On and Off the Wall is a series of brief reflections on or about works in the collection, including those that may not often make an appearance on the gallery wall due to shortage of display space. Deborah Spanich is the museum registrar. She compiled the digital database and fell in love with many of the works in the collection.

Landscapes don’t always come in the two-dimensional form of paintings. One landscape in our collection is Landscape Bowl by Wayne Higby. This small wheel-thrown raku-fired piece captures the attention with a lightning bolt of color that zigzags down its sides. What isn’t easy to see in a photograph is that this appears on the inside of the bowl as well. Higby is a noted instructor and artist, and recently curated the Scripps Ceramic Annual. He favors the forms of bowls and covered boxes, which he augments with landscape imagery that evokes the scenery of his childhood home state of Colorado. In this piece, it seems that Higby wants to make us aware that memory and locale combine and permeate the ordinariness of the everyday.