by Louana M. Lackey - Ceramic Arts Daily

y Louana M. Lackey

y Louana M. Lackey 

With A Foreword by Peter Voulkos 

Published by 

The American Ceramic Society 

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Publisher: Charles Spahr, Executive Director, The American Ceramic Society 

Art Book Program Manager: Bill Jones 

Editors: Barbara Case and Susan Sliwicki 

eBook Manager: Steve Hecker 

Graphic Design: Melissa Bury 

Photographs appearing in this book are reprinted courtesy of: Christofer Autio, Lar Autio, 

Rudy Autio, Jaap Borgers, Bill Brown, Dave DonTigny, L.H. Jones, Louana M. Lackey, 

Hiromu Narita, Joan K. Prior, Bruce S. Rose, Roger Schreiber, and Howard Skaggs. 

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2002019766

Dedication 

To Frederick R. Matson, who introduced me to ceramic studies as an 

undergraduate, guided me through the pitfalls of graduate school, 

saw me through to the successful completion of my dissertation, and 

graciously continues in his role of mentor. 

v

Contents 

Foreword by Peter Voulkos ix 

Preface xi 

Acknowledgments xiv 

Becoming an Artist 1 

At the Archie Bray 21 

Teaching and Making Art in Missoula 47 

An Artist Abroad 79 

In the Studio 103 

More Time for Art 127 

Plates 151 

Chronology 247 

Appendix 249 

Bibliography 255 

Index 259

Rudy and Pete, New Jersey, 2000.

BI Know Rudy 

eing in Rudy Autio’s presence is to experience the 

greatness and humbleness we all seek. The time we’ve 

spent together is extraordinary, to put it mildly. 

Rudy and I have been friends and colleagues for fifty-five years. 

Rudy’s vastly diverse talents, enhanced at times by his wife Lela’s 

remarks, amazed all. From the beginning we had a lot in common; 

we had clay, music, guitars, art, Montana, immigrant parents, new 

families, no money, military service, the G.I. Bill, athlete’s foot, and 

a passion for making stuff. 

At the Archie Bray we also had the chance to collaborate and 

build something together. We were the “Kids,” according to Archie. 

He called what Rudy made “horses and babes,” and what I made 

“ribs, guts, and belly buttons.” We were a good influence on each 

other. We had give and take. 

Rudy is the consummate artist. I am constantly astounded and 

jealous. He can paint, draw, sculpt, and play the accordion; he’s a 

real renaissance guy. Our relationship has taught me a world of 

ideas. I respect Rudy as one of the finest artists and teachers, and 

hold him as my best friend. 

Foreword 

—Peter Voulkos 

ix

At the Archie Bray 

A 

t the end of Rudy’s first year of graduate school in 

1951, he and Lela went back to Montana for the 

summer. Lela and their baby stayed in Bozeman with 

Bob and Gennie DeWeese while Lela took classes in lithography at 

the university. Rudy and Peter Voulkos, who also was back in 

Montana after his first year of graduate school, went to Helena 

together hoping to find summer jobs and a place where they could 

do their work. They found both at the Western Clay Manufacturing 

Shoji Hamada decorating a bowl at the Archie Bray, 1952.

Company in Helena. The firm’s owner, Archie Bray, hired both of 

them to work in his brickyard and to help him build a pottery for the 

art center he wanted to start. 

Archie Bray was not just a simple maker of brick. He had a 

degree in ceramic engineering from the Ohio State University, and 

he played the piano, sponsored concerts and theater productions, 

Hank Meloy, with his portrait of his brother, 

Peter, ca. 1951. 

22 

RUDY AUTIO 

and owned a modest art col- 

lection. Archie dreamed of 

building a place where artists 

and musicians could work, 

and he talked about his idea 

of an art center with his 

friends—Branson Stevenson, 

and Peter and Henry Meloy. 

All three were enthusiastic 

about the idea. Stevenson, an 

oil company executive, was 

an amateur artist. Peter Meloy 

and his brother Henry Meloy, 

were interested in pottery. 

