Ruth Duckworth was one of the most important ceramic sculptors of the second half of the twentieth century, a German-born refugee artist whose hand-built, minimalist, abstract organic sculptures in stoneware, porcelain, and bronze fundamentally extended the possibilities of clay as a fine-art medium and whose monumental ceramic murals at the University of Chicago remain landmarks of postwar American architectural sculpture.
Ruth Duckworth (born Ruth Windmüller, April 10, 1919 – October 18, 2009) was a German-born British and American sculptor and ceramicist, widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the postwar transformation of ceramics into a fine-art medium. Born in Hamburg to a Jewish father and Christian mother, she was forced to leave Nazi Germany in 1936 and studied at the Liverpool College of Art for four years before supporting herself through a sequence of unrelated jobs, puppetry, munitions work during the Second World War, headstone carving — and finally turning to clay in the 1950s. Her formal ceramic training began in 1956 at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London.
In 1964 she emigrated to the United States to teach at the University of Chicago's Midway Studios and remained based in Chicago for the rest of her life. Her two large ceramic murals at the University of Chicago, Earth, Water and Sky(1967–68), commissioned for the Henry Hinds Laboratory for Geophysical Sciences, and the 240-square-foot Clouds Over Lake Michigan (1976), now installed in the Regenstein Library, are among the most ambitious examples of postwar American architectural ceramics. A 2005 retrospective, Ruth Duckworth: Modernist Sculptor, opened at New York's Museum of Arts and Design and traveled across the United States. Her work is held in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and other major collections.