Hospitality can be a startling, stretching endeavor. Sharing a table with strangers may seem like a pandemic-distant memory, but the work of welcome carries on even among families and friends. Maybe especially there. In This Sign explores hospitality at home and abroad, in the places and traditions that have shaped potter Becca Ito.

Hospitality is never a solitary work, and it’s appropriate that many of the pieces made to celebrate it were created in community. Becca collaborated with her sister Katie on these Thai and Midwest-inspired place settings. Their cross-cultural childhoods find a reflection in both the baroque lotus forms and straightforward blue and white dinnerware, and the varied forms and colors cohere in a single message: you are welcome at this table.

Some of these pots were fired in a wood kiln. Their earthy colors and glass-dappled surfaces mirror the play of ash and flame, the result of eleven and a half hours in a pine-fed fire. (Said fire required stoking every four to six minutes, and that too was the work of a community.) In the gallery, you might catch a whiff of dill or kimchi. Becca likes to say that her pottery isn’t complete until it’s in use. So she requested that her friends use the woodfired pieces through June and July, extending their tables to others and layering welcome into the work.

Common vessels at uncommon angles, the mugs suspended in the gallery nod to hospitality in unexpected. Braided handles and faceted bodies float beside lantern shapes and round-bellied mugs. They don’t have to match. College dorms and socially distant walks can open into places of belonging, and together these meetings might add up to something greater than the sum of broken pieces.

Talitha Cumi, Heraldic Bowl — *Talitha Cumi*, Heraldic Bowl

With stylized medieval imagery and shield forms, the heraldic bowls evoke a castle hall even as they play with the inversion of shield into serving vessel. If the Thai and Midwestern place settings ask questions of place, these bowls cast an eye toward tradition. What tables are set in sacred spaces? What can faith say of peace in a divided time? Thrown by Becca, designed and carved by her friend Deirdre, and (in some cases) gold-repaired by Katie, this series is a conversation in clay. With the rest of the show, it invites the audience to ponder both the forms that welcome takes and the ways in which hospitality might be extended at tables of their own.