Alan Steinberg

Alan Steinberg: Artist/Teacher/Guide

As a child Alan Steinberg loved to play in the dirt. His relationship with clay began in 1968, his senior year in college.

His Artist Statement begins:

“I was kidnapped by clay. On my way to another life, a chance course, taken to fill up my schedule during my senior year in college, and it was all over. At first I sneaked into the school ceramics studio at night with several other addicts. Then, after I landed a full-time teaching job in the N.Y.C. public schools, I wound up at the clay studio of the Brooklyn Museum Art School, evenings, weekends, and I now confess, a few sick days.”

More than fifty years later Steinberg’s art work and teaching approach have gone through numerous changes. Leaving the Church of the Potters Wheel in 1981, a “borrowed” kitchen rolling pin eventually led him to join the Temple of the Slab Roller.

Eventually he stopped teaching wheel techniques altogether to focus on hand built wall art and sculpture with colored clay, various textures and non clay inclusions, like gravel, sawdust, or iron filings. Steinberg took a year long sabbatical in 2001, studying with everyone under the sun, including Paulus Berensohn and George Kokis.

Steinberg’s workshop page shows a few samples of the post sabbatical workshops he now offers, the fruits of his own teachers’ wisdom – workshops that focus first on vision, then following up with specific techniques to help birth those visions into form.

In 2004 Steinberg went back to school, completing a four year psychotherapy training program at The Synthesis Center, Amherst Mass, and a two year program in Psychoneuroimmunology. He has maintained a private therapy practice ever since.

These three areas of his life, making, teaching, guiding, often overlap. After all – If clay work isn’t therapeutic, what is?