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Karl Martz (1912-1997) was a studio potter from 1934-1990, and
Professor of Fine Arts at Indiana University, 1945-1977. Karl did
graduate work at Ohio State University in the 1930's with Arthur
E. Baggs, Carlton Atherton, and Edgar Littlefield, following a
B.S. in Chemistry at Indiana University, Bloomington. He
apprenticed at the Brown County Pottery (Nashville, Indiana) in
1934-35, after which he set up his own studio, which was in "The
Pink House", 1938-42. From 1936-1941, his work was exhibited in
the National Ceramic Exhibitions in Syracuse and included in the
circuit, and won dozens of prizes in the Indiana State Fair. By
1940, he was invited to include work in national shows in New
York, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia. Karl worked in Chicago
during the war, and then joined the faculty of the new Fine Arts
Department at Indiana University in 1945, where he taught ceramic
art until his retirement in 1977. In 1949, he built the Martz
Studio in Nashville, Indiana, where he and his wife Becky Brown
Martz made pottery until 1960, when they moved their residence
and studio to Bloomington, Indiana. In 1952, Karl participated in
the seminal ceramics workshop at Black Mountain College (North
Carolina) with Bernard Leach, Shoji Hamada, Marguerite
Wildenhain, and Soetsu Yanagi.
Continuing in the 1950's and later
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decades, Karl won numerous awards in regional and national shows,
and was often a juror. He did two sabbaticals studying
traditional Japanese pottery, one in 1963-4 with Yuzo Kondo in
Kyoto, and one in 1971-2 with Hiroshi Seto in Mashiko. He
published numerous articles in Ceramics Monthly, had works
exhibited in two federal government-sponsored shows in Europe,
was a founding member, President (1965-6), and Fellow of the
National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA), was
Bingham Professor of Humanities at the University of Louisville
(1975), was given a Distinguished Hoosier Award by the Governor
of Indiana (1988), and was a Fellow of the American Craft Council
(1991 -- one of the highest honors for a US potter). Examples of
his work are in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington DC, the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo,
the Museum of Decorative Arts in Lisbon, the Museum of
Contemporary Crafts in New York, the Walker Art Center in
Minneapolis, the IBM Corporation, the Minnesota Museum of Art in
St. Paul, the Hall Collection at the University of Nebraska, and
several museums in Indiana including the Indiana University Art
Museum, the Midwest Museum in Elkhart, and the Indianapolis
Museum of Art.
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