With their carnival colours, squiggly décor, and amorphic shapes, the bowls, vases, and lamps produced by B.C. Ceramics Ltd. were clearly of their time. Manufactured in Yaletown during the 1950s and '60s by an immigrant couple from Germany, the wares combined a European modernist sensibility with locally inspired motifs. Walter and Herta Gertz, a trained ceramist and a designer/sculptor, respectively, blended these elements so successfully that stores right across Canada, including Birks, Woodward's, and Eaton's, carried the company's lines.

Today, it's not unusual to find examples of their cheery and colourful vessels and housewares at midcentury-antiques stores--or at Value Village, if you're lucky. In those optimistic postwar decades, the middle class bought up pieces (or entire sets) of the company's high-quality output, which included designs named Northern Lights, Crack Shell, Carnival, and the famous Dogwood series. Examples of these local ceramics from private collections can be seen at the Vancouver Museum, where the just-opened exhibit By Herta: B.C. Ceramics Ltd., 1955---1967 runs until January 4.

"For Canada, it was ahead of its time," explains Alan Elder, the show's freelance cocurator (with Allan Collier), of the B.C. Ceramics concept. "I think Mrs. Gertz was very savvy about picking up on Canadian imagery and that people wanted things that reflected Canada," he says during a preview tour. "Certainly, the '50s and '60s were a time when issues of Canadian identity were being strongly debated. The Canadian flag gets chosen in 1964, and there's this idea of re-creating Canada as an autonomous and modern nation."

The era's forward-thinking, celebratory spirit shows in organic forms and playful colours, such as the pink, yellow, and turquoise pastels set against black in the atomic age--inspired Northern Lights collection. Another stunner is the multihued Crack Shell series, distinguished by random patterns that resemble those of a huge, tapped egg; a second version has the black cracks painted against a brilliant tomato-soup red. With provincial as well as national pride surging, the relatively staid Dogwood series, which features the flower, may have been a top seller; a photo of the downtown Birks window crammed with the line has survived.

The company also catered to various markets with leaf and Native imagery and souvenirs that included small sculptures of local fauna: deer, salmon, moose, ducks, bear, and...penguins. Elder's interest in the company was spurred when he found a set of plain aqua tumblers resembling Japanese teacups (also in the exhibit) in a New Westminster store. The company's glazing techniques intrigued him, as did its mass-marketing tactics: each form had a four-digit number for ease of ordering. He refers to a triangular bowl as the "7099 bowl" because it recurs so frequently in the show.

Elder and Collier are planning a book to document B.C. Ceramics, and hope to gather stories about the Gertzes and the German community from visitors to the show who may have known or worked with them. They're also aiming to highlight a piece of local immigrant history that disappeared with the demise of Robsonstrasse into a global chain-store row. "The German community was important in this city in the late '50s and '60s," Elder says, adding that the exhibit "is a way of making people aware of the things around them, and, to a certain extent, that they can buy some of the industrial and aesthetic history of Vancouver for a few dollars".