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

Exhibition History

"Confrontational Clay: The Artist as Social Critic", January 2000-September 2002, University of Central Florida, Orlando, Flordia, Philharmonic Center for the Arts, Naples, Flordia, The Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, Arkansas, Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts, Camden, New Jersey, Flint Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan, The Middlebury College Museum, Middlebury, Connecticut, Springfield Museum of Art, Springfield, Ohio, Santa Fe Art Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Belger Art Center, Kansas City, Missouri, Museum of Arts and Design, New York, New York. Illustrated in the accompanying catalogue by Judith S. Schwartz, p. 32.

Artist Biography

Mark Burns was born in 1950 in Springfield, Ohio, and has gone on to become one of the defining voices in American queer ceramics. Dubbed “the John Waters of ceramics” by The Boston Globe, Burns’s boundary-pushing ceramics often incorporate taboo subject matter, self-portraiture, and absurd or unexpected imagery with a distinctly queer aesthetic. Burns received his BFA in Illustration at the School of the Dayton Art Institute in Ohio in 1972, and his MFA in Ceramics at the University of Washington in 1974, where he studied under ceramicists Patti Warashina and Howard Kottler. Burns’s experimental forms and sardonic wit have earned his works places in the collections of museums like the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C. and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, and his work has been exhibited widely. In 2018, Burns was elected to be a Fellow of the American Craft Council.