Warren MacKenzie
2009 Masters of the Medium Award
Warren MacKenzie has been a ceramist for over sixty years and has generously passed on his knowledge to generations of students through the St. Paul Gallery and School of Art and his professorship at the University of Minnesota, where he retired as Regents Professor Emeritus.
MacKenzie’s career in ceramics began somewhat serendipitously. After World War II, MacKenzie enrolled in the Chicago Art Institute to study painting. After learning all the classes were full, he ended up in the pottery department where he met his first wife Alix. After a short stint at the St. Paul Gallery, they apprenticed in England to study with renowned potter Bernard Leach, where they embraced Leach’s philosophy of making simple, affordable pottery for everyday use. When MacKenzie and Alix returned to Minnesota to start their own studio, they aspired to make pottery that was in harmony with the environment and its users.
In the beginning, MacKenzie made the pots and Alix did the decorating, up until her tragic and untimely death in 1962. Never considering himself a decorator, MacKenzie’s work took on his personal minimalist style, reducing everything to its simplest form and relying on a few signature glazes and simple abstract designs on clay. His career flourished and many young potters sought his tutelage. He began showing nationally and internationally, becoming friends with and exhibiting with Shoji Hamada and Tatsuzo Shimaoka, both Japanese Living National Treasures. As Mackenzie explains in an interview for the Smithsonian American Art Museum archives:
“In looking at these pots at the Field Museum [in Chicago], Alix and I both came to a conclusion individually but also collectively that the pots that really interested us were the pots that people had used in their everyday life. And we decided then that our work would center around that sort of utilitarian pottery, and that’s what I’ve done ever since.
And I’m not sorry. I don’t find it at all limiting. In fact, I find it really enriching to make pots which people are using and which they come in contact with, not only visually in their homes but tactilely -- when they pick them up, when they wash them after dinner, and so on and so forth. And this is something which I think I have been able to communicate to both people I have taught and people that have purchased our work since that time, that they all say, it’s so nice to have these pots with us all the time and to eat out of them and be in direct contact with them in our homes.”
To this day, MacKenzie is unique in his devotion to functional pottery. At eighty-four, he recently rebuilt his kiln after forty years of use, and is making some of the best pots of his career. He is being recognized with a solo exhibition, Legacy of an American Potter, which is traveling to six cities. As an icon of functional ceramics, he has been instrumental in solidifying the idea of a dialog between the maker and user of pots. With minimal evidence of artistic ego, he has made functional ceramics his art form.