Karl Martz (June 23, 1912 – May 27, 1997) was an American studio potter, ceramic artist, and teacher whose work achieved national and international recognition.
Martz's first exposure to a professional ceramic art studio was in 1931 when he attended a summer course at Ohio State University.
For the summer of 1932, Griffith Pottery in Nashville, Brown County, Indiana (a tourist destination and artist's colony) hired Martz to improve their glaze formulas.
In 1933-34, Martz returned to Ohio State University to do graduate work in ceramic art with Arthur E. Baggs, Carlton Atherton, and Edgar Littlefield.
[1][2][4][6] Around 1936, Martz was discovered by his subsequent patron, Scott Murphy,[9] an art collector who had a summer home in Nashville, Indiana.
Murphy funded Martz to move his studio from its remote location in the woods to downtown Nashville, where many more tourists would encounter his work.
[5][11] By 1942, tourist traffic in Brown County, Indiana, had largely ceased due to World War II gas rationing.
In 1944, he taught ceramic art part-time at the Chicago Institute of Design directed by László Moholy-Nagy, and at Hull House.
In 1952, Martz participated in the seminal summer workshop at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, working with Bernard Leach, Shoji Hamada, Marguerite Wildenhain, Peter Voulkos, and Warren MacKenzie.
[3] In 1957, Martz and Harvey Littleton spent ten days at the historic Jugtown Pottery near Seagrove, North Carolina, where they learned traditional salt-glazed stoneware techniques.
Craftsmanship in Clay is a series of six moving pictures (originally 16 mm films, now available in digital format) featuring and scripted by Martz and produced by the (then) Indiana University Audio-Visual Center.
[15] As the president, he was a leader in the separation of that group from the ACS and the founding of the National Council on Education in the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) in 1966.
I got a big 20 gallon stoneware crock, knocked the bottom out to get a draft, and put a pan underneath to drip oil into so the flame would come up through.
[2] In the late 1930s and early 1940s, he enjoyed acting in plays (some written or directed by Joseph Hayes) at the Brown County Theater.
[citation needed] In his final years, Martz battled metastatic prostate cancer, became nearly blind due to macular degeneration, and also suffered significant hearing loss.