Pete was an attorney in 

Helena and an amateur potter. 

Henry “Hank” Meloy taught 

painting and life drawing at 

Columbia University in New 

York City, and returned to Helena in the summers to make pottery 

with his brother. The Meloys had unsuccessfully tried to build a kiln


on their ranch, so Archie had been letting them fire their pots on top 

of the bricks in his brick kiln. The first phase of the projected art 

center would be a pottery. The projected center would begin with 

ceramics. Painting, sculpture, weaving, and possibly, a music 

conservatory could be added later. 

A high-school friend of Rudy’s, Kelly Wong, who had also 

studied art at Bozeman, joined Rudy and Pete in the brickyard. The 

three worked from early morning until late at night. They shoveled 

raw clay onto conveyer belts to be crushed and fed into the pugmill; 

they sometimes would relieve the regular “nippers” to pick up brick 

as it came from the extruder; at other times, they were assigned to 

help with the firing. When they weren’t working in the brickyard, 

they laid brick for the new pottery. They did not labor alone at this; 

Pete Meloy and many other volunteers helped to build the pottery. 

Frances Senska (1982:35) reports that “So many eager amateurs laid 

brick for those walls, it’s a wonder they remain standing. But the 

experts managed to compensate for the wavering rows, and the roof 

plate landed on a level course.” By all working together, they man- 

aged to construct a building with a showroom, a workroom, and 

rooms for clay mixing, glazing, and kilns. When the pottery was fin- 

ished, Archie and Peter Voulkos built a large downdraft kiln for high- 

fire reduction wares, the first gas-fired kiln in the state. Under 

Archie’s guidance, Rudy built the twenty-five-foot chimney stack. 

While they were building the pottery, Rudy, Pete, and Kelly did their 

own work at night in a corner of the tile-drying shed. Pete made 

pots on the wheel while Rudy made hand-built sculptures by coiling 

shapes together. Until the new kilns were built, they fired their work 

23

Lela Autio, 1952. 

24 

RUDY AUTIO 

on top of the brick in the big beehive kilns, just as the Meloys had 

done earlier. That first summer at the Bray, Rudy and Pete shared a 

shack with Kelly behind the present pottery building. 

The following summer, 1952, after Rudy and Peter Voulkos 

finished graduate school, they returned to the Bray as resident artists. 

Rudy and Lela bought a small house in Helena, and Pete and Peggy 

Voulkos moved into an old chicken house behind the pottery. 

Although Archie paid Rudy and Pete a modest wage, money from 

the sale of their work was used to help sup- 

port the pottery. 

Rudy and Pete and the other resident pot- 

ters made work for the shop—gift store items 

such as planters, fruit bowls, and nut dish- 

es—nothing that could be called art. They 

had barely enough money to live on, and 

Rudy says he still doesn’t know how Lela 

made do on his small salary. 

Lela and Peggy made enameled ashtrays 

for the shop and taught pottery classes. Lela 

found some of the customers and students 

difficult to deal with: 

A lot of rich people would come and look at 

the stuff, but they would never buy anything, 

and that made it difficult. Sometimes the rich 

people would come and work there and then 

they’d leave and write letters and ask us to 

glaze all their stuff and send it on and send us 

a ten-dollar bill.

Lela continued to do her own work by painting in an attic studio of 

their little house, and she also painted sets for theater productions. 

Helena’s active arts community included painting, pottery, music, 

theater, and even ballet. There were parties with home brew, and 

guitar music played by Rudy, Pete, Peter Meloy, and the DeWeeses. 

Poor as they were, Rudy and Lela found Helena an interesting place 

to live. 

Hamada, Leach, and Yanagi 


Rudy and Pete, Helena, Montana, 1953. 

That fall, the first of many workshops held at the Bray, and probably 

the most famous, was given by Bernard Leach, Shoji Hamada, and 

Soetsu Yanagi. Bernard Leach, who had been born in Hong Kong 

and had studied in Japan, explained the philosophy of the humble 

25

Peter Voulkos, Rudy, and Pete Meloy watching Shoji 

Hamada’s demonstration at the Archie Bray, 1952. 

