Wright Auction

An artist, professor, and musician, Ron Nagle was part of the vanguard of artists—alongside Peter Voulkos, Ken Price, and others—that rebelled against conventional ceramics. Nagle was born in San Francisco and began working with clay while in high school in the 1950s. In 1961 he received his Bachelor of Arts from San Francisco State College and then apprenticed at the University of California, Berkeley with Peter Voulkos. While there, he exhibited his work with the many innovative West Coast ceramicists of the time, Voulkos included. He had his first solo exhibition in 1968 and released his acclaimed music album Bad Rice in 1970.

Nagle’s ceramics embody the essence of California cool with their fun, imaginative array of colors, textures, and shapes, and draw from a wide range of inspiration from the art of Giorgio Morandi and Phillip Guston to Japanese Momoyama ceramics and Hawaiian funerary monuments. His creations are diminutive in scale, slip-cast, fired, and then decorated with epoxy and other synthetic materials which allow him to push the boundaries of what is possible with clay. What they may lack in size, however, they more than make up for in personality and visual impact. This joyous and experimental approach extends to their titles, which often contain puns and wordplay (Centaur of Attention, for example).

In addition to his artistic pursuits, Nagle taught at Mills College in Oakland, California from 1978 until 2010 and received two Mellon Foundation grants and multiple fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. He continues to live and work in San Francisco and has exhibited his work at museums worldwide, including the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Secession in Vienna, the Fridericianum in Kassel, and the Berkeley Art Museum.