Sonoma Art Directory
ceramics
Robert Weiss is a ceramic artist of crystalline glazed porcelain, and a photographer. All profits from the sale of Roberts photography and ceramics are given to The Weiss Family Fine Arts Scholarship Fund.
Frans Wildenhain (1905-1980) was a Bauhaus-trained German potter and sculptor. Right after World War II, he joined his first wife Marguerite Wildenhain in Sonoma County and worked as a teacher and artist with her at the Pond Farm Artists Colony. Frans then moved to Rochester, NY, and taught for many years at the School for American Craftsmen at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Frans Wildenhain received numerous prizes for his artwork, from (among others) the International Exposition in Paris (1939), the Albright Art Gallery (1952), the Brussels Worlds Fair (1958), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1958).
Marguerite (Friedlaender) Wildenhain (1896 – 1985) was a French-born, German and later American ceramic artist, art teacher and author. Due to her Jewish ancestry in World War II, she was compelled to emigrate to the U.S. in 1940, and found her way to Sonoma County. She began to conduct summer pottery workshops at Pond Farm, her home and studio near Guerneville, California. She became a founding teacher of the Pond Farm Artist Colony. Her husband Franz Wildenhain was also a well-known artist in the colony. Marguerite wrote three influential books: Pottery: Form and Expression (1959), The Invisible Core: A Potter’s Life and Thoughts (1973), and …that We Look and See: An Admirer Looks at the Indians (1979).*
See also: Marguerite Wildenhain and the Bauhaus: An Eyewitness Anthology.
*source: Wikipedia.org