Raku ware is a type of Japanese pottery traditionally used in Japanese tea ceremonies, most often in the form of chawan tea bowls. It is traditionally characterised by being hand-shaped rather than thrown, fairly porous vessels, which result from low firing temperatures, lead glazes and the removal of pieces from the kiln while still glowing hot. In the traditional Japanese process, the fired raku piece is removed from the hot kiln and is allowed to cool in the open air.
Paul Edmund Soldner was an American ceramic artist and educator, noted for his experimentation with the 16th-century Japanese technique called raku, introducing new methods of firing and post firing, which became known as American Raku. He was the founder of the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in 1966.
Peter Voulkos was an American artist of Greek descent. He is known for his abstract expressionist ceramic sculptures, which crossed the traditional divide between ceramic crafts and fine art. He established the ceramics department at the Los Angeles County Art Institute and at UC Berkeley.
Jun Kaneko is a Japanese-born American ceramic artist known for creating large scale ceramic sculpture. Based out of a studio warehouse in Omaha, Nebraska, Kaneko primarily works in clay to explore the effects of repeated abstract surface motifs by using ceramic glaze.
Toshiko Takaezu was an American ceramic artist, painter, sculptor, and educator whose oeuvre spanned a wide range of mediums, including ceramics, weavings, bronzes, and paintings. She is noted for her pioneering work in ceramics and has played an important role in the international revival of interest in the ceramic arts. Takaezu was known for her rounded, closed ceramic forms which broke from traditions of clay as a medium for functional objects. Instead she explored clay's potential for aesthetic expression, taking on Abstract Expressionist concepts in a manner that places her work in the realm of postwar abstractionism. She is of Japanese descent and from Pepeeko, Hawaii.
Robert Brady is an American modernist sculptor who works in ceramics and wood. Born in Reno, Nevada, he has made his home in the San Francisco Bay Area for many decades. Brady is a multi-faceted artist who works in ceramics, wood, painting, and illustration, and is best known for his abstract figurative sculptures. Brady came out of the California Clay movement, and the Bay Area Arts scene of the 1950s and 1960s, which includes artists such as Peter Voulkos, Viola Frey, Stephen de Staebler, and Robert Arneson who was his mentor and teacher in college.
Esther Shimazu is an American sculptor who was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1957. Her grandparents were immigrant laborers from Japan. She attended the University of Hawaii at Manoa before transferring to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where she received a Bachelor of Fine Art in 1980 and a Master of Fine Art in 1982.
David Kuraoka is an American ceramic artist. He was born in Lihue, Hawaii, grew up on the island of Kauai, Hawaii in Hanamaulu and Lihue, and graduated from Kauai High School in 1964. Kuraoka spent his formative years in Hanamaulu where he lived with his parents in his paternal grandmother's home in a plantation labor camp. His father, one of seven children and the only son, became a journalist, writing a weekly column published on Wednesdays, and the Kauai campaign manager for local politician Hiram Fong and Richard Nixon. His mother, Emiko Kuraoka, was a school teacher. He is married to Carol Kuraoka. Kuraoka moved to California in 1964 to study architecture at San Jose City College, eventually transferring to San José State University where he received his BA in 1970 and MA 1971. After completing graduate work that focused on ceramics, Kuraoka joined the faculty at San Francisco State University, eventually rising to head its ceramics department.
Claude Horan was an American ceramic and glass artist who was born in Long Beach, California. He received a BA from San Jose State University in 1942 and an MA degree in art from Ohio State University in 1946. His wife Suzi Pleyte Horan collaborated on many of the larger projects. He was a lifeguard and longboard surfer in Santa Cruz in the late 1930s, and is credited with naming Steamer Lane.
Beth Cavener, also known as Beth Cavener Stichter, is an American artist based out of Montana. A classically trained sculptor, her process involves building complex metal armatures to support massive amounts of clay. Cavener is best known for her fantastical animal figures, which embody the complexity of human emotion and behavior.
Yō Akiyama is a Japanese ceramicist based in Kyoto. He was a late leading figure of Sōdeisha, an avant-garde ceramicist group that reimagined ceramics as nonfunctional sculptural practice. Akiyama studied directly under Kazuo Yagi, one of the founders of Sōdeisha, for six years. He later became a professor at Kyoto Municipal University of Arts and Music, where he is currently a Professor Emeritus, having retired in 2018. As an artist, he works primarily with black pottery, a technique that fires clay in low temperature, smoky conditions to create a dark effect. His predominantly largescale work is richly textural and abstract, emphasizing the earthy materiality of the work as well as its form.
Nina Hole was a Danish artist, sculptor, and performance artist who helped to found the CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art Denmark and the International Ceramics Center–Guldagergaard.
Susan Hale Kemenyffy is an American artist who works primarily in drawing and print media. She is known for the innovative raku art she created in collaboration with her husband Steven Kemenyffy.
Susan Collett RCA IAC is a Canadian artist in printmaking and ceramics. In 1986, she graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art, earning a B.F.A. in printmaking with a minor in ceramics.
Michelle Gregor is a San Francisco-based figurative sculptor. She works in mid-fire stoneware ceramic and porcelain.
Tip Toland is an American ceramic artist and teacher who was born in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. She earned a BFA in Ceramics from the University of Colorado and an MFA in Ceramics from Montana State University. Her works, which are figurative and often described as "hyper-real," are held by galleries and museums around the United States.
Nancy Selvin is an American sculptor, recognized for ceramic works and tableaux that explore the vessel form and balance an interplay of materials, minimal forms, and expressive processes. She emerged in the late 1960s among a "second generation" of Bay Area ceramic artists who followed the California Clay Movement and continued to challenge ceramic traditions involving expression, form and function, and an art-world that placed the medium outside its established hierarchy. Her work has been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Denver Art Museum, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art and Kohler Arts Center, and belongs to the public art collections of LACMA, the Smithsonian Institution, Oakland Museum of California, and Crocker Art Museum, among others. Critic David Roth has written, "Selvin's position in the top rank of ceramic artists has come through a process of rigorous self-examination … what differentiates [her] is that she eschews realism and functionality, indicating a level of intellectual engagement not always found among ceramicists." Writer and curator Jo Lauria described Selvin's tableaux as "elegiac and stylistically unified" works that serve as "forceful essays on the relationship between realism and abstraction, object and subject, decoration and use." Selvin lives and works in the Berkeley, California area.
Janet Fieldhouse is a Meriam Mir ceramic artist based in Cairns, Queensland, Australia. Fieldhouse uses a variety of clays and ceramic techniques to recover, reinterpret and represent Ailan Kastom: the cultural practices, symbols and artistic traditions of her Erub community, particularly the significant roles and contributions of women. Fieldhouse was introduced to ceramics by artist and Thainakuith elder, Thancoupie Gloria Fletcher James. Since then, Fieldhouse has developed her practice through artist residencies in Japan and the United States and a Master of Philosophy at the Australian National University in 2010.
Yvonne Edwards Tucker, also known as Yvonne Edwards–Tucker is an American artist, known as a potter, sculptor, and educator. She has taught at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee since 1973.
Nina de Creeft Ward is an American artist who works with bronze, soft sculptures, etchings, woodcuts, and monoprints. She had multiple art exhibitions in the Philippines and the United States. Ward was the co-winner of the Individual Artists Award for Works in Clay in 2006 from the Santa Barbara Arts Fund. Most of Ward's work has to do with animals, including a 1998 exhibition of art that resembled endangered and extinct species. She has taught students such as at the University of Northern Iowa. Her clay animal models are made with raku ware.
