Daniel Rhodes - Later Career

Later Career

In 1939-40, Rhodes taught at the Art Students’ Workshop in Des Moines, and was also a guest lecturer at the Ottumwa Art Center and Iowa State University. In 1940, he married the former Lillyan Estelle Jacobs of Des Moines, a potter, sculptor and figurative painter whom he had met at Stone City. They raised two children, a daughter (Lorna) and a son (Aaron). Lillyan Rhodes died in 1986.

After completing his MFA at Alfred University, the Rhodes remained in that area, where he worked as a designer for Glidden Pottery. In 1943, they moved to California, where he worked in San Jose as a researcher in high heat ceramics for the Henry J. Kaiser Corporation. Three years later, they moved to Menlo Park, California, where in 1947 they built a full-scale ceramic studio, and created thrown and cast ware for Gump’s, the San Francisco department store. During the same period, Rhodes was briefly on the faculties at Stanford University (1946) and the San Francisco Art Institute (1946–47). In 1947, they returned to New York State, where Rhodes joined the art department faculty of his alma mater, the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, where he taught from 1947 to 1973.

While at Alfred University, Rhodes also taught summer sessions in ceramics at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles (1952–53); Black Mountain College, Asheville, North Carolina; and the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle, Maine (1961). Rhodes later taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz (1977–80).

In the last phase of his life, Rhodes married Mary Beth Coulter. At the start of a two-month tour of college campuses, he was conducting a workshop at Sierra Nevada College when he was stricken by a heart attack and died in Reno, Nevada, in July 1989. He was 78 years old.

In June 2011, a Facebook page, "Daniel Rhodes Centennial," was established to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his birth.