Paul Ernest Cox
Paul Ernest Cox was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The son of a stoneware manufacturer in Gas City, Indiana, Cox was exposed to the technical aspects of production, as well as ceramic art history and aesthetics at an early age.
Cox attended the New York State School of Clay Working at Alfred, New York (now the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University). Upon graduation, Cox worked at several ceramic production plants to design kilns and other equipment and hire staff to run the facilities. Cox was married in 1907. In 1910 he became the head ceramist and first trained professional to run the Newcomb Pottery of the H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College at Tulane University in New Orleans. Both as a teacher and an experienced glaze technician, his presence had an immediate impact, fixing glaze defects and developing new colors and surfaces.
Cox became the head of the department in 1926. He travelled throughout Iowa doing demonstrations on the potter’s wheel and lecturing about the history of ceramics, the abundance of shale in the state, and the contribution that the natural resource of clay represented to industry in Iowa. During Cox’s time at Iowa State, he worked in collaboration with Christian Petersen, artist-in-residence from 1934 to 1955, on the production of the terra cotta relief mural panels for the both the Dairy Industry Building’s History of Dairying courtyard and the College of Veterinary Medicine mural, originally located in the Quadrangle Building constructed in 1912.
n 1939 Paul Cox left Iowa State to form his own pottery in Hanrahan, Louisiana, dedicated to the production of utilitarian dinnerware and other functional ceramic building materials. Few pieces of his pottery from this period survive and rare examples have become highly collectible as representative of handmade American Art Pottery. The facility closed in 1942 when Cox returned to ceramic engineering in support of the war effort during WWII.
SOURCE - https://isubios.pubpub.org/pub/jgcraxkj/release/1 (Sept, 2025)
