Columbia, SC, resident Peter Lenzo (b. 1955) is a widely recognized ceramic sculptor with a national profile. The New York City native, who grew up in Detroit, was selected for the 1995 and 1998 South Carolina Triennial exhibitions at the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia. Peter Lenzo is known for sculptures based on traditional southern face jugs. Lenzo distorts the facial expressions and sometimes attaches bizarre, fantastical, kitsch, and grotesque objects onto a traditional face jug form. Some of his face jugs are more realistic portraits while others are pure fantasy. Lenzo took his first clay class when he was ten years old at The School of Arts and Crafts in Detroit. It was not until age 14, however, that Lenzo decided to pursue clay seriously after seeing his brother turning a vessel on a potter's wheel. At the age of 15, he was given a potter’s wheel and one year later dropped out of conventional high school. Lenzo attended an alternative program to earn his diploma and throughout continued to take pottery classes. At age 22 Lenzo was involved in a biking accident that resulted in chronic seizures. His work has been interpreted as a visual expression of the painful experience of having a seizure. Some of the face jugs are covered with found objects including shards stuck into the faces as if the head were exploding. From 1991-2001, Lenzo's work transitioned from resembling stylized traditional Southern face jugs to more realistic self-portraits. Artist Statement The impetus for my ceramic sculptures came from traditional Southern face jugs. I had switched to working in clay exclusively in the 1990s. I had been making sculptural assemblages but had to stop because I couldn’t use a table saw any longer as I increasingly suffered from seizures, which are the result of brain damage sustained in a bicycle accident in my youth. Table saws and seizures don’t mix. I always had been intrigued by face jugs, especially those made by Southern slaves. At my middle school, we tried to develop projects that appealed to our African-American students, and so I decided to have them make face jugs. I had never made any, so I first created several jugs myself. Each batch got better, but more importantly, when I finished a batch, I couldn’t wait to make the next one. It just seemed to be in my bones. It felt like I had made them before – that I was catching up where I had left off. I wanted to let everything go in my current life and go back to a previous one that I had discovered. I once was lost and now was found. From the jugs I came to the current, more elaborate sculptures. It started when my then 4-year-old son Joe started to stick pottery shards, which I used for teeth, in one of my jugs. He went wild and put them all over the nose, eyes and lips. I began to help him and gradually really liked the results. My style was very different, and I had much more respect for the face, but to this day, Joe claims he made me famous.