Lucia Bogatay

Lucia Bogatay was born in Columbus, Ohio. She got a degree in history of art from Wellesley College and another in architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design. In the Bay Area since 1969, her architectural practice in San Francisco is giving way to an increasing focus on pottery and some sculpture. Her father, Paul Bogatay, a ceramic artist of note in the mid-20 th Century, was a designer of art pottery dinnerware, a sculptor and a teacher of ceramics at Ohio State University. Lucia inherited his tools, and inspired by his example, she started taking lessons at the Clay Studio in the 1990’s. She first occupied her studio at the sfclayworks in 2013 and has been potting enthusiastically ever since. The challenges of making glazes and firing, the engrossing possibilities of different clay bodies, and the process of discovering, experimenting, and pushing the limits of the available materials, seem endless. After taking an art tour of Japan in 2023, and meetings with potters and pottery dealers of Mingei ceramics, she returned to experiment with noriage. It combines different layered clays and deforms laminated slabs to create decoration. In 2024 a workshop in Jingdezhen, China has inspired her to make more work in porcelain and to practice underglaze decoration.