UC Santa Barbara

Three California potters Glen Lukens (1887-1967), Hal Riegger (1911-2005), and Rick Dillingham (1952-1994) are at the forefront of art historical interventions in the extraction of the subterranean economy. Their objects, writings, and processes dig up the complex and slippery relations of ceramic vessels to settler colonialism, industrial capitalism, and the liberation of queer personhood in the United States during the twentieth century. I take up the term “geological primitivism” to examine the ways the subjects of this dissertation negotiated their relationship to extraction and the land. Their writings and philosophies reimagined the materiality of ceramics as being ahistorical. The land is not a neutral passive subject. Embedded within its materiality are cultural histories of place and violent genocide enacted under the structure of U.S. settler colonialism. The California Design exhibition series, curated by Eudorah Moore at the Pasadena Art Museum, which featured the works of Lukens, Riegger, and Heath, alongside other artists and designers further builds upon the mythologized narrative of the land of the American West as a primordial landscape ready for cultivation and the exploitation of its natural resources.