Peter Beasecker: Clarity
Peter Beasecker, a longtime teacher at Southern Methodist University and then at Syracuse University, has focused on both the multiplicity of production pottery and the subject of service that is inherent to pottery. In today’s context, some of his works could be thought of as installations.
Beasecker was born in 1957 in Toledo, Ohio, where his mother was an elementary teacher at an inner-city school. His stepfather, from the time he was four, was a good man whom Beasecker calls his spiritual father. He was a committed Christian Scientist, so home was a wholesome environment without alcohol or tobacco. Beasecker’s mom was constantly knitting. Everyone in the family got a sweater a year. He would accompany her to a yarn shop downtown that was like her second home, and he would pick out colors. During high school, he became interested in the patterns as well. He was a typical boy, making model airplanes and ships. But he and his brothers would either burn them − we loved the way that plastic melted – or shoot them with BB guns. Another sense memory is the industrial boiler firm his step-father’s family ran.That was my first sense of an industrial space. The shop was this enormous, cavernous building with lots hoists, and a dirt floor. It had the smell of metal and oil.
Beasecker was an average student who took every art class his high school offered. The teacher would let him go back into the clay room after school. I used to love watching people make pots. The star quarterback had this facility. I would watch him makes pots and in exchange I got to clean up his wheel. [Laughter] I just took to it. I worked whenever I could on pots.
As soon as it was permitted, when he was 17, he took community classes in clay at the Toledo Museum of Art. He watched his teacher throw a porcelain pot. It must have been 18 inches tall and had a girth equal to that or maybe even more. And I felt as though I had witnessed something you would see at It was the first time he made high-fire ceramics and one of his pots won a scholastic award, which he accepted on stage at the museum.
