Another reason the bowl has been overlooked, Ms. Wiggers posits, is because it’s an accessory. Which is to say, it’s a supporting player in the narrative of other objects and their users. What else is to be expected from something defined largely by the void at its center and its ability to contain a near-infinite variety of things?

“When I talk to people about the bowl, it is always about something else,” Ms. Wiggers said. “It’s a metaphorical conversation about ritual, like in the tea ceremony, or about the fabrication process. It’s very hard to just talk about the bowl itself. We talk around the bowl.”

Paradoxically, it’s the bowl’s lack of presence that makes it such an excellent metaphor and accounts for the many memorable references to it in literature. Sifting through the Western canon alone, one quickly arrives at Mr. Micawber and his punch bowl; Mrs. Dalloway’s outré friend Sally Seton floating the heads of dahlias and hollyhocks in bowls of water; stately, plump Buck Mulligan performing a parody of the Roman Catholic mass with a shaving bowl; and, of course, “The Golden Bowl” of Henry James.

Tables, chairs and lamps can’t begin to compete.

Ms. Wiggers has capitalized on the narrative richness of bowls by inviting scholars, writers and artisans to select an example from the show and write a brief essay about it. Some of the essays are philosophical, like the meditation by Mara Holt Skov, a curator in San Francisco, on a glass bowl by Do-Ho Suh modeled with the impression of the South Korean artist’s cupped hands pressed into the base. It is, Ms. Holt Skov wrote, a “reminder that the hand is present in everything we make,” even if the evidence is not always obvious.

Daniel Duford, a potter and printmaker, wrote more personally about a ceramic bread bowl of unknown origin that had been inherited from his wife’s great-grandmother in Puyallup, Wash.: “It is thick and stout like a Dutch farm wife. For all its stoutness, it has a handsome figure, neither dumpy nor high-toned.”

Ms. Wiggers has invited the public to contribute writings as well, which are collected online at objectfocusbowl.tumblr.com. And she is encouraging people to render their ideas about bowls at a drawing station installed at the exhibition. Undergraduates from the illustration program at Pacific Northwest College of Art, the museum’s partner institution, were the first contributors, followed by anyone who has cared to pick up a pencil.