Location: San Geronimo, CA
Medium: Ceramics, Sculpture, Performance
Website: nathanlynch.com
Nathan Lynch grew up in Pasco, Washington, in an agricultural community near the Hanford Nuclear Reservation–a landscape defined by contradictory forces of industry, ecology, and American optimism gone sideways. He studied under pioneering ceramicist Ken Price at the University of Southern California before earning an MFA from Mills College under Ron Nagle. After graduation, Lynch spent five years as a prop master for community theater, an experience that instilled a lasting investment in objects as stages for human interaction. He has lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area for over two decades and is based in San Geronimo, California, in Marin County.
Lynch has served as Professor and Chair of the Ceramics and Glass Programs at California College of the Arts since 2006, where he has built one of the most distinctive ceramics programs in the country. His mentorship has shaped a new generation of ceramic artists, most notably Woody De Othello, who went on to be featured in the Whitney Biennial. In 2011, Lynch was an Artist-in-Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wildlife Conservation Society for the design and fabrication of ceramic nesting modules for at-risk seabirds on the Farallon Islands, Ano Nuevo Island, and the Channel Islands. In 2025, he was awarded the Marcus Commissioning Prize – a $40,000 commission from Montalvo Arts Center’s Lucas Artists Program – for his ceramic drinking fountain A Place for Meeting Strangers.
Lynch works primarily in glazed ceramic sculpture, performance, and designed objects. His practice operates at the intersection of the absurd and the sincere: his sculptures – often large-scale, architecturally scaled pieces with highly tactile surfaces – are conceived as stages or props for human interaction rather than objects to be viewed at a distance. Recurring themes include political conflict, environmental fragility, and what Lynch has described as the folly of improvement – the well-intentioned American effort that goes comically awry. He filters these concerns through dark humor, durational performance, and the inherent weight and warmth of hand-built clay.
Many of Lynch’s works function as social experiments: a ceramic drinking fountain with two spigots requiring two strangers to drink simultaneously while facing one another; a soaking tub scaled for two people; a series of speaking podiums designed to be activated by visitors’ own voices. His approach to ceramics is expansive and interdisciplinary, drawing on collaborations with composers, dancers, poets, and writers, and regularly extending into environmental design and public art.
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