Clyde Burt: the potter Fort Wayne trained

1922 - 1981

The training: Clyde Edwin Burt was born on 5 February 1922 at Melrose, Ohio, and his road to the first rank of American studio ceramics ran through Fort Wayne twice. He studied at the Fort Wayne Art School, and at the Cape Cod School of Art, before Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he worked under Maija Grotell, the teacher who brought the wheel to Cranbrook; Burt made the wheel central to his own practice for life. Ohio State stands in his education as well, on the Paulding County record.

The teaching: Then he came back and taught. Burt was a professor of fine arts at the university level for over twenty-five years: pottery at Ohio Northern University, the Dayton Art Institute, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the Fort Wayne Art Institute, and associate professor of fine arts at Indiana University and Purdue University in Fort Wayne. A generation of Fort Wayne students learned ceramics from a man who was, in the same years, competing in over forty national exhibitions, and whom the Art Institute of Chicago showed in a solo exhibition, "Ceramics by Clyde Burt," from September 1960 to January 1961, praising the individuality of his glazes, color, and textural decoration.

The work: His studio stood on the family farmland near the Little Auglaize River in Ohio, where he harvested the clay from the surrounding land and recorded his glaze successes and failures in a notebook beside his sketches. The work traveled from that farm to the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Cranbrook Museum of Art, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the Everson. He is counted, on the record of his home county and of the museums that hold him, an important pioneer of American studio ceramics, and Fort Wayne's claim is the one the biographies print first among his schools and first among his teaching posts: trained here, and then the trainer here.

Sources:

1. Biography of Clyde Burt from Wright (born Melrose, Ohio, 1922; studied at the Fort Wayne Art School and the Cape Cod School of Art; Cranbrook under Maija Grotell; the home studio and the harvested clay; the museum collections).
2. Paulding County Progress, Visions of Paulding County, "Clyde Burt: Mid-Century Master" (2017) (born 5 February 1922; Ohio State and the Fort Wayne School of Fine Arts; twenty-five years of university teaching including the Fort Wayne Art Institute and Indiana University and Purdue University in Fort Wayne; over forty national exhibitions; the Art Institute of Chicago exhibition of 1960-1961).