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

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.