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Adelaide Alsop Robineau, today considered one of America’s preeminent studio potters, began her ceramics career as a china painter, painting designs on porcelain blanks produced by other craftsmen. After moving to Syracuse with her husband in 1901, Robineau started experimenting with making her own porcelain forms and quickly became a master of the medium, known for decorative techniques that included intricate excising and carving away of clay. Read More

Ceramist Richard Shaw (b. 1941) began working with clay in the 1960s at the San Francisco Art Institute. Shaw’s parents were both artists, his mother a painter and his father an animator at Walt Disney. Although he admired his father’s career from a young age, Shaw set out to be a “serious” artist. In an interview with Richard Wittaker, Shaw explained that he believed “‘real art’ was being a painter, not being an animator, a cartoonist or any of that stuff.” This statement is amusing today, as Shaw’s trompe l’oeil sculptures—the work he is best known for—are not often immediately recognizable as artworks. Read More

Warren MacKenzie (1924-2018) began working with clay as an undergraduate student at the Art Institute of Chicago. Unsatisfied with the teaching provided by their ceramics instructor, MacKenzie and his classmates independently followed the lessons of famed British studio potter Bernard Leach after discovering his publication A Potter’s Book. The book, which explained how Leach had established his pottery and the basic skills every potter should master, introduced MacKenzie to the type of studio pottery he would ultimately make for the rest of his life. Read More

On May 3, 1938, Anna Olmsted, the Director of the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts (today the Everson Museum), wrote a letter to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt extolling the talents of Ethel Mundy, a wax miniature portraitist from Syracuse. Olmsted, a constant champion of Syracuse artists, had known Mundy for many years and hoped to find her patronage from the White House. Read More

Caroline Cheng (b. 1963) is a world-renowned ceramist, curator, and educator. Born in Cambridge in the United Kingdom, Cheng received her bachelor of fine arts from Michigan State University and her master of fine arts from the Academy of Art College in San Francisco before moving to Hong Kong in 1991 to manage The Pottery Workshop, a center for teaching and promoting ceramics. Cheng became Director of The Pottery Workshop in 1997 and has since founded several branches of the Workshop in cities throughout China. Read More