26 

RUDY AUTIO 

potter whose roots were in the 

earth, and who found great satis- 

faction in the repeated making of 

pottery objects. Leach had philo- 

sophical support from Soetsu 

Yanagi. Yanagi, a visiting lecturer 

in Zen philosophy at Harvard, dis- 

cussed the “thusness” of Korean 

wood turning—just letting it hap- 

pen—as compared with Japanese 

wood turning, which was so pre- 

cise, so exact, and so perfectly 

done that it lost its spirit. It was all a new experience for the native 

Montanans. For Rudy, who later confessed that he had some prob- 

lems with Bernard Leach as a “humble potter,” Yanagi’s lectures on 

Zen were liberating ideas. He thought Dr. Yanagi was “very interest- 

ing, insightful, an aesthetician. He talked about Zen. We had never, 

ever heard about Zen.” Although Rudy didn’t entirely accept this 

philosophy, he began to understand the way of thinking that is the 

essence of Zen. Hamada was a “doer” whose workshop had a pro- 

found and lasting effect upon Rudy. Watching Hamada work was a 

great revelation; at this point in his life Rudy really didn’t think 

much about clay, it was just something you made nut dishes, knick- 

knacks, and pottery dishes out of. But Rudy was especially 

impressed when Hamada demonstrated how to throw off the hump. 

Shoji could take a lump of clay and throw a whole teapot set off 

of one lump of clay, and we admired that ancient technique. Most 

of all, though, I think that I began to discover that pottery making

Rudy watching Hamada trim a bowl. 

was not just a matter of throwing pots and selling them in the 

trade world, but from the way he handled things and examined 

them, turned them around, held them, and communicated with 

the work that he was doing, I began to sense that there was a kind 

of a spiritual connection to it, that it was more than just making a 

pot to make a few bucks on the sale. 

To see someone like Hamada working with it was to infuse it with 

a spirit that was as good as anything that could happen in painting 

or drawing and fine arts. I could see that in Japanese eyes this was 

a very important, almost a spiritual kind of experience when they 

worked with clay. The economy of move ment, everything that he 

did, the way he considered the piece before he painted on it. All 

of those things had great impact on me. 

For a while Rudy even tried to throw like Hamada, and he 

believes that the experience made a lot of difference in the way he 

approached working with clay. 


27

Archie Bray, 1952. 

28 

Change in Leadership 

RUDY AUTIO 

In the winter of 1953, as work continued on the arts center build- 

ings, Archie was injured in the brickyard. Then he developed pneu- 

monia and other complications. Two weeks later his son, Archie Jr., 

came to see Rudy in the drying shed where he was pressing clay, and 

told him “The old man is gone.” Rudy was stunned. For a while, it 

looked as though the foundation would be buried with Archie. But 

then, according to Senska and Douglas 

(1993), “Archie Bray, Jr., who took over the 

management of the brickyard, kept it up at 

the insistence of his mother and sister. The 

brickyard continued to absorb the overhead.” 

Rudy remembers the relief he felt: 

Archie Jr., whom we all felt was against all 

this foolishness in the brickyard—pottery, 

bohemians, artists, and everything else we 

stood for—said he wanted to carry on the 

work his dad had started, and told me he 

wanted me and Pete to stay as long as we 

wanted—to carry on the work of the Archie 

Bray Foundation. It seemed that we’d just 

gotten things going. Things looked pretty 

gloomy. As I look back on that day, it’s possible that if Archie 

hadn’t died, things may not have continued. 

With the future of the Bray assured, other workshops followed 

that of Hamada, Leach, and Yanagi. Among the visitors were Rex 

Mason, a potter from San Francisco; Marguerite Wildenhain, also 

from California, and one of Frances Senska’s teachers, who drew an

enormous crowd; and Tony Prieto, who taught 

at Mills College. There were many others, and 

Rudy learned from them all. He says that 

Tony Prieto 

was full of hell, and taught me a lot of things 

about firing and glaze application as well as 

surface decoration. He communicated ideas 

about his contact with Artigas, the Spanish potter, 

and Miró, who was starting to work with 

clay. Tony would periodically visit them in 

Spain. 

