Modern and Contemporary Craft: Selections from the Robert L. Pfannebecker Collection

Artist Biography

Leroy Setziol was born in 1915 in Philadelphia and grew up in Buffalo, New York, but his life and work have since become synonymous with the Pacific Northwest. After completing seminary school in the 1940s and serving in the US Army, Setziol and his wife relocated to Oregon in the 1950s, where Setziol would take up his career as a wood-carving sculptor. Setziol has said that he was “a sculptor who happens to work with wood, an Easterner transplanted to the Northwest, a city boy in the country, carving on the site where Native Americans once carved wood.” His intricately carved work in wood—both reliefs and panels, as well as functional works like benches, and large-scale outdoor sculptures—have earned him esteem within both the art and architecture communities. His commissioned work can be found in and outside buildings throughout the Pacific Northwest, as well as nationally and internationally; in 1991, the University of Oregon Museum of Art in Eugene staged a major retrospective of his wood carvings.