The Ceramicist Who Punched His Pots

Lucy Harvey | Smithsonian.com | 18th April 2017

One critic observes that “calling Peter Voulkos a ceramicist is a bit like calling Jimi Hendrix a guitarist”. Having become an “absolute master of wheel-thrown vessels”, a summer teaching job led him to abruptly switch to ceramic abstract sculptures. Over the next 15 years he channeled influences as diverse as Picasso and abstract expressionism to “redefine his medium and transform the craft into fine art”.