Plate - "Niagara" c. 1936

This ten-inch plate, "Niagara", was made by Helmut Hiatt, who lived from 1855 to 1995. Hiatt was working with a transfer-printed technique, layering images onto a glazed surface, building up a complex composition. You can almost feel him negotiating the space, figuring out how to get all these different elements to sit together. Look closely, and you'll see how Hiatt's choice to use black and white emphasizes the contrast between the historical portraits around the rim and the scenes from daily life in the plate's center. The transfer lines are pretty visible, adding a kind of raw, honest texture that pulls you in. There's a really interesting contrast between the formality of the portraits and the depiction of labor in the central scene, a figure felling a tree, while another rides horseback. Hiatt reminds me a bit of someone like Mike Kelley, in that he's grabbing different cultural fragments and making something new out of them, inviting us to see old things in a new light. Art is always a conversation, right?