Born in 1943 in Glendale, California, Adrian Saxe is a ceramic artist and professor of art at the University of California, Los Angeles. Saxe was introduced to art by his parents and came to ceramics in his teenage years. During a summer program at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, his teacher Priscilla Beattie introduced him to the work of contemporary ceramic artists – including ACC Gold Medalists Peter Voulkos and Beatrice Wood. Saxe also had an interest in science and entered college in Hawaii, planning to study chemistry. Ceramics soon became his primary interest, and he left the university in 1962 to establish a studio back in California with former teacher Orville Clay. In 1965, Saxe enrolled at the Chouinard Art School where he studied ceramics and art history. He went on to earn his BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia in 1974. In line with the emergence of California funk ceramics, Saxe began creating humorous sculptures with embedded visual and verbal puns. He also became interested in the pristine finish of works by contemporary artists like Ken Price and John McCracken. In 1974, Saxe accepted a temporary teaching appointment at the University of California, Los Angeles and joined the faculty permanently soon after. He became recognized for his historically referential, highly finished, and intellectually rigorous sculptures, gaining representation with prominent gallerist and ceramics scholar Garth Clark in the early '80s. Saxe’s work has been profiled in numerous publications and featured in exhibitions around the world, including a solo retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1993. It can be found in the collections of institutions including the de Young Museum in San Francisco and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He has received several prominent fellowships and awards, including the Master of the Medium Award from the James Renwick Alliance in 2013 and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2002. Adrian Saxe was elected a Fellow of the American Craft Council in 2000.