Patrick Crabb

Chinese/American, b. 1947

Patrick Crabb was born in Shanghai, China, in 1947 and immigrated to the United States with his father, who was in the Air Force, and Chinese mother, from Taiwan, at the age of eight. Crabb and his two younger brothers moved many times, but a summer house on Cape Cod prompted his BFA work at the University of Massachusetts. In 1976, he received an MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was professor of ceramics from 1976 to 2015 at Santa Ana Community College, except for two quarters in 1983 when he taught at Utah State University during a job swap with Alan Bennett (see Bennett’s 1980 Fish Bowl and Fish). Crabb’s travels and his experiences of the cultures of Asia, Africa, and South America have informed his multicultural imagery.