Roger Herman might just be the most important artist you’ve never heard of. Ceramics is the Rodney Dangerfield of the art world: the medium gets no respect. So why is there such a glittering crowd at the Acme gallery on Wilshire Boulevard for the opening of a Los Angeles Museum of Ceramic Art?

The women are model-y swans, the men are rugged and fashionable, and this being L.A., there's even the requisite celebrity John C. Reilly mingling among the crowd. And everywhere, just everywhere, are the young art stars that twinkle in the L.A. firmament.

They're mostly painters, and they have been drawn here by the gravitational pull of an artist that most outsiders have never heard of: Roger Herman.

He co-curated t...