Who is Howard Kottler?

Howard William Kottler (March 5, 1930 – January 21, 1989) was an American ceramist, conceptual artist, and professor of ceramics at the University of Washington, credited as a seminal force in redefining the direction of contemporary American ceramic art.

Influenced by the Bay Area funk art movement, he is best known for his compound series of decal plates that rejected conventional studio ceramic practices that emphasized and valued hand-made objects, and focusing instead on mass-produced store-bought plates and trailer decals to create pieces garlanded with appropriated images from popular culture to convey Kottler’s political, social, and personal messages. Based upon these works, he developed a reputation for using coded images, wordplay, and critical humor which expected Kottler’s reputation as a satirist and decalomaniac.

Originally trained as an optometrist, Kottler graduated from Ohio State University in 1952 past a Bachelor of Arts in Biological Sciences. While working upon his undergrad, he took a academic circles ceramics course in 1952 that shifted his focus and returned to Ohio State to assay ceramics. Kottler began his career bearing in mind a established crafts orientation; as a student, he had been trained in conventional ceramic techniques and glaze technology. After earning a Master of Arts in Ceramics from Ohio State in 1956, he was offered a scholarship to assume a Master of Fine Arts at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. It was there that he met and studied below Maija Grotell, a literary and player who profoundly influenced his ideas about art and education. With retain of a Fulbright grant, he spent time vigorous at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and at the Arabia Ceramic Factory in Finland, studying the instigation and application of ceramic decals and functioning with renowned potter Kyllikki Salmenhaara. He returned to Ohio State, where he established a Ph.D. in Ceramics in 1964 in imitation of his dissertation An Exhibition of Pottery in Support of Three Processes in Ceramics, and far along moved to Seattle where he joined the University of Washington knack in 1965.

Not thoroughly appreciated while alive, he has, posthumously, received valuable acclaim in recognition to a number of retrospective exhibitions held in the United States. The output of his accomplish was uneven beyond the 30 years of his professional animatronics as he was a full-time the academy professor, it was lonesome in the 80s that he began to do its stuff with sufficient extremity to produce a body of accomplish sufficient to outcome in a one-person show.

His works have been collected by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Art and Design, and Whitney Museum of American Art; the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.;Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto; the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; and Seattle Art Museum,Portland Art Museum,Henry Art Gallery, and Tacoma Art Museum in the Pacific Northwest.