Robert Winokur

Robert Winokur creates ceramic sculptures that explore the concept of a house as a container. His early work, from the 1970s, consisted of vessel forms and functional domestic ceramics.

Winokur soon moved on to creating more complicated forms including his "Table series" featuring stoneware stewpots and house sculptures on corresponding stoneware bases. He created monumental works, requiring the use of a scaffold.

The colorful geometry that characterizes Winokur's stoneware houses is influenced by the innocence and spontaneityhe sees in children's drawings of houses. Winokur's houses explore color and construction. He typically uses a Pennsylvania brick and fire clay to construct slab-built house sculptures, that are usually salt fired.

In addition to the houses, Winokur's work includes a variety of forms including shrines, wedges, figurative sculptures and special commissions.

An interview with Robert Winokur conducted July 23 and 24, 2011 by Mija Riedel, for the Archives of American Art?s Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America is available at: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-robert-winokur-15999