Ohio ceramic artist and ACC Fellow Jack Earl died on June 17, 2023 at the age of 88.  He was known for his figurative porcelain work, equally philosophical and whimsical, that reflected his outlook growing up and living in the Midwest.

Jack Earl was born outside of the small town of Uniopolis, Ohio on August 2, 1934.  He took an early interest in drawing and painting as a child, and after taking high school art classes, decided to pursue a career as an art teacher.  He received his B.A. from Bluffton College in 1956 where he was introduced to ceramics.  After teaching high school and grade school for seven years, he decided to pursue an M.A. in ceramics at Ohio State University.  He continued his teaching career, working as an instructor at the Toledo Museum of Art from 1964 to 1972, then as an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University until 1978.  Disillusioned with teaching at the university, Earl was considering leaving his position at Virginia Commonwealth and returning to Ohio when he and his family experienced a catastrophic house fire.  Packing up what could be salvaged, Earl and his wife Fairlie and children found a new home in Lakeview, Ohio.  At this time, he also made the decision to abandon teaching and to make his living solely on the sale of his artwork.

While Earl’s earliest ceramics work during his graduate studies tended toward more functional pottery in the Japanese style of Iga ware, he made a sudden shift after graduate school to sculptural and figurative work that he found more to his liking.  As an educator at the Toledo Art Museum, he took advantage of their library’s collection on ceramics.  He was attracted to the forms and qualities of European porcelain and copied the forms he found in photographs to learn how to convey their figurative qualities in his own work, while adding his own details and decoration.  His early works tended toward all white porcelain, later incorporating colored glaze and china paint as he moved from porcelain to low-fire whiteware as a medium.  Earl’s subjects reflected the American vernacular, of the small-town working man and the simplicity of acts of daily life.  He created a ball cap-wearing Everyman character named Bill who appears in many pieces, likely a composite of family, friends, and acquaintances from his rural life in Ohio.  His figures could be surreal and humorous, at times melding objects with human or animal forms.  His work also projected Earl as a storyteller; his lengthy titles provide an added layer of significance to the works.  “I learned that whatever you make, it has to have some philosophy behind it,” he said in an interview for Ceramics Monthly (October 1981).

Earl received many honors and awards throughout his career.  Along with ceramic artist Tom Ladousa, Earl was invited to participate in the first artist residency at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center’s Arts/Industry Program in 1974, and with the success of that inaugural year of the program, was invited for subsequent residencies in 1976 and 1979.  He was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1974 and 1988, numerous Ohio Arts Council grants, and the Governor’s Award for the Arts in Ohio in 2013.  He was named an Honorary Member of the National Council for Education in the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) in 1990 and was inducted into the American Craft Council College of Fellows in 1997.

Jack Earl’s works were shown in many exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts/American Craft Museum, such as Clayworks: 20 Americans (1971) OBJECTS: USA (1972), Soup Tureens (1976), The Clay Figure (1981), Craft Today: Poetry of the Physical (1987), as well as two solo exhibitions:  Porcelains by Jack Earl (1971) and Ohio Boy: The Ceramic Sculpture of Jack Earl (1987).  His works can be found in major public and private collections, including the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City; the Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Johnson Wax Company in Racine, Wisconsin; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

An extensive profile of Jack Earl can be found in Jack Earl: The Genesis and Triumphant Survival of an Underground Ohio Artist by Lee Nordness.