Jerry Rothman: Rituals & Myths

Ceramics from the Laguna Art Museum Collection

Jerry Rothman (1933 – 2014) spent his career making art that pushed the limitations of clay. Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1933, he moved to Los Angeles and later received his BA from the Art Center College of Design and his MFA from the Otis Art Institute. He was part of a group of artists from Otis who revolutionized the ceramic art world with their radical departure from European tradition, as utilitarian vessels gave way to forms of pure artistic expression.

Rothman always worked as a potter and as a sculptor. As an artist, he maximized on his divergent interests: between functional and sculptural, between classic and baroque, between the serious and the comic. Stylistically his work is difficult to categorize, due to his varying interests throughout his career. Noted authority on ceramics Garth Clark says, “Rothman’s aesthetic credo is largely based on the belief that there is no such thing as intrinsic beauty in any given material, contending that the inherent qualities are simply those that the artist can see and extract.”

Rothman was a Laguna Beach artist and a professor at California State University, Fullerton.

Further reading:

• Laguna Art Museum biography

• Obituary - L.A. Times

• American Archives of Art, Smithsonian Institution oral history interview

• The Marks Project