Hisae Yanase - Contemporary Ceramic Art

Hisae Yanase (1943 –2019) was a Japanese ceramist, painter, and sculptor, based in Spain. She spent the majority of her adult years in Córdoba, Spain, where she trained in ceramics and developed her career as an artist and instructor. She was considered an innovator of contemporary ceramics, fusing Japanese, Spanish, and Caliphate of Córdoba styles.
Yanase was born in a remote region of Chiba, Japan on December 8, 1943, and grew up in Tokyo. She attended Bunka College in Tokyo, graduating in 1960 with a degree in design. In 1964, she completed an apprenticeship in leather techniques in Tokyo.
In 1968, at age 23, she travelled to Córdoba, as she had a friend moving to the city and an interest in cordovan leather.Her artistic interests shifted to ceramic art, which she studied in Valencia and Manises. In 1976, she began working as a ceramic teacher at the Mateo Inurria School of Arts and Crafts in Córdoba. She taught for 35 years before retiring in 2011.Wikipedia

Heitor Pais - Artistic Ceramics

 Heitor Pais was born in Mozambique in 1960. He lives and works in Portugal.

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Donald Lester Reitz - Ceramic art

Donald Lester Reitz (November 7, 1929 – March 19, 2014) was an American ceramic artist, recognized for inspiring a reemergence of salt glaze pottery in United States. He was a teacher of ceramic art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1962 until 1988. During this period, he adapted the pottery firing technique developed in the Middle Ages, which involved pouring salt into the pottery kiln during the firing stage. The method was taught in European ceramic art schools, but largely unknown in United States studio pottery.In 1982, Reitz was in a serious car accident involving a truck and was hospitalized for several months. While recovering from his injury, he began to create a series of ceramic pieces that came to be known by a collective name, Sara Period. In 2007, Reitz suffered a heart attack and would undergo close to a dozen surgeries, including a valve replacement. He continued producing works with the help of studio assistants.Reitz died on March 19, 2014, at the age of 84 of heart failure and was eulogized by The New York Times and the American Craft Council. His works are featured in several museums including the Smithsonian Institution, American Museum of Ceramic Art, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Later in the 1980s and 90s, he became involved with wood firing ceramics as a collaboration with several artists, traveling to many ceramics studios to utilize different kilns for their varied effects. In 1988, he retired from the University of Wisconsin, but continued to work at his private studio in Clarkdale, Arizona.
Reitz was named on Ceramics Monthly's list of "greatest living ceramic artists worldwide" in 1988 and 2001. In 2002, he was awarded the American Craft Council's Gold Medal award.In 2007, he suffered a heart attack and underwent a series of eleven surgeries, including a valve replacement. However, he continued producing works for several more years, this time, with the help of studio assistants and collaborative artists. He would take elements they molded in cylindrical shapes, modify and assemble them into abstract sculptures, statuettes and table top pieces.Wikipedia

Ceramic Art Paul Soldner

Paul Soldner (April 24, 1921 in Summerfield, Illinois – January 3, 2011 in Claremont, California) was an American ceramic artist, 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 served as an army medic during World War II and began to pursue a career in art upon returning to the United States. He earned degrees in art education and art administration from Bluffton College and the University of Colorado, then turned his attention to ceramics. He focused first on functional pottery.
In 1954, Soldner became Peter Voulkos' first student in the nascent ceramics department at the Los Angeles County Art Institute (now the Otis College of Art and Design).[3] As Soldner helped his teacher establish the program, he made several changes to the studio pottery equipment, which led to him founding Soldner Pottery Equipment Corp. in 1955, to market his inventions. He eventually held seven patents related to pottery equipment.
After receiving his MFA in ceramics in 1956, Soldner began teaching at Scripps College.

In the 1960s he helped found Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass, Colorado. He was also involved in starting the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts.
He developed a type of low-temperature salt firing.Along with Voulkos, Soldner has been credited with creating the "California School" of ceramic arts by combining Western materials and technology with Japanese techniques and aesthetics.
While teaching at Scripps College, he organized the Scripps Ceramics Annual - a nationally recognized ceramic exhibition. In addition, as a result of his lifelong friendship with ceramic collectors Fred and Mary Marer, Scripps became the fortunate recipient of the extensive Marer Collection of Contemporary Ceramics. In 1990, Scripps received an NEA Grant to research and organize and exhibition titled, "Paul Soldner:A Retrospective'" that travelled throughout the United States.
Soldner retired from Scripps in 1991. He lived and maintained studios in Aspen, Colorado and Claremont, California.Wikipedia

Ceramic sculptures Peter Voulkos

Peter Voulkos (popular name of Panagiotis Voulkos; January 29, 1924 – February 16, 2002) 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 While his early work was fired in electric and gas kilns, later in his career he primarily fired in the anagama kiln of Peter Callas, who had helped to introduce Japanese wood firing aesthetics in the United States.
He was born as Panagiotis Harry Voulkos, the third of five children to Greek immigrant parents,Aristovoulos I. Voulkopoulos, anglicized and shortened to Harry (Aris) John Voulkos and Effrosyni (Efrosine) Peter Voulalas, in Bozeman, Montana.
After serving in the United States Army during the Second World War, Voulkos studied painting and printmaking at Montana State College, in Bozeman (now Montana State University), where he was also introduced to ceramics; Frances Senska, who established the ceramic arts program there around that time, was his teacher.He subsequently earned an MFA degree in ceramics from the California College of the Arts and Crafts, in Oakland. Afterwards he returned to Bozeman, and began his career in a pottery business with classmate Rudy Autio, producing functional dinnerware.

 In 1951 Voulkos and Autio became the first resident artists at the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts, in Helena, Montana. It is from his time there (Resident Director, 1951-1954) that the lineage of his mature work, later in full bloom during his tenure at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, California, can be traced.
In 1953, Voulkos was invited to teach a summer session ceramics course at Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina. After the summer at Black Mountain, he changed his approach to creating ceramics. The artist eschewed his traditional training and instead of creating smooth, well-thrown glazed vessels he started to work gesturally with raw clay, frequently marring his work with gashes and punctures.

 In 1954, after founding the art ceramics department at the Otis College of Art and Design, called the Los Angeles County Art Institute, his work rapidly became abstract and sculptural.
He moved to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1959, where he also founded the ceramics program, within the department of design and decorative arts. He became a full professor there in 1967,and continued to teach until 1985.Among his students were many ceramic artists who became well known in their own right.Voulkos's sculptures are known for their visual weight, their freely-formed construction and their aggressive and energetic decoration. During shaping he would vigorously tear, pound, and gouge their surfaces. At some points in his career, he cast sculptures in bronze; and in early periods his ceramic works were glazed or painted and/or finished with painted brushstrokes. In 1979 he was introduced to the use of wood firing in anagama kilns by Peter Callas, who became his collaborator for the next 23 years. Most of Voulkos's late work was wood-fired in Callas's anagama, which was located at first in Piermont, New York, and later, in Belvidere, New Jersey. This unique partnership, and the resulting work, is considered by many curators and collectors to be the most exuberant period of Voulkos's career.Wikipedia