Funk You Too!

Funk You Too!: Humor and Irreverence in Ceramic Sculpture is the first book to connect the historic Funk Art Movement to contemporary ceramic practice through the exploration of the enduring role of irony, absurdity, and a tongue-in-cheek approach to image-making with clay. The essay contributors address the historical context for the emergence of ceramic sculpture in the Funk Art movement and apply a critical lens to the work of a younger generation working today who have redirected the sharply barbed irreverence of the historic Funk style to a broad exploration of social injustice and personal narratives. In their hands, irony and satire are tools for addressing inequality, and slapstick or gallows humour functions as a vehicle for the exploration of difficult subject matter or taboo issues surrounding race, gender, and sexuality.

Contributors include the exhibition curator Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy, who conceptually frames the exhibition's emphasis on humour as a visual and rhetorical tool in ceramics to address themes of personal and political narratives; Garth Johnson (Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse), who contributes a historical essay on the Funk Art movement, its development over the years, and the important but often overlooked place of ceramic sculpture within it; and Andres Payan Estrada (Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles), who explores the zeitgeist of ceramics in the contemporary art world with particular attention to the new generation of artists included in the exhibition. The book also includes biographies; full-colour, captioned images; and a bibliography. For many of the younger artists featured in the exhibition, it is their New York City debut, and this is the first scholarly examination of their work in print.