Rudy learned a great deal about high-temperature 

glazes from Carlton Ball who worked 

at the Bray one summer on a Ford Foundation 

grant. Rudy thought Carlton was a great guy: 

He could throw very well; he taught us a lot of 

wonderful, simple things about glazes—you 

can do this, add feldspar to this; a lot of wonderful 

simple things to do with materials. I think 

I learned from him that there was a sense of 

experimenting, and trying, and testing and all 

kinds of things that are importantly related to 

anyone working in clay. Carlton taught us that. 

He was very generous with his information, no 

secretiveness like a lot of potters. 

Working on a Bigger Scale 


Three Musicians, 1952. 

21 in. 14 in. 14 in. 

Aside from the production work Rudy did for the shop, most of his 

work at the Bray was sculptural. Examples include Three Musicians 

and his large, salt-glazed bust, Archie Bray, now installed in Robert 

Harrison’s Potters’ Shrine on the grounds of the Archie Bray Foundation. 

The bust was fired in a salt firing on top of the bricks in the brick kiln. 

29

30 

RUDY AUTIO 

Rudy also had begun to make small, decorative architectural 

pieces, such as plaques, that the brickyard gave away with orders for 

brick. Many of these plaques were designed for fireplaces; others, 

designed for a kindergarten, were based on fairy tales and nursery 

rhymes. Rudy’s plaques with various decorative motifs were shipped 

all over Montana. He even created a bison skull and recreated 

Charlie Russell’s signature on a plaque he made for the C.M. Russell 

Gallery in Great Falls. He remembers, “The bison’s skull was an idea 

foisted on me by Branson Stevenson. I hated it, but finally made the 

damned thing.” He had had problems; his clay was full of grog and 

difficult to work with, and he made about fifteen attempts—pound- 

ing about fifteen molds—before he finally patched one together. 

One of Rudy’s earliest large architectural commissions was done 

in 1953 for the south face of the Liberal Arts Building at the 

University of Montana. This large, circular, terra cotta medallion has 

a relief of a Native American writing on a skin. Archie, Jr. asked 

Rudy to design the medallion using traditional terra cotta tech- 

niques. These techniques would serve Rudy well in his later work. 

First, he created a design showing a Native American intent upon 

writing. Then he made the medallion in plaster and cast it some nine 

and a half feet in diameter, to allow for shrinkage to the 

finished size of eight feet. Then Rudy divided the medallion into 

twenty-four sections and cast a negative mold of each section. Next, 

he pounded clay into these press molds. Rudy removed the clay 

when it was leather-hard by inverting the molds onto plywood bats. 

Finally, he touched up the sections and smoothed them with a trow- 

el. Peter Voulkos helped develop colors and glazes for the piece, 

which is still in place on the university campus at Missoula. 

Through his work at the brickyard, Rudy developed a technique


Medallion, Liberal Arts building, University of Montana, 1953. 

that he was to use again and again. He noticed that one method of 

making decorative brick was to carve fired brick, and he wondered 

why the technique couldn’t be used with unfired brick. So he 

removed some of the cutting wires from the brick-cutting machine so 

that he could make large blocks rather than individual bricks. He 

used this technique to make a large relief, Sermon on the Mount, ten 

feet tall and thirty feet wide, which he designed for the First 

Methodist Church in Great Falls, Montana in 1954. Unfired bricks of 

clay measuring 3 1 ⁄2 in. by 8 in. by 9 in. were set on easels that 

leaned just enough to keep them in place. After carving the blocks, 

31

32 

RUDY AUTIO 

Sermon on the Mount, 1954. Carved-brick relief, 10 ft. 30 ft., First Methodist 

Church, Great Falls, Montana. 

