Peter Voulkos is born to Greek immigrant parents in the town of Bozeman, Montana on January 29th,1924. Voulkos got his start in art in the late 1940s, when he was studying at Bozeman State College on the G.I. Bill, after being drafted and serving as an airplane armorer-gunner in the Pacific in World War II. It was here that he discovered ceramics, the medium that would characterize his career. After graduating from Bozeman State College in 1951, Voulkos moved west and earned his MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California in 1952. Returning to Montana after graduation, Voulkos attracted attention “as a prodigious natural potter and a producer of elegantly thrown functional earthenware,” according to Roberta Smith for the New York Times. He also produced dinnerware to sell through high-quality stores, and was noted for his wax-resist method of decoration.Voulkos gained a reputation as a master of ceramics techniques, winning twenty-nine prizes and awards from 1949 through 1955. However, a summer spent teaching at the experimental Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina in 1953 resulted in a dramatic shift in Voulkos’s artistic priorities, as well as his aesthetic. It was at Black Mountain College that Voulkos met Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Charles Olson. He then visited New York City and encountered Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline—Abstract Expressionist painters who influenced the new direction Voulkos would go on to pursue. In 1954, Voulkos was invited to teach at the Los Angeles County Art Institute (now Otis), and he established a new ceramics department that attracted other young artists including John Mason, Ken Price, Billy Al Bengston and Paul Soldner. It was here that, inspired by the scale and spontaneity of the New York School, Voulkos began to build progressively larger works that cast aside utility and abandoned ceramic conventions. Decoration became aggressive, as he slashed at and pierced the clay, which he then energetically painted with glaze. Peter Voulkos exhibited these new works in shows at the Landau Gallery in Los Angeles, which announced to the world a new way of approaching ceramics. Disagreements with the more conservative administrators of the LA County Art Institute led to Voulkos’s departure for the University of California, Berkeley, that same year. While at Berkeley, Voulkos experimented with bronze and produced large-scale bronze sculpture. In 1979, a young ceramist named Peter Callas constructed the first Japanese wood fire kiln in the United States and Voulkos experimented with it, creating works that exploited the spontaneity of the process. The artist retired from his teaching position at Berkeley in 1985, and began working full-time on his own projects. If anything, his creativity and productivity seemed to accelerate in his later years, as he focused on clay and later, bronze. The influence of Peter Voulkos on the field of ceramic art and sculpture is hard to overstate—Roberta Smith described the magnitude of his impact when she wrote, “few artists have changed a medium as markedly or as single-handedly as Mr. Voulkos.” Voulkos is often credited with contributing to the demolition of the traditional hierarchies between the fine arts and craft, and the elevation of ceramics out of the decorative arts to which they had been consigned. His work as an innovator, teacher, and colleague inspired generations of ceramists to push boundaries and find liberation in their medium. Peter Voulkos passed away from a heart attack in Bowling Green (Ohio), on February 16th, 2002. During his lifetime, he was honored with countless awards and fellowships, and has exhibited in nearly 100 solo shows around the world. His work is represented in major museum collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Peter Voulkos is one of America’s most significant sculptors of the 20th century.
