The current exhibit at the Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek, "Pots: Objects of Virtue," suggests the complex appeal, both humble and lofty. Some pots look as if they were wrenched from the fire thousands of years ago; others are miniature postmodern sculptures.

The new show at the Oakland Museum of California, "The Art of Vivika and Otto Heino," displays a couple's 45-year love affair with ceramics. Their lives and their works were intertwined.

In a couple of months, Stanford University's Cantor Arts Center will present ceramic sculpture created by -- and inspired by -- the late Benicia artist Robert Arneson.

There's more to see: displays at Berkeley's Trax ceramics gallery and ACCI Gallery, and the big American Craft Council Show coming up in San Francisco.

It's quite an extravaganza for something that even the best ceramic artists -- often the most modest -- describe as nothing more than earth, water, fire and air. You can't get more elemental than that.

Talking with the artists has only deepened the mystery of ceramics' appeal. They love the feel of wet clay, the process of kneading and shaping that connects them with ancient potters. When they place a clay vessel into a kiln or fire pit, they know they're giving it back to nature. The fire, heat, smoke and ash complete their work, for better or worse.

What I've found fascinating in the Bedford and Oakland Museum exhibits is the creative conflict that's resolved in so many pots, bowls, bottles and pitchers.

You can imagine making one in a summer camp workshop when you were a kid. At the same time, you discover that an artist such as 91-year-old Otto Heino spends a lifetime perfecting a certain yellow glaze for his pots.

What's frustrating about the gallery and museum exhibits, however, is that so many of these pots cry out to be touched. You can see how an artist's hands created them, and you want to follow the ridges and edges, run your fingers over the grainy, salt-fired surface.

The Oakland Museum's Heino exhibit, with its photos of the couple in their Ojai gallery and Otto working at a potter's wheel, gives a sense that they embraced every work they created. We want to embrace it as well.

Fortunately, you can touch examples of the Heinos' work, if carefully, in the Oakland Museum's Collectors Gallery that offers art for sale. "Please touch" is the unspoken message as well at Trax Gallery, the ACCI Gallery (which has a show and seconds sale Aug. 18-21) and the American Craft Council Show, Aug. 12-14 at San Francisco's Fort Mason Center.

Museum exhibits seem to have settled the debate about whether ceramics -- including the humble pot -- deserved to be called art or craft. The artists don't worry about it. They work with clay the way others work with stone, bronze or oil paint -- which is, as one artist once told me, "nothing more than dirt and oil."

Martha Kean of Danville, whose work is featured in the Bedford Gallery show, says she's always considered herself a "crafts person." She likes creating functional objects. "If I worked with a blank page and a pen I wouldn't know what to do," she says, "but I know I can make a bowl, make a pitcher."

Jane Burton of Walnut Creek and Kathy Kearns of Crockett, whose works are also in the Bedford exhibit, especially enjoy practicing an ancient art. Burton shapes her pots with coils of clay, burnishing them with a polished stone. Kearns sometimes fires pottery in a Japanese-style kiln that required volunteers to keep the wood fire stoked 24 hours a day for a week. That's one way to save on gas or electricity, but it does burn through six cords of wood.

There's also something sensual, almost romantic, about the creation of ceramics, exemplified by the Heinos' collaboration. The couple met in 1948 in Concord, New Hampshire. Otto enrolled in the pottery class Vivika was teaching; they fell in love and married.

Over the years, the Heinos signed their pots simply "Vivika+Otto," regardless of who actually made them. They worked side by side from 1950 until Vivika's death in 1995. Otto has continued in their Ojai studio on his own.

The museum's curator for the exhibition, Suzanne Baizerman, points out that the Heinos reflect everything from the arts and crafts movement to the clean lines of Scandinavian and German design to the "creative explosion" in California ceramics in the 1950s.

Leave it to Vivika Heino to have the last word in the exhibit text: "The bottom line is that we really just like to make pots."