Born in Rochester, NY, Peter Pincus is a ceramic artist and instructor. He joined the School for American Crafts as Visiting Assistant Professor in Ceramics in Fall 2014. Peter received his BFA (2005) and MFA (2011) in ceramics from Alfred University, and in between was a resident artist at the Mendocino Art Center in Mendocino, California. Since graduate school, Peter worked as the Studio Manager and Resident Artist Coordinator of the Genesee Center for Arts and Education in Rochester, NY, Adjunct Professor of three dimensional studies at Roberts Wesleyan College and has established a studio in Penfield NY. Peter works in colored porcelain to create three dimensional paintings out of pots. His work has been exhibited in venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Craft, John Michael Kohler Arts Center, San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, Icheon World Ceramics Center, AKAR Gallery, TRAX Gallery, Plinth Gallery, the Art of the Pot studio tour, the American Pottery Festival, Greenwich House Pottery and National Council on Education for the Ceramic Art. A recipient of the NICHE award for slip cast ceramics, Peter’s work can be found in numerous private and public collections. In 2012, Ceramics Monthly featured Peter’s work on the cover and in the article “Painting Pots from the Inside.”
Pincus’ research into the value and perceptions evoked by colour is made all the more remarkable in its synchronisation with ceramic form. His precisely thrown porcelain vessels or pots find themselves a canvas for the kind of colour theory first expressed by Isaac Newton in his 1704 opus Opticks, or the exercises and studies of Johannes Itten and Josef Albers, and portray a semi-scientific and progressively orientated approach to understanding interactions of space, interaction and perception. Pinches often refers to his vessels as ‘paintings of pots’ as commonly as pots themselves, introducing an intriguing conflict between our impression of surface and object.