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2013 Peter Voulkos: Works, 1956 – 1997, Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York 2011 A Survey, Frank Lloyd Gallery, Santa Monica, California 2009 The Montana, Otis & Berkeley Years, Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco, California 2005 Peter Voulkos, Bronze: 1986-2002, Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco, CA Peter Voulkos: Echoes of the Japanese Aesthetic, American Museum of Ceramic Art, Pomona, California 2004 Works on Paper, Frank Lloyd Gallery, Santa Monica, California 2003 Selected Work: 1953-2000, Frank Lloyd Gallery, Santa Monica, California Charles Cowles Gallery, New York Osceola Gallery, Emeryville, California LongHouse Reserve, East Hampton, New York 2002 Galerie Yoramgil, Beverly Hills, California 2001 Frank Lloyd Gallery, Santa Monica, California Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco, California Art Foundry Gallery, Sacramento, California 2000 Gallerymateria, Scottsdale, Arizona Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass Village, Colorado Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University at Logan, Logan, Utah 1999 Frank Lloyd Gallery, Santa Monica, California Mussi Artworks Foundry & Gallery, Berkeley, California (catalogue) 1998 Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco, California Charles Cowles Gallery, New York 1997 Perimeter Gallery, Chicago, Illinois University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida 1996 Charles Cowles Gallery, New York Kenji Taki Gallery, Nagoya, Japan (catalogue) William Traver Gallery, Seattle, Washington 1995 Sezon Museum of Art, Tokyo, traveled to: the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan (catalogue) Society for Contemporary Craft, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, traveled to: the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Fisher Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand; and the Dowse Art Museum, Wellington, New Zealand (brochure) The Oakland Museum, Oakland, California, traveled to: the Newport Harbor Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California; and the American Craft Museum, New York Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco, California 1993 Hordaland Kunstnersentrum, Bergen, Norway, traveled to: Ram Galleri, Oslo, Norway; Kunstindustrimuseum, Trondheim, Norway; and Kunstnernes Hus, Salthomsgade, Denmark; Grimmerhus Center for International Studiokeramik, Middledfart, Denmark Perimeter Gallery, Chicago, Illinois Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco, California 1992 Louis Newman Galleries, Beverly Hills, California 1991 Leedy/Voulkos Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco, California (catalogue) 1990 Charles Cowles Gallery, New York 1988 Twining Gallery, New York (catalogue) Thomas Segal Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts 1987 Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco, California 1986 Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco, California 1985 Bancho Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (brochure) Exhibit A, Chicago, Illinois 1984 Faith and Charity in Hope Gallery, Hope, Idaho (catalogue) Magnolia Gallery, Oakland, California Gallery 181, College of Design, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa Exhibit A, Chicago, Illinois Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco, California 1983 Art Center, Tokyo; traveled to Kyoto Art University, Kyoto, Japan; and the Tokoname Ceramic Research Center, Tokoname, Japan (brochure) Charles Cowles Gallery, New York Morgan Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri 1982 Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco, California Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Connecticut 1981 Charles Cowles Gallery, New York Jacksonville Art Museum, Jacksonville, Florida (brochure) Thomas Segal Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts Exhibit A, Chicago, Illinois 1980 Okun-Thomas Gallery, St. Louis, Missouri Morgan Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri 1979 Foster/White Gallery, Seattle, Washington Northern Arizona University Art Gallery, Flagstaff, Arizona (brochure) Hill’s Gallery of Contemporary Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico 1978 Exhibit A, Chicago, Illinois Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco, California San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; traveled to Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas; Museum of Contemporary Crafts, New York; and the Milwaukee Art Center, Milwaukee, Wisconsin (book) Exhibit A, Evanston, Illinois 1977 Contemporary Crafts, Portland, Oregon 1976 Exhibit A, Evanston, Illinois Yaw Gallery, Birmingham, Michigan Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan (catalogue) 1975 Kemper Gallery, Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, Missouri; traveled to Helen Drutt Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco, California 1974 Quay Gallery, San Francisco, California 1972 San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, California (catalogue) 1968 Quay Gallery, San Francisco, California David Stuart Galleries, Los Angeles, California 1967 David Stuart Galleries, Los Angeles, California 1965 Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California (catalogue) 1964 Hack Light Gallery, Scottsdale, Arizona Art Unlimited, San Francisco, California 1963 David Stuart Galleries, Los Angeles, California 1961 Primus-Stuart Galleries, Los Angeles, California 1960 Museum of Modern Art, New York (brochure) 1959 Felix Landau Gallery, Los Angeles, California (catalogue) 1958 Pasadena Art Museum, Pasadena, California 1957 Bonnier’s, New York Downstairs Gallery, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 1956 Landau Gallery, Los Angeles, California 1954 American House Gallery, New York 1953 Art Gallery, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida
Pictures: Otis Art Institute, 1956 with Soldner and Mason (courtesy Soldner enterprises); portrait (source Frank Lloyd Gallery); Voulkos on his 50th Anniversary in 1974 (photo courtesy Craft in America); Voulkos in 2001 with his sculture Anasazi (photographer Jerry Telfer); large pot, 1958; charger, 1981 (collection Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City); Snowmass II (photographer Noel Allum / www.voulkos.com).
