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David Benge (1936-2002) was an American ceramic artist from Los Angeles, California. He began his career in ceramics in 1965, training under fellow artists Carlton Ball and Susan Peterson, and then worked as a potter in Santa Fe, New Mexico for ten years. While in Santa Fe, Benge frequently exhibited his work, participating in exhibitions that focused on ceramics. Benge later returned to California and worked in research and development for various Los Angeles-based ceramic factories. Read More

Carl Walters, a seminal figure in American sculptural ceramics, begun his career as a painter. He first studied at the Minneapolis School of Art in Minnesota from 1905 to 1907 and later trained under Robert Henri at the Chase School in New York City from 1908 to 1911. After marrying in 1912, Walters moved to Portland, Oregon, and worked as a prominent North West painter for the next six years. The course of Walters’ artistic career changed upon his return to New York City in 1919. Read More

Jerry Rothman (1933-2014) began exploring ceramics while studying industrial design at Los Angeles City College and the Los Angeles-based Art Center School in the early 1950s. In 1956, at the invitation of master ceramist Peter Voulkos, Rothman enrolled in the ceramics graduate program at the Otis Art Institute. For the next few years, Rothman and a group of students who would become some of the most famous American ceramists of the century—Ken Price, Billy Al Bengston, Paul Soldner, and John Mason among them—studied under Voulkos and revolutionized American ceramics by questioning the traditional conventions of pottery and using clay as a sculptural medium. Read More

Horace Clark (1911-1995) studied art around the country, at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, the Designers Art School in Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the University of Arizona, where he received his bachelor’s degree in 1946. That same year, Clark accepted a teaching position in the School of Art at Syracuse University. He moved to Syracuse with his wife, painter and ceramist Mary Andersen, and taught painting for twenty-nine years before retiring in 1975. Read More

Born in Hackensack, New Jersey, David MacDonald (b. 1945) first experimented with ceramics in the late 1960s at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Art Education. As part of the Art Education curriculum, MacDonald was required to take a ceramics course, and he quickly found that working with clay satisfied a desire to create pieces with dimension, form, and functionality, something he could not do when working in other mediums. After graduating from the Hampton Institute, MacDonald attended graduate school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, receiving his Master of Fine Arts in 1971. Read More