Minnie Negoro

Minnie Negoro, a prolific studio potter, created a wide range of thrown functional pieces. She used various clay bodies including stoneware, porcelain, and earthenware throughout her career, her work reflected a strong mid-century aesthetic.

Negoro and her family had been sent to a Japanese internment camp in Wyoming where she met Daniel Rhodes who helped her leave the internment camp.

Daniel Rhodes, a mentor to Negoro until his death in 1989 emphasized the importance of technique, skill at the potter's wheel and aesthetics attitudes to work. In addition to her studio work Negoro was a very active teacher who incorporated these fundamental concepts into her teaching. She credited Bernard Leach with making her feel it was OK to be Japanese. In 1965 she was brought to the University of Connecticut where she established a ceramics program in the School of Fine Arts.

Negoro?s work was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA, the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, CT. In 1992, the Benton Museum, University of Connecticut, Stores, CT held a retrospective of her work.