Uncommon Clay at Santa Barbara Museum of Art

For a lighter and more categorically summery Santa Barbara Museum of Art encounter than the subtle, enigmatic survey of James Castle’s dusky spit and soot drawings, proceed to the smaller Emmons Gallery and bask in the colorful, sly-witted fare to be found in the exhibition WARES! Extraordinary Ceramics and the Ordinary Home. Here, elements of pop art’s fusion of high and low culture and carbonated irreverence meet in the realm of contemporary/modern ceramic art, a medium still deserving more love in the fine-art world.

Highlights in this mix include both emerging artists and such groundbreaking luminaries as Viola Frey, Robert Arneson, and Ojai’s own beloved Beatrice Wood (1893–1998). Wood’s small, genially grotesque autobiographical figurines, like wedding cake cameos, allude to her husband-by-convenience Steve Hoag and friend and confidant Helen Freeman, as a lopsided, lippy nude.

Arneson’s playful and decidedly pop-artful 1963 piece “Case of Bottles” counterbalances the reality of a single mass-produced soda bottle (7Up, the truth be told) with a motley crew of gruffly fashioned ceramic facsimiles. Art imitates marketplace reality, crudely, and trumps the commercial commodity subject.