Peter Voulkos is born to Greek immigrant parents in the town of Bozeman, Montana on January 29th,1924. Voulkos got his start in art in the late 1940s, when he was studying at Bozeman State College on the G.I. Bill, after being drafted and serving as an airplane armorer-gunner in the Pacific in World War II. It was here that he discovered ceramics, the medium that would characterize his career. After graduating from Bozeman State College in 1951, Voulkos moved west and earned his MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California in 1952. Returning to Montana after graduation, Voulkos attracted attention “as a prodigious natural potter and a producer of elegantly thrown functional earthenware,” according to Roberta Smith for the New York Times. He also produced dinnerware to sell through high-quality stores, and was noted for his wax-resist method of decoration.Voulkos gained a reputation as a master of ceramics techniques, winning twenty-nine prizes and awards from 1949 through 1955. However, a summer spent teaching at the experimental Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina in 1953 resulted in a dramatic shift in Voulkos’s artistic priorities, as well as his aesthetic. It was at Black Mountain College that Voulkos met Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Charles Olson. He then visited New York City and encountered Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline—Abstract Expressionist painters who influenced the new direction Voulkos would go on to pursue. In 1954, Voulkos was invited to teach at the Los Angeles County Art Institute (now Otis), and he established a new ceramics department that attracted other young artists including John Mason, Ken Price, Billy Al Bengston and Paul Soldner. It was here that, inspired by the scale and spontaneity of the New York School, Voulkos began to build progressively larger works that cast aside utility and abandoned ceramic conventions. Decoration became aggressive, as he slashed at and pierced the clay, which he then energetically painted with glaze. Peter Voulkos exhibited these new works in shows at the Landau Gallery in Los Angeles, which announced to the world a new way of approaching ceramics. Disagreements with the more conservative administrators of the LA County Art Institute led to Voulkos’s departure for the University of California, Berkeley, that same year. While at Berkeley, Voulkos experimented with bronze and produced large-scale bronze sculpture. In 1979, a young ceramist named Peter Callas constructed the first Japanese wood fire kiln in the United States and Voulkos experimented with it, creating works that exploited the spontaneity of the process. The artist retired from his teaching position at Berkeley in 1985, and began working full-time on his own projects. If anything, his creativity and productivity seemed to accelerate in his later years, as he focused on clay and later, bronze. The influence of Peter Voulkos on the field of ceramic art and sculpture is hard to overstate—Roberta Smith described the magnitude of his impact when she wrote, “few artists have changed a medium as markedly or as single-handedly as Mr. Voulkos.” Voulkos is often credited with contributing to the demolition of the traditional hierarchies between the fine arts and craft, and the elevation of ceramics out of the decorative arts to which they had been consigned. His work as an innovator, teacher, and colleague inspired generations of ceramists to push boundaries and find liberation in their medium. Peter Voulkos passed away from a heart attack in Bowling Green (Ohio), on February 16th, 2002. During his lifetime, he was honored with countless awards and fellowships, and has exhibited in nearly 100 solo shows around the world. His work is represented in major museum collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Peter Voulkos is one of America’s most significant sculptors of the 20th century.
