Ralph Bacerra

1938Born Garden Grove, California

2008Died Eagle Rock, California

EDUCATION

1961BFA Chouinard Art Institute, Los Angeles, California

PRIMARY WORK EXPERIENCE

1961-1964Faculty, Ceramics Department, Chouinard Art Institute, Los Angeles, California

1963-1972Chairman, Ceramics Department, Chouinard Art Institute

1983-1997Faculty and Chairman Ceramics Department, Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles, California

BIOGRAPHY 

Ralph Bacerra is known as one of the leading decorative ceramists of the 20th century. His work shows the influences of Asian art, especially Imari porcelain, and of 20^th_– and 21^st–century abstract artists like M.C. Escher. Bacerra was one of the first American studio potters to create highly decorative surfaces using enamels and lusters, incising into the clay body, and over glaze china paint.

The vivid colors and contrasts of his characteristic glazes are then built up using up to ten separate firings, each firing in succession at a lower temperature than the previous. The rich jewel colors in complex patterns that appear on his works are the result of multiple controlled firings. Bacerra often started with an unglazed geometric vessel created using various thrown, hand-built, and cast components.

Bacerra was Chairperson of the Ceramics Department at Chouinard Institute from 1963 until the department was dissolved in 1971. He returned to teaching in 1983 at the Otis Art Institute, where he became Chairperson of the Ceramics Department, a position he held until 1997.

Bacerra once stated, “My pieces are based on traditional ideas and engage in certain cultural appropriations—in form, in design, in glaze choices. However, my work is not postmodern in the sense that I am not making any statements—social, political, conceptual or even intellectual. There is no meaning or metaphor. I am committed more to the idea of pure beauty. When it is finished, the piece should be like an ornament, exquisitely beautiful.”

An interview with Ralph Bacerra conducted April 12 and 19, 2004 by Frank Lloyd, for the Archives of American Art’s Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America is available at:
http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-ralph-bacerra-12942.