Studio pottery is pottery made by professional and amateur artists or artisans working alone or in small groups, making unique items or short runs. Typically, all stages of manufacture are carried out by the artists themselves. Studio pottery includes functional wares such as tableware and cookware, and non-functional wares such as sculpture, with vases and bowls covering the middle ground, often being used only for display. Studio potters can be referred to as ceramic artists, ceramists, ceramicists or as an artist who uses clay as a medium.
Joan Takayama-Ogawa is a sansei (third-generation) Japanese-American ceramic artist and currently professor at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, California. Takayama-Ogawa's heritage since the 15th century of Japanese ceramic art influences her work, that usually explores beauty, decoration, ornamentation and narrative while also introducing a dialogue that rejects the traditional role of women in Japanese culture. Her most recent work addresses issues like climate change.
Akio Takamori was a Japanese-American ceramic sculptor and was a faculty member at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington.
D. Wayne Higby is an American artist working in ceramics. The American Craft Museum considers him a "visionary of the American Crafts Movement" and recognized him as one of seven artists who are "genuine living legends representing the best of American artists in their chosen medium."
Regis Brodie is a tenured Professor of Art at the Department of Art and Art History at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY and a potter. Since 1972, he has been serving as the Director of the Summer Six Art Program at Skidmore College. He also wrote a book called The Energy Efficient Potter which was published by Watson-Guptill Publications in 1982. He started the Brodie Company in 1999 in the interest of developing tools which would aid the potter at the potter's wheel.
Cindy Kolodziejski is a contemporary ceramic artist living and working in Venice, California. She has been showing her work in solo and group exhibitions since 1986 in the United States, Europe, and Asia, and is represented in public and private collections domestically and abroad.
Adrian Saxe is an American ceramic artist who was born in Glendale, California in 1943. He lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Rudolf Harry "Rudi" Staffel was an American ceramic artist and educator.
Arnold Zimmerman (1954-2021), also known as Arnie Zimmerman, was an American sculptor and ceramic artist. His work ranged from monumental to miniature, and abstract to figurative, encompassing totemic vessel forms, tabletop sculpture and figures, murals, and room-size installations. He was part of a multi-decade, 20th-century shift in American ceramics during which artists challenged clay's identification with function and craft, engaging fine-art domains such as emotional expression, social commentary, figuration and narrative. Zimmerman first gained recognition in the 1980s for deeply carved, architectonic sculptures characterized by rough physicality, rhythmic surfaces, gestural presence and Italian Romanesque influences. In the mid-1990s, he shifted to figurative work that critic Donald Kuspit wrote, examined the interaction of finite man and infinite matter, artist and creative work: "There is a sense of futility and folly as well as seemingly senseless idealism and innocence built into Zimmerman's parables of the all-too-human."
Peter Shire is a Los Angeles-based artist. Shire was born in the Echo Park district of Los Angeles, where he currently lives and works. His sculpture, furniture and ceramics have been exhibited in the United States, Italy, France, Japan and Poland. Shire has been associated with the Memphis Group of designers, has worked on the Design Team for the 1984 Summer Olympics with the American Institute of Architects, and has designed public sculptures in Los Angeles and other California cities. Shire has been honored by awards for his contribution to the cultural life of the City of Los Angeles.
Jeanne Quinn is an American ceramic artist who works primarily with installations. She is a Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado. She lives and works in Boulder, Colorado, and Brooklyn, New York.
Elizabeth Fritsch CBE is a British studio potter and ceramic artist born into a Welsh family in Whitchurch on the Shropshire border. Her innovative hand built and painted pots are often influenced by ideas from music, painting, literature, landscape and architecture.
Viola Frey was an American artist working in sculpture, painting and drawing, and professor emerita at California College of the Arts. She lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area and was renowned for her larger-than-life, colorfully glazed clay sculptures of men and women, which expanded the traditional boundaries of ceramic sculpture.
Sueharu Fukami is a Japanese ceramic artist and sculptor known for his work in pale-blue qinbai porcelain. Fukami's abstracted, sculptural ceramic works depart from the traditional Japanese artisan traditions of his upbringing and instead explore natural phenomena and universal senses like "infinite space" through sharp silhouettes, sweeping curves, architecturally-inspired arches, and delicately-colored glaze. His minimalist approach to porcelains has contributed to defining and expanding the meaning, importance, and popularity of contemporary Japanese ceramics beyond craft art circles, most notably to fine art collectors and museums globally.
Steven Montgomery is an American artist most often associated with large scale ceramic sculpture suggesting industrial objects or mechanical detritus. He received a Bachelor of Philosophy degree from Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan and a Master of Fine Arts from the Tyler School of Art of Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Jack Doherty is a Northern Irish studio potter and author. He is perhaps best known for his vessels made of soda-fired porcelain. He has been featured in a number of books, and his work has been exhibited widely in both Europe and North America. Articles of his have appeared in various pottery journals and he has been Chair of the Craft Potters Association.
Kurt Weiser is an American ceramicist and professor. His work—explorations of the relationship between man and nature through narratives rendered in vivid color—are described as "Eden-like." His work has often taken the form of teapots, vases, and cups, though he has recently begun crafting globes as well. Weiser is currently the Regents Professor at Arizona State University's School of Art.
Chris Gustin is an American ceramicist. Gustin models his work on the human form, which is shown through the shape, color, and size of the pieces.
Rick Dillingham (1952–1994) was an American ceramic artist, scholar, collector and museum professional best known for his broken pot technique and scholarly publications on Pueblo pottery.
Christine McHorse, also known as Christine Nofchissey McHorse, was a Navajo ceramic artist from Santa Fe, New Mexico.