Rudy stained them by rubbing iron oxide into them and, after they 

dried, sprayed them with borax to seal the stain. Next the blocks 

were numbered for placement on the wall, fired in the brick kilns at 

the brickyard, and installed at the church by brick masons. Christ is 

portrayed preaching to the multitudes with His arms outstretched, 

and a self-portrait of the artist can be seen in front. Several of Rudy’s


friends also can be seen in the crowd, including Peter Voulkos and 

Cyril Conrad, Rudy’s advisor at Bozeman. The carved figures are 

blocky, echoing the form of the brick, and giving a linear feeling that 

carried a swinging movement across the thirty-foot wall it covered. 

Both Rudy and Peter Voulkos had been experimenting with new 

techniques, and they each entered work in the Eighth National 

Wichita Decorative Arts—Ceramic Exhibition. Rudy’s ceramic 

33

34 

RUDY AUTIO 

Bird and Egg, early 1950s. Stoneware, 13 in. 23 1 ⁄2 in. 9 3 ⁄4 in. 

sculpture, Bird and Egg, is pictured in Ceramics Monthly on page 19 

of its July 1953 issue. Pete took first prize for a brown- and gray- 

flecked tureen with wax-resist decoration pictured on the facing 

page of the same issue. Pete had made wax resist very popular with 

potters at the Bray after Branson Stevenson brought them a new 

liquid wax emulsion that made the process very easy. Rudy tried

the technique on a few pots, and took full advantage of it in a large 

repeat motif wall mural he designed for the C.M. Russell Gallery in 

Great Falls in 1957. The committee rejected Rudy’s original pro-pos- 

al, a wall of running horses. Rudy then designed a mural sixteen feet 

tall by thirty feet wide, based on a stone with Native American pic- 

tographic writing. The pattern on the stone is thought to be a maze 

meant to confuse evil spirits, to keep them from finding burial 

grounds in eastern Montana. The overall pattern of this work is a 

checkerboard with tiles alternating in black and natural terra cotta. 

He scratched in the line drawing, and inlaid the design in white 

engobe, using the new wax-resist 

process. Rudy then fired the hol- 

low construction tiles to cone 

one in the brickyard kilns. 

For Peter Voulkos, the year 

1953 was a turning point. His 


Mural, 1957. Glazed and unglazed 

terra cotta, 16 ft. 30 ft. C.M. 

Russell Gallery, Great Falls, 

Montana. 

35

36 

RUDY AUTIO 

work had begun to change shortly after he returned from giving a 

three-week summer workshop at Black Mountain College in North 

Carolina. At Black Mountain, Pete “acquired a fresh outlook on art 

and an attitude toward experimentation that were to release his own 

adventurous spirit and fierce energies” (Slivka and Tsujimoto 1995: 

37). After Black Mountain, he visited New York, and was exposed to 

the heady atmosphere of Abstract Expressionism. His classical pots 

of the early fifties were now replaced by large, dramatically shaped 

and dramatically made forms—forms that were torn, flattened, com- 

bined, and recombined. He returned to the Bray at the end of the 

summer but spent only a few more months there. When Pete was 

offered an opportunity to set up a new ceramics department at the 

Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, he and Peggy and their young 

daughter, Pier, left Helena and the Bray in August 1954. 

Rudy was kept busy with architectural commissions. In 1955 he 

designed a large (eighteen feet by thirty feet) carved brick, terra cotta 

wall relief, Christ and the Disciples, for the Hope Lutheran Church, 

in Anaconda, Montana. Rudy felt that the project had lost some of its 

integrity because it was separated by a glass wall. That same year, he 

made a series of stoneware reliefs, Fourteen Stations of the Cross, for 

Saint Gabriel’s Catholic Church, in Chinook, Montana. This series of 

partly glazed, 20 in.-square, stoneware reliefs, shows Christ’s journey 

to the cross. As part of this commission Rudy also made a relief of 

the Crucifixion for the central altar area. 

