Who would have thought the Walker Art Center, an institution known mostly for showing provocative, avant-garde sorts of contemporary artwork, would host a ceramics show? Actually, I can't remember the last time the Walker presented an exhibition where the thematic focus rested, first and foremost, on any one medium.

In a Walker show, the artist is typically primary — artists may work only in, say, painting or sculpture, but the institution has generally been more concerned with an individual artist's work than with exploring the historical development of a larger art form. Usually, you find those sorts of shows at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts or one of the many medium-specific arts centers in the region (Northern Clay Center, Highpoint Center for Printmaking, the Textile Center, Goldstein Museum of Design, etc).

But when you walk through "Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay," the Walker's eclectic new exhibition of contemporary ceramics art (on loan from the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania), it's immediately clear why curators were drawn to this show. The exhibition's sensibility exploits the increasingly porous boundaries between the art and craft of clay. There are 88 pieces by 22 artists on view in the exhibit -- from small figurines and almost conventional, modestly sized pots to much larger, more abstract sculptural work; these artists span four generations of work in the medium.

There are recent pieces (Nicole Cherubini, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Jeffry Mitchell, Sterling Ruby, and Paul Swenbeck), work from artists who emerged during the 1990s (Ann Agee, Kathy Butterly, Jane Irish, Arlene Shechet, and Beverly Semmes), as well as pioneering artists from the '60s and '70s who were among the first to bring the form to critical notice (Robert Arneson, Viola Frey, Ron Nagle, Ken Price, Adrian Saxe, Beatrice Wood and Betty Woodman). "Dirt on Delight" also includes pieces from "outsider" artists and individuals of historic note in the form, like Lucio Fontana, Peter Voulkos, Rudolf Staffel, George Ohr and Eugene Von Bruenchenhein. You can see a slideshow of some of these artists' work on the Walker's website.

Walker chief curator Darsie Alexander describes the exuberant mood of the show aptly: "These pieces are dynamic, in flux — growing, collapsing, taking flight and bursting out." As Andria Hickey, a Walker visual arts curatorial fellow and resident expert on the show, points out as she leads us around the exhibit, shades of the functional and domestic history of ceramics are abundantly evident in the assembled work. But, she notes, there's also a pervasive sense of play with these traditional forms, whimsical flourishes and witty tweaks on conventional motifs throughout that unite the work on view in a sort of conversation about the ever-shifting boundaries and long history of artwork made in this medium.

In spite of the liberties these artists have taken with traditional forms, what I find most striking in the exhibition is the elemental, compliant nature of the clay. Collectively, the artists of "Dirt on Delight" wonderfully illustrate the elasticity of the material itself, and the numberless possibilities it affords for creation, both crude or delicate, conventional or cutting-edge.

"Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay" is on view at the Walker Art Center through Nov. 29.