Wall relief

Mason was one of the early students of Peter Voulkos at the Los Angeles County Art Institute (now the Otis College of Art and Design) in the 1950s, and his work evolved from pottery to sculpture. By 1966, he was making large-scale stoneware sculptures like the seminal Red X, a 5-foot-by-5-foot red “X marks the spot” sculpture now in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

After over a decade teaching in New York and working on installations featuring firebrick, he moved back to L.A. in the early 1980s, and resumed his sculptures with this stoneware plate—Red X at one-fifth scale. Mason explained that this work allowed him to get back into the medium, and it stayed in his collection until it was purchased by the Roots in 2010.