Vince Pitelka has been professionally involved in ceramics for over thirty-five years. After a ten-year career as a studio potter making functional tableware and ovenware at Railroad Stoneware, his studio in Blue Lake, California, Vince returned to school in 1985 for his MFA in ceramics at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. At U-Mass he developed his colored clay marquetry techniques for creating highly detailed pattern and imagery with inlaid colored clays. His fascination with pattern and surface led to an extensive exploration of masonry patterns in colored clays. Industrial Revolution mill towns like Holyoke, Massachusetts provided inspiration for a series of vessels and sculpture that often reinterpret the precarious structure and complex surface patterns of industrial ruins.

Vince has always been mechanically-inclined, and worked as a journeyman welder and mechanic before becoming a full-time studio potter. He has built most of his own studio tools, fixtures, and equipment including kilns of all kinds, potter’s wheels, a de-airing pugmill, and a wide variety of hand tools.  Go to the Railroad Stoneware page for images of a kiln and pugmill.

From 1988 to 1991 Vince taught art foundations at Northeastern University in Boston, and from 1991 to 1994 he was Assistant Professor of Art and Coordinator of the Art Department at North Dakota State University in Fargo, where he taught ceramics, art history, art appreciation, and drawing.

Vince is Professor of Clay and Head of the Clay Program at Tennessee Technological University’s Appalachian Center for Craft, located 20 miles from the TTU campus on a wilderness site adjacent to Center Hill Lake in the mountains of central Tennessee. The Craft Center features some of the best studio facilities in the United States in clay, wood, metals, glass, and fibers, plus sales and exhibition galleries, administrative offices, library, student accommodations, audio visual facilities, and conference rooms. The clay studio includes 8000 square feet indoors (heated/air conditioned) and another 3400 square feet outdoors under roof, with a full materials storeroom, clay- and glaze-mixing facilities, spacious classrooms for wheel work and handbuilding, and 15 kilns (electric, gas, salt, soda, and wood).

Vince still occasionally employs colored clay marquetry, but most of his current work explores impressed pattern and texture without colored clay effects.   Examples of his recent and current work include slab- and coil-constructed vessels reinterpreting traditional utilitarian and industrial storage and pouring vessels. 

Over the last ten years Vince has become increasingly active on the workshop circuit around the country. Subjects include colored clays, handbuilding, slab-built tableware, and his Ancient Clay workshop, which explores forms and techniques of ancient and tribal clay.

Since 1995 Vince has been an active participant on Clayart, the rapidly growing Internet discussion group. With thousands of members worldwide, this on-line forum has become an important force in national and global ceramics.  Information about Clayart is available at the American Ceramic Society webpage.  

Vince’s column Tool Times, appearing bimonthly in Clay Times magazine, addresses clay studio tools and fixtures.  His book Clay: A Studio Handbook, published by American Ceramic Society, is available from most ceramic suppliers and online at the American Ceramic Society webpage. 

Vince's wife Dr. Linda Pitelka is Professor of History at Maryville University in St. Louis, and his son Dr. Morgan Pitelka is Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at Occidental College in Los Angeles.  Morgan is a scholar of Japanese Medieval ceramics and tea culture, and his published volumes include Handmade Culture: Raku Potters, Patrons and Tea Practitioners in Japan, and Japanese Tea Culture: Art, History, and Practice.  

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