Permanent Collection

— German-born British-American modernist sculptor Ruth Duckworth (1919-2009) specialized in ceramics, creating hand-built, minimalist, abstract organic forms that established clay as a sculptural medium when it was not widely accepted.

Born Ruth Windmüller in April 1919 in Hamburg, Germany, the daughter of a Jewish father and Lutheran mother, she could not study art in N**i Germany and left for England in 1936. She studied at Liverpool College of Art, Hammersmith School of Art, and City and Guilds of London Art School where she learned stone carving and worked as a tombstone engraver.

She studied ceramics at Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. While her early work followed traditional forms, she increasingly produced abstract works. She married British artist Aidron Duckworth.
In 1964 she accepted a teaching appointment at University of Chicago, continuing for 13 years and remaining in Chicago until her death.

She befriended meteorologist Tetsuya “Ted” Fujita and was drawn to aerial photography and geophysical mapping. These interests informed her career-defining public murals “Earth, Water, Sky” for the Henry Hinds Laboratory for Geophysical Sciences, and the clay-tile mural “Clouds Over Lake Michigan.”

She is best known for ultra-smooth, unglazed white porcelain surfaces, though she occasionally added ceramic oxide stains and later cast forms in bronze. Her work channels earth’s imperceptible forces—storm systems, lake currents, tectonic plates, cloud and wind patterns. She famously declared “Everything is clay.”

She died October 2009 in Chicago at age 90. Work held by Smithsonian American Art Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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