was nurtured by a ceramics teacher at Dorsey.
“She gave me the keys to the studio. And everyday I worked after school until the janitor would come and say, ‘OK, it’s time for you to go home.’ ”
When De Larios graduated from high school, she was offered scholarships to attend the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland (now the California College of the Arts) and the Cranbrook Academy of the Arts in Michigan. But her father insisted she remain in Los Angeles — “I was young and couldn’t stand up for myself,” she explained — so she enrolled at USC, which had come through with a partial scholarship.
The school wasn’t a natural fit. De Larios was the rare Mexican American student on the largely white campus. And she often felt a bit the beatnik outcast on a campus that was all football and sunny cheerleaders.
“I dressed in black all the time and tried to look very moody,” she said and chuckled. “I would walk around campus like this little tarantula.”
But her studies there were nonetheless formative. De Larios learned from key 20th century ceramicists such as Susan Peterson, who was influenced by American Indian designs, and Otto and Vivika Heino, Americans of Finnish ancestry who would later gain international fame and wealth for a butter-yellow glaze formula.
De Larios was also exposed to the work of important Japanese artists such as potter Shoji Hamada, a key figure in the mingei folk art movement, which sought to find beauty in the everyday. As a result, she developed a keen interest in Japanese design, with its devotion to material and line.
“I’m not subtle, but I love subtlety,” De Larios said of Japanese ceramics, “the delicacy, how patterns are interpreted.”
By the time De Larios graduated from USC, she was ready to take things into her own hands — often making opportunity when there was none to be found.
Soon after she graduated, she got to work — producing functional and decorative pieces. As one story goes, De Larios once loaded up her car with a pile of her ceramics and drove to San Francisco, where she demanded that the staff at Gump’s, the luxury retailer, examine her wares. They not only took her on, they sold out of her work.
In the 1960s, she helped establish Irving Place Studio (for which her current company is named) with fellow ceramicist Ellice Johnston. There, the pair, along with four other women artists, shared space and resources.
“They shared a kiln and a glazing booth,” Agsten said. “But they also shared recipes and they helped take care of each other’s kids. She helped create a way for women to work and make money. They had biannual sales.
“She was a woman of color who had to make a way for herself at a time when there wasn’t a natural path.”
If at first De Larios had gone largely unacknowledged by galleries or the critical press, recognition eventually came.
By the 1970s, the artist was taking on major architectural commissions: a ceramic mural for the Compton Library and a cast cement monument for a park in Japan — a gift from the city of Los Angeles to its sister city Nagoya.
“I once got a call from Millard Sheets,” she recalled. “He said, ‘We have this huge project. It’s a $10million budget. I want you to be the lead artist in charge of the textural design.’ ”
That project consisted of a roughly eight-story, 18,000-squarefoot mural in the atrium of Disney’s Contemporary Resort in Orlando, Fla. The design was by Mary Blair. De Larios developed the mural’s rich color and texture.
“They tried to take it down once,” she remarked casually. “People had an uproar over it.” To this day, the mural stands. That same decade, she was commissioned by the Craft & Folk Art Museum to make a set of tableware for an undisclosed VIP client. The job: create a set of 12 table settings in fewer than 40 days. De Larios took it on — creating two sets of hand-painted dishes with indigenous-style patterns, in case the first set didn’t turn out perfectly.
The mysterious client? First Lady Rosalynn Carter, who had commissioned 14 artists to create place settings for the White House. (The Main Museum will have a set on view.)
In recent years, De Larios drew recognition not just for her high level of craft, but for the aesthetic innovations of her work.
In 2009, the Craft & Folk Art Museum staged the retrospective exhibition “Sueños/Yume: Fifty Years of the Art of Dora De Larios.” The catalog for that show describes an artist who “moves easily from abstraction to the realistic, to a stylistic or mythological dimension.”
At the moment, a pair of her sculptures are also on view in the PST: LA/LA exhibition “Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico, 1915-85,” through April 1 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Show co-curator Staci Steinberger noted that many artists in the 20th century made ceramics inspired by pre-Columbian motifs: “Much of the work that was coming from California was very exoticlooking.” But De Larios’ work bears a quiet familiarity and grace. “She was looking into her own heritage,” Steinberger explained.
She was digesting other influences in interesting ways, too.
“There is that deep interest in Japanese ceramics,” Steinberger said. “She draws from that. She grew up in a Japanese neighborhood and that cemented her interest in Japanese culture. She is a quintessential Los Angeles artist — looking at the things that make L.A. L.A., and incorporating that into her work.”
De Larios was never one to spend too much time taking stock of her accomplishments — seeing each day as yet another possibility to test out new possibilities.
The formula, she said, is really quite simple: “Every day. You show up. You do your work. You rest. You eat. Every day.”
Dora De Larios showed up — to the last day.