Mara Superior “A Sea Goddess” Porcelain Platter, a high-fired porcelain, ceramic oxides, underglaze, glaze, depicting a mermaid swimming amongst fish

Length 18.5 in.

Mara Superior is an American visual artist who works in porcelain. Her ceramic high relief platters and sculptural objects reflect the artist’s passion for art history and the decorative arts, and her painterly motifs range from the pleasures of the domestic to serious political and environmental issues as points of departure to comment on contemporary culture and its relationship to history. Superior has received numerous awards including a National Endowment for the Visual Arts Fellowship, the prestigious Guldaggergård Residency in Denmark, and numerous individual artist grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Superior has exhibited at the American Museum of Ceramic Art (Pomona, CA), Scripps Women’s College (Claremont, CA), and the Fuller Craft Museum (Brockton, MA) among many other institutions. Her work can be found in the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC), the Museum of Arts and Design (New York, NY), the Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, MA), Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia, PA), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA), and White House Collection of American Craft (Little Rock, AK). In 2018, through the generous support of the Kohler Foundation, gifts of art by Mara Superior were made to fifteen museums throughout the USA, increasing the public holdings of Superior’s artworks  and including an in depth collection acquired by the Racine Art Museum (Racine, WI) and shown in 2020 in Collection Focus: Mara Superior. In 2010 she was interviewed for the oral history program of the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art (Washington, DC).

Superior studied at the Pratt Institute and Hartford Art School, completing her BFA in painting from the University of Connecticut in 1975 followed by a MAT in ceramics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1980.