Patti Warashina

Patti Warashina is a ceramic sculptor born in 1940 in Spokane, Washington. She earned her BFA (1962) and MFA (1964) from the University of Washington in Seattle. After 30 years of teaching art in the Midwest and Seattle, she retired in 1995 as Professor Emerita from the University of Washington, where she taught for 25 years. In 2012, she was honored with a 50-Year Retrospective Exhibition at the American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA), Pomona, CA. The exhibition was titled “Patti Warashina: Wit and Wisdom” and was accompanied by a book with the same title. The following year, in 2013, the exhibition moved to the Bellevue Art Museum, Bellevue, WA, which received a National Endowment for the Arts grant to help fund the exhibition. A second book on Warashina’s career titled “Patti Warashina” was published by John Natsoulas Press in 2021.

Patti Warashina has been widely recognized for her exceptional contributions to the arts, receiving awards and honors such as three National Endowment for the Arts Grants (1975, 1986, 2013), the 2009 Regis Masters Award from the Northern Clay Center, the 2018 US Artists Fellow Award, the 2020 Smithsonian Institution’s Visionary Artist Award, or most recently, the 2024 University of Washington Golden Graduate Award, among many others.

In addition, Warashina’s personal “lifetime” papers and “oral history” have been collected by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC. She was awarded travel grants by the Chinese (2001), Korean (2001), and Japanese (1978) governments to participate in their respective cultural exchange programs.

Warashina’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Museum, Washington, DC; the Museum of Art and Design, New York, NY; the L.A. County Art Museum, CA; the Detroit Art Museum, MI; the Seattle Art Museum, WA; the Portland Art Museum, OR; the University of Washington; the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan; the Perth Cultural Center, Australia; and the Inchon World Ceramic Center, South Korea, among others.

Visit Patti Warashina’s website.