Whitney Atchley

1908 Born Des Moines, Iowa

1955 Died

EDUCATION

1932 Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, Ohio

PRIMARY WORK EXPERIENCE

1932-1934 Designer, Cowan Pottery, Rocky River, Ohio

1935-1937 Advisor in Ceramics, Resettlement Administration, Washington, DC

—Technical Advisor in Ceramics, WPA Art Project, Washington, DC.

—Instructor in Ceramics, The California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco, California

BIOGRAPHY 

Whitney Atchley is known for vessel forms with abstract and figurative decoration in the 1930s and 1940s.

Atchley’s ceramics career started at Cowan Pottery as a ceramics designer. Together with Russel Aitken, another designer from Cowan, Atchley founded the Pottery Workshop in Cleveland. Atchley, then, headed the ceramics department at the California School of Fine Arts and became a technical advisor for the Works Progress Administration (W.P.A.). Atchley exhibited at the Syracuse Ceramic National in 1933, 1937, 1941, 1947, 1949 and 1950.

A Speech Before the Second National Conference on Handicrafts, Penland, North Carolina by Whitney Atchley September 3, 1940, is available from the Archives of American Art at: https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/holger-cahill-papers-6730/subseries-4-2/reel-5291-frames-0328-0336.

Atchley was associated with the Cleveland School, a group that was involved in the founding of the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cleveland May Show.