Potter and Her Proteges Delta Arts Center showing works by a renowned ceramicist and 10 of the artists she influenced as a teacher and mentor

For more than 30 years, ceramic artist Winnie Owens-Hart has maintained a dual interest in preserving the traditions of her art and nurturing new generations of ceramics innovators.

Owens-Hart has received awards and other honors from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Smithsonian Institution's Renwick Gallery and the National Museum of Women in the Arts. As a professor of art at Howard University in Washington, she has influenced and mentored many younger ceramic artists.

A group exhibition at the Delta Arts Center celebrates her influence with examples of her own art and works by some of her former students and others for whom she has served as a teacher and mentor.

"From This Earth: Ceramics by Winnie Owens-Hart and Her Followers" includes pots and other works by 10 other artists. It also includes 19 mostly uncredited color photographs documenting Nigerian pottery traditions that Owens-Hart has studied and that have influenced her work.

Despite Owens-Hart's central role in the exhibition, her own work is limited to seven small vessel forms, most of which reflect her interest in women's issues, referenced in her accompanying artist's statement. Her pot titled The Makers, in varied shades of brown, celebrates women's procreative roles and, by implication, their creative powers as artists. In variegated shades of earthy brown, it features six tiny, stylized images of voluptuous women and a relatively wide, fluted mouth.

Slightly smaller are five pots from Owens-Hart's "Little Women" series, which "calls attention to the devastating consequences of female genital mutilation practiced in many parts of Africa and the Middle East," according to an accompanying label.

All are variations on a woman's torso. Each is nude but bears rhythmically patterned markings that suggest jewelry, tattoos or ritual scarification. The political powerlessness and physical vulnerability of women in societies where they're routinely subjected to genital mutilation is emblemized by these figures' lack of either heads or legs.

Several other artists are represented in the show by vessel forms. Among the more striking examples is Chizura Imura's untitled piece of a smoky gray orb with large, identically colored petal-like forms flaring out from the round opening at the top.

As indicated by its title, Kay Wongchardentham's Lotus is inspired by a flower long symbolically associated with wisdom. Tapering up from its rounded bottom into a point at the top, and lacking any visible opening, this luminously white-glazed form is more strictly a sculpture than a vessel.

The same is true of Tricia Bishop's Title Unknown, which also takes its inspiration from the plant world. A realistically simulated bamboo stalk rises in a horizontally compressed S-curve from the top of this work's round, roughly basketball-size base, whose textured surface resembles tree bark. The reference to vessel forms is clear, but there's no visible opening that would allow it to function as a vessel.

Two relatively large, nearly identical forms from Kathleen Varnell's "Wounded Series" technically qualify as vessels, since they're hollow with openings at the top, but they also exert a strong sculptural presence. The lower portions of these smoke-fired pots suggest downward-pointing torpedoes or other kinds of bombs, but their bent, crimped, multi-tiered tops suggest the damage referenced in the series title. The irregularly shaped openings -- themselves reminiscent of literal wounds -- are so small that the pieces resist the vessel function. Thematically they resonate with Owens-Hart's "Little Women" series.

Each of the roughly 75, nearly identical components in Rashida Ua Bakari Ferdinand's March of the Tapetum Lucidum is technically a vessel, but they're clearly not intended for use in that capacity. Each form overtly represents a double-sided human eye, simultaneously looking ahead and backward, and the iris on one side of each eye form is covered in a mosaic of jaggedly broken mirror glass. All of them are attached at the bottoms of wires, which are of varied lengths and suspended from the ceiling so that they rotate, each at its own slow speed, propelled only by the air inside the gallery. This sculptural installation is a highlight of the exhibition.

Another traditional craft for which clay is used in Africa and elsewhere is bead-making, adapted in this show as a sculptural vehicle by Sharif Bey, the show's only local artist and an assistant professor of art education at Winston-Salem State University.

His wall-mounted Sun Dial and Water Vial, another exhibition highlight, is a beaded necklace and disc-shaped pendant with passages of African-referenced geometric patterning, and on a scale so large it suggests a custom-design job for a giant -- or a god. Much smaller is Bey's other necklace form, Offering the Progeny, in which a string of five large black beads is suspended from a black ceramic bowl mounted on the wall with its gold-painted interior facing outward. The lower, central bead is a sculpture of a man's head, and each of the others is a stylized representation of male genitals.

Also represented in the exhibition are Awatif Al Kenibit, Barbara Madden-Swain and Reginald Yazid Pointer.

■ "From This Earth: Ceramics by Winnie Owens-Hart and Her Followers" is on view through Jan. 19 at the Delta Arts Center, 2611 New Walkertown Road. Currently closed for the holidays, the center is scheduled to reopen Jan. 2. For more information, call 336-722-2625.