Peter Oslon: Marked for Life

Co-Curated by Hannah Sloan & Craig Krull

Peter Olson began his photography career in the 1970s when he founded the punk rock magazine, New Sound. Subsequently, he became a street photographer, architectural photographer, sports photographer and even corporate head shot photographer. Around 2013, he developed a passion for ceramics and looked for ways to combine his two interests. Recognizing that simply adding photos to the surface of ceramics was rather commonplace, he invented a form of ceramic narratives in the tradition of ancient Greek vessels that told mythological stories around the circumference of their forms. However, Olson’s figures are not gods and goddesses, but often average people on the street. He transfers ink from his photographic images onto his own, highly accomplished, wheel-thrown pots. In fact, all the images on Olson’s pots come initially through his camera, even the filigree and architectural elements that he photographed at the V&A and British Museums. He then meticulously hand colors every element, achieving the appearance of fine Sévres porcelain. His recent series, Marked for Life, which will be on view at the Vita Art Center, depicts people whose bodies are covered with tattoos, a parallel to Olson’s own practice of decorating the bodies of his ceramic forms. 

“The portraits in this series were all taken on location in Olson’s native Philadelphia, and each ceramic work becomes a kind of memorial to its subject. Their images are combined with elaborate decorative designs made from an amalgamation of vintage illustrations of the human corpus, and decorative motifs from art museums and ancient manuscripts, to create kaleidoscopic imagery celebrating the temporality of our bodies, and the endurance of our legacies.” - Ceramics Now, 2024

Peter Olson’s works can be found in the permanent collections of the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, The Crocker Museum, The Scripps Collection, the Asheville Museum of Art, and the George Ohr Museum, among many others. His published monographs are in the permanent collections of The Getty Museum and the Mint Museum.

He has exhibited at the American Museum of Ceramic Art, The Ohr-O’Keeffe Museum of Art, the Asheville Museum of Art, Fuller Craft Museum, The Crocker Museum, and many others. The artist is represented by Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica. He lives and works in Philadelphia.