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Leza McVey (1907-1984) was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. She attended the Cleveland Institute of Art from 1927 to 1932, where McVey experimented with sculpture and ultimately graduated with a degree in crafts. She met her husband and fellow artist William McVey at the Cleveland Institute; they married in 1932 and moved to a farm just outside of Cleveland. At the farm, McVey accidentally drank unpasteurized goat’s milk and contracted brucellosis. Read More

For two days in January of 1972, the Everson hosted New York City-based artist John Fischer for an unusual exhibition and event centered on baking bread. Titled Love Me, Love My Bread, the program embraced the idea of bread as sculpture and baking as performance art. Read More

William Merritt Chase (1849-1916) is considered one of the most prolific American Impressionists of the late nineteenth century. Born in Nineveh, Indiana, as the son of an aspiring entrepreneur, Chase experienced a very nomadic childhood. Upon his family’s move to Indianapolis, he began to experiment with painting and drawing and developed a love for the artistic practice. After apprenticing with local artists Barton S. Hays (1826-1914) and Jacob Cox (1810-1892), Chase moved to New York City, and in 1869, enrolled at the New York Academy of Design. Read More

Ruth Hunie Randall (1896-1983) was born in Dayton, Ohio and grew up just outside of Cleveland. She graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1919 with a degree in design and completed a certificate in Art Education in 1921. Randall moved to Syracuse in the early 1920s and began taking classes at Syracuse University’s School of Art, where she studied ceramics in depth for the first time. She also took courses at Alfred University and, in 1932, Randall traveled to study ceramics in Vienna, Austria, at the urging of her friend Thelma Frazier Winter. Read More

Thelma Frazier Winter (1903-1977) began exploring art at a young age and, in her own words, “did hardly anything else so that an art career seemed to be inevitable.” In 1929, she graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art, where Julius Mihalik, an artist and teacher who traveled and taught in Vienna before arriving in Cleveland, first introduced her to ceramics. While a student, Winter also worked as a designer at Cowan Pottery alongside several important Cleveland-based ceramists, including Waylande Gregory, Viktor Schreckengost, Edris Eckhardt, and Edward Winter (who she married in 1939). Read More