American Craft - The 1950s and Peter Voulkos

The 1950s and Peter Voulkos

During the 1950s, some artists turned to the truth-to-materials doctrine. This movement also entailed an emphasis on the collective production of crafts work. Craftsmen sometimes worked together during this period to develop more ambitious projects. Throughout the 1950s and afterwards, potter Peter Voulkos developed increasingly largescale and nontraditional ceramic works, influenced by Abstract Expressionism, which transformed traditional understandings of the craft media. Like the Abstract Expressionists, Voulkos emphasized performance, process and primal expression in his ceramic forms. In some cases, Voulkos deconstructed and reconstructed traditional ceramic vessel forms such as plates, ice buckets, and tea bowls. In other works, Voulkos created new nonutilitarian forms, such as his purely sculptural, large-scale cylindrical "stacks."

Voulkos was also influeced by Zen Buddhism after a 1952 encounter with prominent Japanese potter Shoji Hamada. Hamada encouraged Voulkos to embrace a Zen approach to ceramics based not only upon technical proficiency but also upon a mental and spiritual union between creator and art object. Voulkos later cited Hamada's statement that it "took him ten years to learn the potter's wheel and another ten years to forget it"—an insight that inspired Voulkos' early attempts to fully form a teapot in two minutes.

Voulkos taught at Black Mountain College in 1953, where he was further exposed to the avant-garde movements. In 1954, he founded the ceramics department at the Otis College of Art and Design (then called the Los Angeles County Art Institute). In California, Voulkos' pottery rapidly became abstract and sculptural. Voulkos then moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where he founded another ceramics department and taught from 1959 until 1985. At Berkeley, Voulkos became increasingly prominent for his massive, cracked and slashed pots.