About me and ceramics
My name is Cezar Cozianu. I was born in Romania in 1999, but my family moved to Southern California when I was a baby.
I discovered ceramics when my mom signed me up for a kids ceramics class through the rec department in Torrance. I was probably about 12, but I can’t really recall.
When I discovered that my high school had a ceramics studio during my freshman year, I was throwing almost every day during my lunch hour despite not being enrolled. The next two years, I took my history courses during the summer so I could have room in my schedule for ceramics.
I enrolled at UC Santa Cruz initially as an Environmental Studies major, but after realizing that art was my passion, ended up graduating with a B.A. in art. While there was no formal ceramics instruction at UCSC, I took part in managing a student-run pottery cooperative where we would take the responsibilities of running a studio; that included buying materials, mxing glazes, managing work hours, and firing the kilns.
I graduated UCSC in Winter of 2020 during the COVID pandemic, moved to the Los Angeles area while working at Chipotle and a few other minimum wage jobs until I found some work doing production and teaching classes at a member studio. Now I work doing production pottery part-time while working on my M.A. at CSU Northridge. I began the program in the Spring of 2025, and it’s been a amazing experience so far.
Eventually I aim to get an M.F.A. and maybe get into teaching or help start an worker-owned cooperative pottery studio.
Statement
Access to art—a vital resource—is cruelly limited by our socioeconomic structures. My work is a multifaceted attempt to contradict, criticize, and counteract dominant means of participation with consumption of artistic resources.
I am a potter who rejects the distinction between fine art and craft that enables the speculative lionization of fine art assets and rote derision of the accessibility, utility, and spiritual value of craft objects—instead choosing to embrace an alternative notion of value that derives from the enriching potential of art being a present part of people’s lives.
Drawing inspiration from a long history of folk art and pottery culture, the distinct, arbitrary, and abstract systems of mark-making that I employ to create different forms and surface designs serve a dual purpose: to parallel the man-made socioeconomic systems that dictate our behavior, and in contrast to one another, to point to an expansive imagination of alternative social, political, and economic structures that have been laid out by generations of thinkers who dreamed before me. I want you to imagine a new logic. My performative distribution means to challenge participants’ expectations around
accessing and consuming art while the focus on highly functional forms attempts to minimize the potential burden of forcefully reversing a cruel distribution of access. Even if the participants I engage with don’t retain my work, I hope that they take it to pollinate art in the communities around them.
Everyone needs art; everyone uses pots.
CEZARAMICS 