Peter Voulkos

Peter Voulkos was born in 1924 in Bozeman, MT to Greek immigrant parents. He attended Montana State College and served as an airplane armorer-gunner in World War II. Upon his return, he became interested in the arts in the late 1940’s and earned his MFA at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, CA. After his summer teaching at BMC, Voulkos took on a teaching position in 1953, and his artistic priorities and aesthetics shifted dramatically. It  was at the college where he first met artists Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Charles Olson, resulting in lifelong collaborative relationships. On his trips to New York City, NY, he met Abstract Expressionist painters such as Willem de Kooning who influenced his new stylistic direction. Voulkos became known for his large-scale ceramic vessels with slashes, piercings, and expressive glazes, as well as his bronze sculptures. Voulkos has had many achievement including establishing a ceramics department and masters program at the Los Angeles County Art Institute (Now Otis). He has been exhibited over 100 global solo shows and is in various museum collections around the world including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The artist died on February 15, 2002.