Peter Voulkos

Peter Voulkos (b. 1924, Bozeman, MT - d. 2002, Bowling Green, OH) is widely considered the father of contemporary American ceramics. Born and raised in Bozeman, MT, Voulkos was the son of working-class Greek immigrants. After serving in the Pacific during World War II, Voulkos returned home in the mid-1940s; the GI Bill allowed him to enroll at Montana State College (now Montana State University), where he studied painting and eventually discovered his love for ceramics. He went on to earn an M.F.A. in ceramics at the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1952.

In the summer of 1953, while Voulkos was teaching at the famed Black Mountain College in Asheville, NC, he met Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham. They convinced him to visit New York. Voulkos took them up on their suggestion soon after, and it was during that first trip that he met and became inspired by Abstract Expressionists Willem DeKooning and Franz Kline. It was an invitation to chair the Los Angeles County Art Institute (now Otis Art Institute) ceramics department in 1954, however, that propelled Voulkos’ long and famed teaching career. At Otis he broke ranks with traditional rules of both ceramic practices and teaching methods and radically created a new path for clay to merge with contemporary art. Voulkos’ unorthodox teaching style – essentially having students learn by simply watching him, and then creating their own work without specific instruction – was frowned upon by the administrative staff at Otis; in contrast, Voulkos’s unique methodology was highly regarded by many students, including eventual luminaries such as Billy Al Bengston and Ken Price. Voulkos’s studio class mantra “no rules, no rules” inspired a radical departure for ceramics as an art form and gave it a voice outside of functional pottery. Voulkos’ impressively-scaled genre-defying works, which draw from a long, international legacy of ceramic arts, inspired generations of artists working in the medium to come.

Peter Voulkos earned a B.A. from Montana State College (Bozeman) in 1951 and an M.F.A. from California College of Arts and Crafts (Oakland, CA) in 1952. He carried numerous teaching appointments throughout his career, including Archie Bray Foundation (Helena, MT), Black Mountain College (Asheville, NC), Los Angeles County Art Institute (Los Angeles, CA), University of Montana (Missoula), University of California, Berkeley; and Greenwich House Pottery, New York Teachers’ College, and Columbia University (New York, NY). Voulkos was the recipient of multiple awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1984), College Art Association Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement (1997), American Crafts Council Gold Medal (1986), and several honorary degrees.

Peter Voulkos’ works have been exhibited in institutions internationally, including solo exhibitions at Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Sezon Museum of Art (Tokyo, JP), and Museum of Art and Design (New York, NY). His works are held in the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including Stedelijk (Amsterdam, NL), Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center (Asheville, NC), Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA), Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL), Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit, MI), High Museum of Art (Atlanta, GA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN), Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh, PA), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, CA), National Museum of Modern Art (Tokyo, JP), Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT), Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), and Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), among many others.