Irma Starr Information

People love the little ceramic Santas that Irma Starr makes for the bookstore at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. And many purchase her reproductions of 17th-century English slipware in the museum's famous Burnap Collection. Starr, who works out of the studio behind her Loose Park area home, knows all the historical techniques - combing, feathering, marbling and slip-trailing - necessary to duplicate the pottery's distinctive brown and orange designs on ocher backgrounds. And she's been doing it for 30 years. Starr is "one of the greatest living practitioners of these traditional decorative techniques," according to Catherine Futter, the Nelson's new curator of decorative arts. She often is commissioned to make commemorative plates in the English slipware style, celebrating everything from Father's Day to important anniversaries - of people, institutions and organizations. In 1999 she was invited to create an ornament for the annual White House Christmas tree; in 2000 Hillary Clinton commissioned her to make a commemorative plate for the Clintons' 25th wedding anniversary. While visiting Washington, D.C., three years ago for the White House Christmas tree fete, Starr introduced herself to Kenneth Trapp, director of the Smithsonian Institution's Renwick Gallery of the National Museum of American Art. The result of the meeting was yet another prestigious commission: to create a commemorative plate for the Renwick's 30th anniversary in 2002. "I knew her work, I know the Nelson-Atkins well and the Burnap Collection, Trapp said in a recent telephone interview. "This is going to be a magnificent piece." "What I like about it," he added, "is Irma making works of art in clay that reference the history of clay, but she brings that past tradition forward to the present." Starr and Trapp worked together to come up with the plate's design. The aim, Trapp said, was to commemorate "an American architectural landmark as well as the Renwick's commitment to the American craft movement." At his suggestion, Starr worked up an ...