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2013 Peter Voulkos: Works, 1956 – 1997, Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York
2011 A Survey, Frank Lloyd Gallery, Santa Monica, California
2009 The Montana, Otis & Berkeley Years, Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco,
California
2005 Peter Voulkos, Bronze: 1986-2002, Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco, CA
Peter Voulkos: Echoes of the Japanese Aesthetic, American Museum of Ceramic
Art, Pomona, California
2004 Works on Paper, Frank Lloyd Gallery, Santa Monica, California
2003 Selected Work: 1953-2000, Frank Lloyd Gallery, Santa Monica, California
Charles Cowles Gallery, New York
Osceola Gallery, Emeryville, California
LongHouse Reserve, East Hampton, New York
2002 Galerie Yoramgil, Beverly Hills, California
2001 Frank Lloyd Gallery, Santa Monica, California
Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco, California
Art Foundry Gallery, Sacramento, California
2000 Gallerymateria, Scottsdale, Arizona
Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri
Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass Village, Colorado
Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University at Logan, Logan, Utah
1999 Frank Lloyd Gallery, Santa Monica, California
Mussi Artworks Foundry & Gallery, Berkeley, California (catalogue)
1998 Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco, California
Charles Cowles Gallery, New York
1997 Perimeter Gallery, Chicago, Illinois
University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida
1996 Charles Cowles Gallery, New York
Kenji Taki Gallery, Nagoya, Japan (catalogue)
William Traver Gallery, Seattle, Washington
1995 Sezon Museum of Art, Tokyo, traveled to: the National Museum of Modern Art,
Kyoto, Japan (catalogue)
Society for Contemporary Craft, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, traveled to:
the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Fisher Gallery, Auckland,
New Zealand; and the Dowse Art Museum, Wellington,
New Zealand (brochure)
The Oakland Museum, Oakland, California, traveled to: the Newport Harbor
Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California; and the American Craft Museum,
New York
Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco, California
1993 Hordaland Kunstnersentrum, Bergen, Norway, traveled to: Ram Galleri,
Oslo, Norway; Kunstindustrimuseum, Trondheim, Norway; and
Kunstnernes Hus, Salthomsgade, Denmark;
Grimmerhus Center for International Studiokeramik, Middledfart, Denmark
Perimeter Gallery, Chicago, Illinois
Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco, California
1992 Louis Newman Galleries, Beverly Hills, California
1991 Leedy/Voulkos Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri
Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco, California (catalogue)
1990 Charles Cowles Gallery, New York
1988 Twining Gallery, New York (catalogue)
Thomas Segal Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts
1987 Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco, California
1986 Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco, California
1985 Bancho Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (brochure)
Exhibit A, Chicago, Illinois
1984 Faith and Charity in Hope Gallery, Hope, Idaho (catalogue)
Magnolia Gallery, Oakland, California
Gallery 181, College of Design, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa
Exhibit A, Chicago, Illinois
Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco, California
1983 Art Center, Tokyo; traveled to Kyoto Art University, Kyoto, Japan;
and the Tokoname Ceramic Research Center, Tokoname, Japan (brochure)
Charles Cowles Gallery, New York
Morgan Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri
1982 Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco, California
Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Connecticut
1981 Charles Cowles Gallery, New York
Jacksonville Art Museum, Jacksonville, Florida (brochure)
Thomas Segal Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts
Exhibit A, Chicago, Illinois
1980 Okun-Thomas Gallery, St. Louis, Missouri
Morgan Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri
1979 Foster/White Gallery, Seattle, Washington
Northern Arizona University Art Gallery, Flagstaff, Arizona (brochure)
Hill’s Gallery of Contemporary Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico
1978 Exhibit A, Chicago, Illinois
Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco, California
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; traveled to Contemporary Arts Museum,
Houston, Texas; Museum of Contemporary Crafts, New York; and the
Milwaukee Art Center, Milwaukee, Wisconsin (book)
Exhibit A, Evanston, Illinois
1977 Contemporary Crafts, Portland, Oregon
1976 Exhibit A, Evanston, Illinois
Yaw Gallery, Birmingham, Michigan
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan (catalogue)
1975 Kemper Gallery, Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, Missouri; traveled to
Helen Drutt Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco, California
1974 Quay Gallery, San Francisco, California
1972 San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, California (catalogue)
1968 Quay Gallery, San Francisco, California
David Stuart Galleries, Los Angeles, California
1967 David Stuart Galleries, Los Angeles, California
1965 Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California (catalogue)
1964 Hack Light Gallery, Scottsdale, Arizona
Art Unlimited, San Francisco, California
1963 David Stuart Galleries, Los Angeles, California
1961 Primus-Stuart Galleries, Los Angeles, California
1960 Museum of Modern Art, New York (brochure)
1959 Felix Landau Gallery, Los Angeles, California (catalogue)
1958 Pasadena Art Museum, Pasadena, California
1957 Bonnier’s, New York
Downstairs Gallery, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California
1956 Landau Gallery, Los Angeles, California
1954 American House Gallery, New York
1953 Art Gallery, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida
Pictures: Otis Art Institute, 1956 with Soldner and Mason (courtesy Soldner enterprises); portrait (source Frank Lloyd Gallery); Voulkos on his 50th Anniversary in 1974 (photo courtesy Craft in America); Voulkos in 2001 with his sculture Anasazi (photographer Jerry Telfer); large pot, 1958; charger, 1981 (collection Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City); Snowmass II (photographer Noel Allum / www.voulkos.com).