Susan Harris

Ceramicist
American, b. 1945

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1968 BA University of Illinois
1990 MFA Utah State University
Professor of art Southern Utah University

Recently retired, Susan Harris was a Professor of Art & Design at Southern Utah University,where, since 1996, she taught ceramics and sculpture. She received a BA degree in anthropology from the University of Illinois, and her MFA in ceramics from Utah State University. In 1990, she taught for a year at the Kansas City Art Institute with Ken Ferguson and for a year at USU with John Neely.

For 18 hours a week she worked at USU’s Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, where she had received a Mountain West fellowship to create a ceramics catalog for the museum’s collection. “That was the time when Twain Tippetts had been director of the museum and he was collecting a lot of pottery from miscellaneous grad students and keeping no record whatsoever. It would be ‘Student pot no. 1‘, Student pot no. 2’ on the bottom of the pots.” So the catalog became an investigation. “If I could find out who did one, I could compare the style and the finger marks and the ridges and the handling of the clay and match it up with others.” All those credit hours in archeology were not wasted. “I wasn’t paid a whole lot to do that job, but I really enjoyed it.”