Matthew Lutz Kinoy The Mud Room: Itinerant Artists, Folk Spectacles, and Painted Walls

The Mud Room: Itinerant Artists, Folk Spectacles, and Painted Walls is an exhibition at Amant's AZ gallery built as a theater-in-the-round, with a working ceramic workshop at its center surrounded by four large paintings serving as backdrops. It is by Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, developed with collaborators Natsuko Uchino and Kazunori Hamana, and considers the gallery as a ceramic studio and the studio as a theater. The exhibition reflects on artists, artisans, potters, and muralists whose work has shaped domestic and public spaces, tracing lineages from Aaron Douglas's 1934 mural Aspects of Negro Life to murals by Philip Guston and Reuben Kadish and Keith Haring's public murals. Ceramics are created throughout the run of the exhibition, and the staging is extended through artist dialogues, culinary gatherings, and theatrical performances that frame ceramics as knowledge transmitted through the body, touch, and making.