CALIFORNIA POTTERY: From Mission to Modernism (with photographs by Peter Brenner; Chronicle Books)

Bill Stern was the Executive Director of the Museum of California Design and the Consulting Curator of LACMA’s 2011 exhibition “California Design 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way.” The Journal of the American Art Pottery Association lauded CALIFORNIA POTTERY as “the most accessible primer for anyone seeking to better understand what California Pottery is all about! This work is as faultless as it is fun.”

Among the exhibitions Stern curated are: “California Pottery: From Missions to Modernism” (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, July-Sept. 2001; the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, Los Angeles, July 2003 – January 2004), which the New York Times called “a jubilant display”; “Mid-Century Mandarin: The Clay Canvases Of Tyrus Yu Wong” (Craft & Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles, 2004); “Starring William Haines” (Pacific Design Center, West Hollywood, 2005 and Palm Springs Modernism, 2006), “Ornament is a Crime: The Classic Modernism of Architectural Pottery” (Palm Springs Modernism 2007), and “Myth & Manpower: Graphics and the California Dream, CAFAM, 2009).