Ceramics Studios & Kiln Room
MassArt is home to one of New England’s premier ceramics facilities, featuring a 3,000-square-foot kiln room, a dedicated wheel-throwing studio, and a specialized glazing studio.
Ceramics Faculty & Administrators within the Fine Arts 3D Department
BFA Ceramics students develop a strong foundation in the technical skills and ideas important for today’s artists, designers, and educators.
At MassArt, students majoring in Ceramics dig into the foundational techniques, skills, and ideas that are critical to today’s artists, designers, and educators working with clay. These include handbuilding, wheelworking, moldmaking, glazing, and kiln-firing, as well as work in ceramic casting, architectural ceramics, new technologies, and clay and glaze materials.
Students work in a wheelworking class, down the hall from the Kiln Room in the Collins building.
The Collins building houses expansive ceramics studios
Students load a kiln in MassArt’s 3,000 square-foot Kiln Room
Seminar and advanced studio courses focus on developing a professional portfolio, and emphasize critical thinking, research, lectures, and critiques. Students also further enrich their learning with visiting artists and on field trips.
The program provides students with the practical and theoretical preparation they need to pursue ceramics as a dedicated vocation, or to develop their ceramic practice as a part of their larger artistic work.
Students are required to take a professional practices course that prepares them for life after MassArt, and seniors document and present their work in a final thesis.
BFA Learning Outcomes
Students who complete the Ceramics BFA program are expected to be able to demonstrate the following learning outcomes.
- Communication Skills (written & verbal)
- Studio Practice (material safety, craftsmanship, studio habits, personal research, design principles, community & collaboration)
- History of the Field (traditional, historical, contemporary)
- Connection of the field and art to the world and society
- Agency (risk-taking, personal vocabulary, )
- Analyze and “Read” works of art (able to read and analyze objects in the world, including their own art)
- Cultural Humility (not privileging and one culture or POV)
Rylie Paull, ’24 BFA, Ceramics
Plate #5, Stoneware Clay, 2024
Kylie Marden, ’24 BFA, Ceramics
Holding the Heaviness, porcelain, underglaze, glaze, 2023
Lily Schuerger, ’25 BFA, Ceramics
Viral, midfired stoneware, 2023
Explore your creativity through the endlessly adaptable medium of clay, used around the world in art and design.
MassArt Ceramics students explore personal ideas through a lens of history, aesthetics, world culture, social /environmental issues, design, craftsmanship, science and technological innovation. You will focus on your own creative work, and also study ceramic chemistry, kiln building and firing (both electric and gas), social practice, and environmental impact. The curriculum includes a wide range of elective course choices, giving you a strong foundation to continue your professional life after MassArt.
Sam Kim, ’18 BFA, Ceramics, Industrial Design
Symmetry, Sculpture, 2019
Ji In Lee, ’13 MFA, MFA Fine Arts 3D
Vessels, Wheel thrown ceramic bowls, soda and reduction fired, stoneware clay. Wood turned plates and bowls, oak, poplar, and figured maple wood., 2013
Kei Sasaki, ’18 BFA Ceramics, Ceramics
Figure 5, Sculpture, 2017
18 unique undergraduate programs. A world of opportunity.
Sheila Pepe ’83 BFA Ceramics was recently profiled by the New York Times in celebration of her newest installation at Madison Square Park. For more than two decades, Pepe has used the craft of crochet as a way to “draw” in three dimensions and infiltrate architecture. At the northern end of Madison Square Park, Pepe has suspended strips of crocheted material, measuring as long as 95 feet, from the tops of eight existing lampposts and eight 20-foot-tall telephone poles newly planted around the lawn and walkways.
Read more about Shela Pepe’s work
Share
All MassArt news
Artisans on Asparagus Valley Pottery Trail fired up for the weekend
- Alumni in the News
- Ceramics
On a recent weekday morning, James Guggina was feeding wood into his backyard kiln and watching the pyrometer climb toward 2,500 degrees.
“This is my job. It’s also my absolute passion,” he said, pausing with an armful of scrap wood salvaged from a local casket company. “People complain about sitting in a cubicle all day. I feel so fortunate that I get to make things.”
Guggina moved to Northampton two decades ago from Boston, where he attended MassArt and worked for the acclaimed Fort Point potter Gabrielle Schaffner. These days, Guggina has three kilns — wood, gas, and electric — and he works, more or less, constantly.
He didn’t know anyone in the area initially, but that changed after he was invited to join the pottery trail. “It’s great to have other people to commiserate with nearby,” Guggina said. And this weekend, there will be throngs of folks visiting his studio.
Share
Admissions
- First Time Undergraduates
- Transfer Students
- Re-admission Candidates
- International Students
- Graduate Students
- Certificate Students
- Resources for Veterans
- Admissions Policies
- Meet the Admissions Team
- Admissions Events
- Resources for Teachers & Counselors
- Accepted Students
- Schedule Your Visit
- Request Information
Information for