Ten potters, from a Cornish fishing town to a Nigerian training center to a California art school, who turned clay from craft into one of the great art forms of the past hundred years.

Studio pottery has a birthday of sorts: 1920, the year Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada built a Japanese climbing kiln on a hillside in St Ives, Cornwall. What followed was a century in which individual makers, working at their own wheels and firing their own kilns, wrested clay away from the factory. The movement spread from England to Japan, across the American Southwest and West Coast, into West Africa, and eventually onto the walls of Tate and the Turner Prize shortlist. Along the way the pot stopped being merely useful. It became a philosophy, a sculpture, a diary, and in some hands a weapon of satire.

Choosing ten names from that century means favoring influence over fame. Everyone here changed how pots are made, taught, or understood, and together they cover the movement’s full geography: Britain and Japan, the Pueblo Southwest, postwar America, Nigeria, Kenya, and the contemporary gallery. A couple of them, we suspect, will be new even to readers who know their glazes. They appear in no particular order, because studio pottery has never been a league table. It is a conversation between hands, and these ten spoke loudest.

1. Bernard Leach

1887-1979

Born in Hong Kong and trained in Japan, Leach founded the Leach Pottery at St Ives in 1920 and effectively invented the idea of the artist potter in the West. He preached a marriage of English slipware and East Asian stoneware, and his workshop trained generations of potters from three continents. His manifesto, A Potter’s Book of 1940, has never really been out of potters’ hands since. Start there, then look for his stoneware vases and chargers in the Victoria and Albert Museum, where the whole Anglo-Japanese conversation sits on one shelf.

2. Shoji Hamada

1894-1978

Hamada helped Leach build that first kiln, then returned to Japan and settled in the rural town of Mashiko, where he became the living heart of the mingei folk craft movement. He famously refused to sign his pots, arguing that good work should speak without a name, and in 1955 Japan designated him a Living National Treasure in the first round of that honor. His thick stoneware bottles and dishes, brushed with iron and rich persimmon kaki glazes, made humility look monumental. Start with a Mashiko glazed bottle in any major museum collection and notice how casual, and how inevitable, every brushstroke feels.

3. Maria Martinez

The potter of San Ildefonso

While Leach was firing his first kiln in Cornwall, Maria Martinez of San Ildefonso Pueblo in New Mexico was perfecting something entirely her own: black-on-black ware, developed with her husband Julian around 1918, in which matte designs float on a mirror-polished black surface. Working without a wheel, coiling and burnishing by hand, she turned an ancestral Pueblo technique into an economic lifeline for her whole community and signed pots at a time when Native artists were expected to stay anonymous. Her work redefined who counted as a studio potter. Start with a black-on-black jar painted with the avanyu water serpent, like the one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

4. Lucie Rie

1902-1995

Rie fled Vienna for London in 1938 and spent the war years making ceramic buttons to survive, then spent the next five decades making some of the most refined pots of the century in a tiny mews studio. Against the brown, rustic orthodoxy of the Leach school she offered urban modernism: thin-walled porcelain bowls on flaring feet, needle-fine sgraffito lines, glazes in pink, yellow, and glinting bronze. She proved that studio pottery could be cosmopolitan, feminine, and quietly radical all at once, and she was made a dame in 1991. Start with one of her footed bowls, where an everyday form is stretched until it feels weightless.

5. Hans Coper

1920-1981

A German refugee who had never touched clay before joining Rie’s London studio in 1946, Coper became the potter who pushed the vessel closest to pure sculpture. His thistle, spade, and hourglass forms, built from thrown sections and finished in dry white and manganese black, look at once space age and ancient, closer to Cycladic idols than to teapots. Nearly every ceramic artist who now shows in galleries rather than craft shops is walking through a door Coper opened. Start with the monumental altar candlesticks he made for the new Coventry Cathedral in 1962, then find his smaller forms at the V&A.

6. Peter Voulkos

1924-2002

If Leach gave studio pottery its scripture, Voulkos tore the pages out. A Montana-born son of Greek immigrants, he arrived at the Los Angeles County Art Institute in 1954 as a virtuoso thrower and, fired by abstract expressionism and jazz, began slashing, gouging, and stacking his pots into raw sculptural masses. His classroom became the crucible of the American clay revolution, and his students carried the gospel of expressive clay across the country. American ceramics splits cleanly into before and after Voulkos. Start with Rocking Pot of 1956, in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, a vessel turned on its side and punctured until it becomes something else entirely.

7. Toshiko Takaezu

1922-2011

Born in Hawaii to Japanese immigrant parents, Takaezu asked a heretical question: what if a pot needs no opening at all? Her answer was the closed form, a sealed vessel, sometimes taller than the artist herself, glazed in poured and brushed color like a canvas wrapped into three dimensions. She often dropped a bead of clay inside before sealing, so the finished piece rattles softly when moved, a secret only the holder knows. Decades of teaching, notably at Princeton, made her a quiet matriarch of American ceramics, and recent museum retrospectives have confirmed her stature. Start with her towering Moon pots, then listen for the rattle.

8. Ladi Kwali

c. 1925-1984

Here is the discovery this list insists on. Ladi Kwali learned to build water jars as a Gwari girl in northern Nigeria, and in 1954 became the first woman to join Michael Cardew’s pottery training center in Abuja. There she did something nobody had done: she kept her hand-built forms and incised lizards, snakes, and fish, but fired them as glazed stoneware, fusing African tradition with studio technique in a single pot. She toured and demonstrated internationally, and today her portrait appears on Nigeria’s 20 naira banknote, the only woman so honored. Start with one of her great incised water jars, now prized by museums from London to Los Angeles.

9. Magdalene Odundo

Born 1950

Born in Nairobi and long based in England, Odundo builds her vessels without a wheel, coiling and scraping and burnishing until the clay glows like polished skin, then firing to produce luminous oranges and carbonized blacks. Her forms carry echoes of Kenyan and Nigerian pottery, Pueblo blackware, and the human body itself, a swelling belly here, a tilted neck there. She has become the most celebrated vessel maker alive, collected by major museums on both sides of the Atlantic and made a dame for services to art. Start with one of her asymmetric burnished vessels, such as the example in the Art Institute of Chicago, and try to decide whether it is a pot or a person.

10. Grayson Perry

Born 1960

Perry completed the century’s arc by taking the pot into the middle of contemporary art’s biggest stage. His classically shaped vases seduce from across the room, then reveal surfaces crowded with drawings, photographs, and text skewering class, taste, war, and his own life as a transvestite from Essex. When he won the Turner Prize in 2003, a potter claimed British art’s most argued-over award, something the craft world had scarcely dared imagine. He made ceramics urgent, funny, and headline news. Start with Matching Pair from 2017, two nearly identical vases built from the words and faces of Leave and Remain voters after the Brexit referendum.

Final thoughts

What unites these ten is not a style, since no century of any art form has contained styles as opposed as Hamada’s silent bottles and Perry’s talkative vases. It is a conviction that a vessel made by one pair of hands can hold as much meaning as a painting. Between 1920 and today, studio pottery grew from a countercultural experiment on a Cornish hillside into a global language, and each of these artists added a word to it: the workshop, the closed form, the torn stack, the burnished body, the pot as confession.

Any list this short leaves giants outside the door. Beatrice Wood, who found her way from New York Dada to shimmering luster glazes and worked until her death at 105, nearly made the cut, as did Michael Cardew, Leach’s first English apprentice and the restless teacher who brought Ladi Kwali to the world’s attention. Consider them your next two rabbit holes. And when the wheel starts calling, CreARTivity’s guides to ceramics and pottery are waiting to take you deeper into the clay.