In 1956, Rudy was asked to create a relief for an exterior wall of 

the Glacier County Library in Cutbank, Montana. He made a terra 

cotta relief twelve feet high and four feet wide, partly glazed in

white, turquoise, and light blue, along with 

the natural terra cotta tiles. For the design, 

Rudy chose animals symbolizing three peri- 

ods in the history of the lands of the 

Blackfeet: a bison to symbolize prehistory, a 

horse for exploration, and an ox for the early 

settlement of the west. Contours of the hol- 

low, hand-built sections of the relief follow 

the curves of the animals’ figures. Rudy was 

to use this technique to emphasize important 

lines and curves in his compositions again 

and again in later reliefs and wall murals. 

Although Rudy spent most of his time on 

large commissions or clay sculpture, he con- 

tinued to make a few pots for sale in the 

shop. Lela continued to paint at home, but 

she also was at the Bray much of the time 

teaching classes and making enameled ware. 

Interesting people came to the pottery all the 

time—as students, as residents, to give dem- 

onstrations and workshops and, of course, to 

buy its ceramics. 


The Montana Historical Society 

Museum 

Except for his architectural commissions, 

Rudy did not earn very much at the brick- 

yard. Fortunately, just when he needed money 

Exterior Wall Relief, 1956. Glazed terra 

cotta, 12 ft. 4 ft. Glacier County Library, 

Cutbank, Montana. 

37

38 

for a new car, he found temporary work. The Montana Historical 

Society, one of the institutions that contributed to the teeming cul- 

tural activity in Helena, had built a new museum building on the 

grounds of the State Capitol and had hired K. Ross Toole as its direc- 

tor. Toole was young, energetic, and ambitious. In his first three 

years at the museum, while finishing his doctoral dissertation in his- 

tory at U.C.L.A., Toole began to implement his plans for the muse- 

um. These included permanent exhibits with dioramas depicting the 

development of the West. For these Toole needed artists. Peter 

Meloy, a volunteer director of the museum, was in a position to 

make recommendations, so he introduced Toole to Rudy. Meeting 

Toole solved Rudy’s immediate financial crisis, and was to have 

long-term importance. 

RUDY AUTIO 

Toole hired several other artists, including Gardell Christiansen, 

Robert DeWeese, Shorty Shope, Clarence Zuehlke, and John Weaver. 

With help from the museum staff, these artists and craftsmen made 

most of the dioramas in the museum. John Weaver, a sculptor who had 

studied at the Chicago Art Institute, was the son of “Pop” Weaver, 

Rudy’s high-school art teacher. Rudy remembers that 

Weaver had an uncanny ability to cast plaster into all kinds of 

unbelievable objects—horses, cars, figures—so he also began to 

make a series of dioramas based on the oil industry, which donated 

funds for the making of their series of exhibition cases. 

Gardell Christiansen created a dramatic and very popular exhibit 

of a bison drive that showed bison being driven over a cliff, hanging 

in mid-air, and falling, as Native American hunters chased them to 

their deaths. The fact that none of the suspension wires could be 

seen added to the effect. Christiansen also made, fired, and painted


several terra cotta figures at the Bray to use for dioramas of Native 

American costume and related exhibits. 

Rudy was assigned the task of making a large Lewis and Clark 

diorama. Toole wanted him to illustrate the expedition on the day in 

1805 when Lewis set out to discover a route to the Pacific while 

Clark was left behind with a larger group to reconnoiter the head- 

waters of the Missouri. Rudy was no expert on dioramas. 

In fact, I’d never even heard of them. The dioramas he had in mind 

were exhibits showing bucking broncos, wild buffalo exhibits, 

scenes from Virginia City—small accurate models of buildings—a 

kind of childlike fantasyland with exhibits of various kinds. I had 

no skills along these lines, but I was confident I could model 

Lewis and Clark diorama, 1954. Mixed media, 7 ft. 10 ft. 9 ft. Montana 

State Historical Society Museum, Helena, Montana. 

