Peter Voulkos, the artist who launched an American revolution in ceramic sculpture, died Saturday, evidently of a heart attack. He was 78.
Mr. Voulkos, who lived in Oakland, died in Bowling Green, Ohio, where he had just finished teaching a ceramics workshop at Bowling Green State University.
Mr. Voulkos was the fountainhead of a new strain in American art. When he began, pottery was considered a minor decorative art or a hobbyist’s craft. Six years after the Montana-born artist moved to Los Angeles, however, his work was the subject of a solo exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Working from an unassuming classroom studio in the old Los Angeles County Art Institute in 1954, he was the pivot around which an important group of ambitious young artists turned, establishing Otis Clay, the first art movement of national importance to originate in Los Angeles.
