Telfair Museums is pleased to announce The Moss Mystique: Southern Women and Newcomb Pottery and (Un)Grounded: Raheleh Filsoofi, opening to the public on May 30. These exhibitions will be on display through Sept. 7 at the Jepson Center in Savannah, located at 207 W. York Street.

Telfair Museums will host an opening reception, including a lecture by Telfair Museums’ Curator of Decorative Arts Dr. Elyse D. Gerstenecker at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, May 29 at the Jepson Center. In addition, a Lunch & Learn with ceramicist Joanna Angell is scheduled for 11:45 a.m. on Friday, June 27. Angell will provide an artist’s perspective and walkthrough of the exhibitions. Other related events include Clay Day Family Day on Saturday, Aug. 9 and Telfair Contemporaries Arty Party and Artist Talk with Raheleh Filsoofi on Thursday, Aug. 28 followed by a Lunch & Learn Performance with Raheleh and Reza Filsoofi at 12 p.m. and 12:30 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 29. 

The Moss Mystique focuses on the Newcomb Pottery of New Orleans, Louisiana, its material and subjects, and their relationships to regional identity and change over time. By exploring these visions of the American South, The Moss Mystique asks visitors to reconsider their ideas about what makes a place unique. In an adjacent gallery, interdisciplinary artist Raheleh Filsoofi’s new multimedia exhibition (Un)Grounded will respond to the complexities of Newcomb pottery. 

In 1895, administrators in the art department at the H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College in New Orleans, Louisiana, a women’s higher education institution that was joined to Tulane University, started a new commercial enterprise so that their students could put the skills they learned in their art and design courses into practice. A group of potters, mostly men, created various objects out of clays sourced throughout the South. Tasked with representing the region through their work, Newcomb’s women designers earned a reputation for turning to their local environment for inspiration, painting the clay works with images of plants and wildlife. Newcomb Pottery quickly gained international acclaim for the quality of its designs and the perceived authenticity of its representation of Southern regional identity, and these strong ties to location remain present today, long after the Pottery’s closure in 1939.

(Un)Grounded, the solo exhibition of new work by Iranian American artist Filsoofi, is an immersive installation of ceramic vessels, sound and video in conversation with the pottery and landscapes on view in The Moss Mystique: Southern Women and Newcomb Pottery. Over the past two years, Filsoofi has traveled to nine states in the Southeast to collect soil, including a visit to Savannah in April 2024. She has carefully archived, processed and extracted the clay from these locations to form the physical content and symbolic subject matter of her multidisciplinary practice. (Un)Grounded considers the legacies of Newcomb Pottery through Filsoofi’s personal identity to engage with present-day perceptions surrounding southern identity and meanings of authenticity.

“As an immigrant artist living in the American South, I feel a deep responsibility to reflect on the histories that shape this region, its land, its people and its contradictions,” said Raheleh Filsoofi. “(Un)Grounded is both a personal archive of navigating, collecting and creating in this region and a reflection on how my work as a woman working with clay can carry forward the legacy of the Newcomb women artists. I explore how my story might collide with theirs, how memory and migration settle into form, into fragments and into earth.”

Filsoofi is a collector of soil and sound, an itinerant artist, feminist curator and community advocate. She is an assistant professor of ceramics in the Department of Art at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN and holds the secondary appointment at the Blair School of Music. Filsoofi is the 2023 recipient of Joan Mitchell Fellowship award, the 2022 Winner of the 1858 Contemporary Southern Art Award and the recipient of the 2021 Southern Prize Tennessee State Fellowship. She received her MFA in fine arts from Florida Atlantic University and a BFA in ceramics from Al-Zahra University in Tehran, Iran.

The Moss Mystique: Southern Women and Newcomb Pottery and (Un)Grounded: Raheleh Filsoofi are sponsored by a Dean F. Failey Exhibition Grant from The Decorative Arts Trust. The Moss Mystique is organized by Telfair Museums and the Newcomb Art Museum and curated by Dr. Elyse D. Gerstenecker, curator of decorative arts. (Un)Grounded is organized by Telfair Museums and curated by Erin Dunn, curator of modern and contemporary art, and Dr. Elyse D. Gerstenecker.

To learn more about Telfair Museums, visit http://www.telfair.org.