Ceramic artist Dora De Larios on shaping her own path by melding the Mexican, Japanese and Modern
Just about every corner of Dora De Larios’ home appears to be inhabited by a magical being. A whimsical feline figure peeks out from a dining room cabinet. Wide-eyed owls etched onto tin observe the kitchen from cabinet doors. In one corner of the living room, a helmeted figure from an indeterminate era sits atop a regal horse.
They are works by the Los Angeles ceramic artist, who for more than six decades has made art that eludes easy categorization. During a period in the 20th century, when other ceramicists were exploring the abstract, De Larios was creating curious creatures. Where others went minimal, she composed rich mosaics of intricate color and form. She created work inspired by pre-Columbian pottery and ancient Japanese funerary sculpture, yet her work felt resolutely Modern.
“I had to follow my own dream,” she says matter of factly. “I really didn’t care what others were making.”
Her singular path as an artist will be traced in a solo exhibition at the Main Museum in downtown Los Angeles next month. “Dora De Larios: Other Worlds” will gather works from throughout her career — sculptures, mosaics and functional tableware, including a set of majolica dishes she created for the White House in 1977. The show will also serve to inaugurate the museum’s newly renovated 2,800-square-foot mezzanine gallery.
“What’s so special about her is that she is forever learning,” says Main Museum director Allison Agsten. “There is such a vulnerability to the way she presents her work. She says, ‘I only got great at this in my seventies.’ She never stopped working — it’s a career marked by unflagging activity.”
That activity has extended to designing a permanent outdoor piece for the Main Museum — a design that will be etched into a concrete access ramp to be added to the building sometime this year.
De Larios has worked on all of this despite her declining health. After a prolonged battle with cancer, she is now in hospice. She conducts our interview (which took place late last year) stretched out on a recliner in her Culver City home, surrounded by the myriad artifacts of her storied life: books, works of art, family snapshots taken on jaunts around the world.
But even as her body fails, and her phrases are punctuated by occasional breathlessness, De Larios’ mind and wit remain sharp. She is concerned that I have something to drink when I arrive. She debates glazes with her daughter, Sabrina Judge, with whom she opened the ceramics company Irving Place Studio in 2012. She asks for a piece of paper to sketch out a bird that has popped into her imagination.
At one point, I gently ask if she minds revealing her age.
“I’m 84!” she replies enthusiastically. “I know I look good for my age. I’m just repeating what everyone else says. It’s my Hispanic genes!”
She looks damn good: close-cropped gray hair frame an elegant mestizo profile and a toothy grin — a Mexican American woman who singlehandedly willed her career into existence in the ‘50s displaying resolute strength to the end.
De Larios’ basic biography has by now been relatively well documented: Born in Boyle Heights in 1933 to a pair of Mexican immigrants, the artist went on to attend USC, where she graduated with a degree in ceramics in 1957.
Two things shaped her youth in indelible ways: her family and art.
Her father, Elpidio De Larios, was a turbulent presence. “In Spanish, they have that saying, that he was the light of the street and the darkness of the house,” she explains. But he was a lover of culture — and he passed on this affinity to his daughter, taking her on regular pilgrimages to see artifacts and monuments.
This included a trip to the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, where the 6-year-old Dora was seduced by a massive 13th century monolith bearing an Aztec calendar (a piece known as the “Piedra del Sol,” or rock of the sun). And there was the ride up to the De Young Museum in San Francisco in the late 1940s to see an exhibition of works that had once been secreted away by the Nazis in a salt mine.
“It was the first time I saw Rembrandt,” De Larios says with wonder. “It was fabulous, fabulous.”
She came to clay in a ceramics class at Dorsey High School in South Los Angeles.
“I liked that you could smash it up,” she says, “and then as long you didn’t fire it, you could reuse the material over and over again.”
Her enthusiasm for it was nurtured by a ceramics teacher at Dorsey.
“She gave me the keys to the studio. And everyday I worked after school until the janitor would come and say, ‘OK, it’s time for you to go home.’”