Linda Sikora
ALFRED, NEW YORK
Potter Linda Sikora uses advanced techniques to make complex but functional porcelain and stoneware tableware with distinct polychrome motifs.
Canadian-born Linda Sikora was, from childhood, attuned to the qualities of craft, turning to clay after acquiring a kiln in high school. Her ceramics are currently featured in several museums across the United States, and in 2020 she received the prestigious United States Artists Fellowship award. She now resides with her family near Alfred and works as a professor of ceramic art at the New York State College of Ceramics, where she thrives on the creative and intellectual energy of making, scrutinizing and exploring ideas alongside students who share in her pursuit.
First encounters with crafts
A descendant of French-Canadian and eastern European immigrants, Linda was raised in Canada by parents from large working-class families whose industrious, hands-on ethic shaped the household and attuned her early to the world of making.
Armed with a cardboard box of bisqueware from community college, Linda was admitted to art school. Her diploma, accompanied by years of accumulating the means, catapulted Linda to Nova Scotia College of Art and design and onward to an MFA at the University of Minnesota. Renowned Canadian ceramic artist Walter Ostrom’s pedagogy on the importance of integrity to historical context influenced Linda’s approach to her own work, and she followed her years of study with artist-in-residencencies in Taiwan, Korea, Montana and Australia.
“Ceramics as a dynamic realm within material culture, bearer of unspoken histories of many peoples, fueled my inquiry of global/material culture through time and up to this day.”
Amongst other renowned museums in the United States and Europe, Linda's pieces currently feature in collections at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Since 1997, Linda has acted as professor of pottery at the university of New York at Alfred, onea of the earliest and most prominent academic ceramic programs, leaving room for a couple day’s studio time a week.
Fuction and Imagination
To Linda, the studio is a place of freedom for the mind — her room of one’s own, to which she can retreat and unreservedly engage her imagination. There is a tenacity in her research and in her devotion to ceramic objects of functionality - teapots, bowls, cups and plates, that quietly intersect with our daily movements and habits. For Linda, the influence of such objects lies in their proximity to daily life. Inhabiting intimate spaces, they shape experience through small, repeated interactions that subtly redirect our focus and play in our imagination.
“Whether an encounter with a creative work supports a physical function because it works in tandem with the human body or, whether an encounter with a creative work supports the human body primarily through thought — both types of encounter impact culture."
In her own home, an archive of plates, cups, bowls, pitchers, vases, teapots, and jars fills cupboards, ledges, mantels, shelves, and even the floor, creating an intermittent surface of ceramics across her living space.