39

40 

RUDY AUTIO 

figures. After looking at the painful efforts of some of the artists 

Ross had hired earlier, I knew it wouldn’t be difficult, so I modeled 

some sample studies. Ross loved the studies and his staff was joyous. 

Here was an artist who could create the figures they needed. 

The historical society did the research for Rudy, who took leave 

from the Bray for the project. He began by developing the figures 

from beeswax. They started to take shape at home where he could 

keep the beeswax warm and malleable on the kitchen stove. For 

weeks afterward, Lela worked to get the stove burners unclogged. 

Rudy later switched to petroleum wax, which was easier to model 

than beeswax and didn’t crystallize or become moldy. He constructed 

the figures over wire armatures, which made them rigid enough to 

place into position in the exhibit. In addition to modeling the figures 

with authentic costumes, Rudy had to paint the diorama, model its 

landscape, and fill it with figures, canoes, tents, camping gear—the 

works. He did a great deal of improvising to build ground forms, riv- 

ers, and canoes, and to find indigenous grasses and colorful material 

typical of the site on the Beaverhead. Muriel Guest from the Bray and 

Bob Morgan helped him with some of the basic work. Morgan was a 

sign painter and exhibits designer who later became a popular wild- 

life artist. Les Peters, also a wildlife painter who had a good sense of 

the western landscape, painted the background, successfully merging 

it with the foreground and the three-dimensional figures. 

People began to drop by to watch the progress of the work. 

Once the figures of the Lewis and Clark expedition were finished 

and painted, they were put into place in the exhibit. When the 

exhibit was finally finished, it was seven feet high, ten feet wide, 

and nine feet deep. Rudy describes the scene, which depicted

Captain Clark taking a compass reading as he waves farewell to a 

group of three men in the middle distance. Sergeant York, Clark’s 

manservant, held a map of the area beside him. Sacagawea, with 

her papoose on her back, sat cross-legged on the slope near the 

hunter who was carrying into camp a deer he shot that morning. 

In the middle distance the party of three—Lewis, Shannon, and 

Charbonno, with Scanlon, the Labrador dog—were setting out to 

find the Shoshones. Under a small hummock in the foreground I 

made a little mouse for my daughter Lisa, who couldn’t see above 

the sill, being only three years old at the time, but it was for her 

and the other little kids to look at. 

Rudy had been happy working at the museum, but his work was 

finished. He went back to the Bray where he found that things had 

not been going well. The new tunnel kiln at the brickyard was a 

disaster, and Archie Jr. was losing money. He and Rudy had had an 

understanding that they would split any net profit from the pottery at 

the end of the year. Rudy’s books showed a profit of $3,000, but 

the bookkeeper’s records of the pottery’s accounts showed a loss. 

When the discrepancy was discovered, the bookkeeper was fired. 

Rudy began to think about moving. His family was always on the 

edge of financial disaster, and he was desperate. He didn’t know 

where to turn. 


Leaving the Bray 

Peter Voulkos had urged Rudy to come to California to make archi- 

tectural ceramics, so Rudy finally wrote to Pete to say he was com- 

ing. Pete was becoming increasingly well known and successful in 

California, and Rudy wanted to get in on the good life too. So, one 

bitterly cold day in the winter of 1956–57, Rudy kissed Lela and his 

children goodbye, promised to send money as soon as he could, 

and set off for California in his rickety old truck. He moved in with 

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Pete and Peggy Voulkos and “tried not to eat too much” while he 

looked for a job. 

For Rudy, California was no promised land. He found a part-time 

job in Whittier setting bricks into kilns at the Advanced Kiln 

Company for a friend, Mike Kalan. Meanwhile he continued to 

search for a way to work at his art. He made some designs for 

stained-glass windows for a synagogue, but they weren’t accepted. 

He sat in line with many other artists, trying to make connections 

with architects. He had sample photos of his carved-brick reliefs, 

and some designers expressed interest, but Rudy couldn’t afford to 

leave a portfolio. Engineers at a plant in Pasadena interviewed him 

and offered him a job doing their lab work, but he seemed to be 

getting farther and farther away from art. Another job prospect was 

being a foreman in a ceramic plant, supervising the manufacture of 

electrical parts. Rudy turned it down: “I don’t think I would’ve made 

a good foreman.” 

