Waylande gregory biography

Early life.
Waylande Desantis Gregory was one of the most innovative and prolific American art-deco ceramics sculptors of the early 20th century.
Biography.

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Waylande Desantis Gregory

Waylande Desantis Gregory was born in Baxter Springs, Kansas, on June 13, 1905. He was a sculptor, a designer and a craftsman. He studied at Pittsburg State Teachers College, 1922 and enrolled in the Kansas City Art Institute. Within a few months, Gregory accepted a position with the McCartney Ornamental Plastering Company. Though still very young, Gregory was soon assigned his first major project of the design and casting of architectural ornaments for Strong Hall, the administration building at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. Gregory next found his way to the Chicago Art Institute, where he came under the influence of historian-sculptor Loredo Taft and began to work in marble, bronze and ceramics. Ceramics became Gregory’s primary medium. He apprenticed himself to the Midland Terra Cotta Company in Cicero, Illinois, then enrolled at the University of Kansas City to study chemistry, geology and mineralogy. Before embarking on his career as a ceramic sculptor, however, in 1928 he went as artist-designer to the Cowan Art Pottery Studio in Rocky River,

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Waylande Gregory

American sculptor

Waylande Desantis Gregory (1905 Baxter Springs, Kansas – 1971, New Jersey) was one of the most innovative and prolific American art-decoceramics sculptors of the early 20th century. His groundbreaking techniques enabled him to create monumental ceramic sculpture, such as the Fountain of the Atoms and Light Dispelling Darkness, which had hitherto not been possible. He also developed revolutionary glazing and processing methods, and was a seminal figure in the studio glass movement.^[1]

Early life

Waylande Gregory was born in Baxter Springs, Kansas in 1905. His mother was a concert pianist, and his father was a farmer. From an early age he showed precocious artistic talent, beginning with small sculptures of animals in earth, as well as prodigious musical talent, even composing his own pieces. He at one time declared that he would no longer play pieces by Bach, but only original pieces he had written himself.^{[citation needed]}

In 1913, his mother moved to Pittsburg, Kansas in order to gain better education

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Waylande Gregory

Artist

born Baxter Springs, KS 1905-died Elizabeth, NJ 1971

Also known as: Waylande DeSantis Gregory
Born: Baxter Springs, Kansas, United States
Died: Elizabeth, New Jersey, United States
Active in: Warren, New Jersey, United States
Metuchen, New Jersey, United States

Biography: Waylande Gregory was raised in a small town in Kansas where, as a child, he made mud sculptures and glazed them with syrup. In 1933 he settled on a farm in New Jersey, where he operated the world’s largest kiln, executing important commissions for the 1939 New York World’s Fair and the Municipal Center in Washington, D.C. Gregory’s career declined in the 1950s, a casualty of the artist’s personal problems and the rise of abstract expressionism, which made Gregory’s figural work seem old-fashioned.