RAM has learned, with sadness, of the death on April 7 of John Glick, one of the nation’s most respected studio potters. Glick operated Plum Tree Pottery in Farmington Hills, Michigan, in suburban Detroit from 1964 through 2016. He had recently closed the pottery to retire to California with his wife, looking forward to the next stage in his life.
Glick was a Detroit native who was born in 1938 and received his MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1962. His work is infused with a quite sense of experimentation in patterning and glaze decoration. Both his forms and surfaces demonstrated a respect for Asian aesthetics and decorative arts traditions. Glick was internationally respected and admired in the field, having published numerous articles on ceramics and appearing in more than 30 books on ceramics around the world. He was an avid leader of workshops and throughout his career he offered an assistantship program, through which Glick mentored 33 young ceramists, many of whom have gone on to their own successful careers in the field.
Glick received two Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Awards in 1961 and 1972, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in 1977 and 1988, and a Michigan Foundation for the Arts Governor’s Award in 1977. His work is in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Arts and Design, New York City; and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 2016, he was the subject of a career retrospective at the Cranbrook Art Museum, John Glick: A Legacy in Clay. RAM currently holds seven examples of Glick’s work in its collection and he has been represented by the RAM Museum Store since 2014.