RUDY AUTIO 

The last straw came one day as Rudy was turning off the freeway 

exit to Whittier on his way to the Advanced Kiln Company: 

A motorcycle cop pulled me over just to inspect my poor old 

1941 pickup truck. Everything worked on it, thank God—wipers, 

brakes—but it was an old truck that didn’t have turn signals. I got 

a warning to take it to a state traffic inspector for a check. This was 

the end. I was homesick. I missed my kids. I had no money. I 

called Ross Toole and asked him for a job at the Historical Society. 

Ross said, “Come on home.” He wired me a hundred dollars. So 

I drove home and ended my big California adventure. 

Meanwhile back in Helena, Lela was having her own problems: 

It was a horrible winter, and all the pipes froze and it was about fifty 

below, and the kids got chickenpox and measles, and my dad had 

to come and help us because we were having such a horrible time.


Rudy rejoined the museum in Helena as an assistant curator, 

although the position was only part-time and temporary. Rudy had 

given the brickyard notice before he went to California, so he decided 

to work freelance from his own studio, but in cooperation with the 

brickyard. Archie Jr. agreed to the idea. One of Rudy’s college room- 

mates at Bozeman, Harold Godtland, who had become an architect, 

asked him to design a carved-brick relief, Christ Surrounded by 

Children, for the Gold Hill Lutheran Church in Butte. Working at 

home, Rudy made a carved plaster model to present to the commit- 

tee. He envisioned a monumental figure of Christ facing the children 

as He blessed them, with the figures concentrated into the shape of a 

cross, and framed by areas of glazed tiles at the corners. It took sever- 

al weeks and many studies, but he received the commission. 

Rudy used unfired clay blocks for the project and rubbed iron 

oxide and rutile stain into them after they were carved in order to 

highlight the carving. The relief was then partly glazed with borax 

and fired to cone one in the brick kilns. Rudy thought it was a perfect 

job technically. The blocks had fired well in the brick kilns at the 

Bray, and the glaze also had worked well. One of Rudy’s friends from 

the museum staff, Clarence Zuehlke, went to Butte to help him install 

the sixteen- by eighteen-foot relief on an exterior wall of the church’s 

educational wing. The shape fit the space exactly as planned. The 

Gold Hill relief was Rudy’s last architectural project while he and his 

family lived in Helena. With no new projects or commissions in 

sight, Rudy once again began to look for a teaching position for the 

fall of 1957. Once again, Ross Toole came to the rescue. 

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RUDY AUTIO 

Christ Surrounded by Children, 1956. Carved brick, 16 ft. 18 ft., Gold Hill 

Lutheran Church, Butte, Montana.

Carl McFarland, president of the University of Montana, was 

looking for someone to start a ceramics program, and he asked Ross 

Toole if he knew a good potter. Toole answered that he knew “the 

best one in the whole world” (Pietala, I977: A2). Carl McFarland 

remembered Rudy from his days at the Bray, four years earlier, when 

he had chosen Rudy’s design for the medallion for the Liberal Arts 

Building at the university. Now McFarland thought that Rudy could 

start a ceramics department, teach, and also add ceramic decora- 

tions to some of the other campus buildings, starting with studies for 

the Main Hall, and the old science building; later, possibly, he might 

do some terra cotta murals for the planetarium based on Native 

American star legends. McFarland offered Rudy the rank of 

Instructor at Missoula with a starting salary of $550 a month. Rudy 

accepted, not realizing that the way he had been recruited was 

extremely irregular: McFarland had circumvented all the written and 

unwritten rules and rituals of academic hiring practice. Little wonder 

that the Art Department faculty was cool to Rudy when he arrived, 

and for a long time afterward. 


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by Louana M. Lackey - Ceramic Arts Daily

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