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The thesis show by acclaimed potter Joel Queen, a Master of Fine Arts candidate at Western Carolina University, will be on view from Saturday, Dec. 6, through Wednesday, Dec. 31, at the Grove Arcade Arts & Heritage Gallery at 1 Page Ave. in downtown Asheville.

A reception for Queen will be held from 3 to 5 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 6, at the gallery.

Queen is a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, and his thesis work centers on large-scale, hand-built pieces incised with decorations drawn from Cherokee mythology. Burnished and pit-fired to produce a polished black surface, Queen’s work is a contemporary reinterpretation of the Mississippi period, which flourished from approximately 1000 to 1800 and which Queen regards as the height of the Cherokee ceramic tradition.

“It is my desire to incorporate the Mississippi time period shapes, designs and forms in large-scale, contemporary pottery, bringing this style of ceramics to the forefront of Cherokee art,” Queen said.

Queen, a ninth-generation potter of the Bigmeat family, owns and operates a gallery in Cherokee. Using the same methods employed hundreds of years ago by his ancestors, Queen builds, carves and polishes each piece by hand. His work is included in the collections of, among others, the Smithsonian Institution, the British Museum, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, Western Carolina University, and the Museum of the Cherokee Indian.

For more information, contact Joan Byrd, ceramics professor in WCU’s School of Art and Design, at (828) 227-3595 or jbyrd@wcu.edu.

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Last modified Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2008.