Robert Engle

“No art with potters can compare; We make our pots from what we potters are.” - Unknown

Robert Bruce Engle, Jr. (Bob) died peacefully on Dec. 18, 2025 at his home in Mattawan, MI. In June he celebrated his 97th birthday with a backyard gathering of family members, neighbors, and friends from the local community.

Robert was born a southpaw, a visual thinker and learner, his dominant hand directly connected to his creative brain. He was a maker; he could make anything with his hands, and at times his hands couldn’t keep up with his mind’s eye. Among the thousands of objects Robert fashioned over the years were not only stoneware ceramics, but rafts and sailboats, cabins and fireplaces, films and photographs, marionettes and martini goblets, windchimes and whirligig—an uncountable outpouring of craft and artistry, of forms and materials crossing and recrossing over a lifetime of creative pursuits.

Born June 28th, 1928 in Lansing, MI to Robert Bruce Engle, Sr. and Eva (Towers) Engle, two public school teachers who met at church choir practice, Robert grew up a middle child between two sisters and two world wars. His parents passed on the frugality of their own rural upbringings, along with a deep regard for family, books and education; stories and conversation; Christian values and civic responsibility. In the summers, while Robert Sr. stretched his teacher’s salary by painting houses, Eva brought the children to visit her family in nearby Mattawan, where her father was a postman. There Robert formed a special bond with his dapper and doting Grandpa Lewis Towers, an amateur artist who introduced his only grandson to photography, painting, and carpentry tools. Another source of wonder was his Uncle Gervin Glidden’s farm; for the rest of his life, Robert felt pulled by the rhythms of farm life and the beauty of the natural world. Years later he recalled being dazzled by his first puppet show, staged on the tailgate of a pickup truck one summer evening in Mattawan. Decades of artistic exploration unfolded from these childhood enchantments.

By college, Robert was serious about photography. He had first noticed his future wife, Noreen (Ayres) Craig, in the hallways at Lansing’s Pattengill High, where both were students. But their romance began several years later, on a beach shoot with the Lansing Camera Club—with Noreen the lissome model, and Robert behind the lens. The couple married the day after Christmas in 1950, and Robert completed his BA in Art from Albion College the following spring. After a stint building tract homes to support (and house) his growing family, Robert earned his MA in Art Practice (Ceramics) from Michigan State University (1958), then moved to Delaware, OH to join the fine arts faculty of Ohio Wesleyan University.

In his new profession, Robert’s appetite for conversation found a natural fit. He thrived on discussions with colleagues and students, of politics, religion, theology, and art. And like his father before him, he eagerly engaged with total strangers. In fact, although Robert remained rooted in Michigan for life, his travel experiences to non-English speaking countries helped shape his identity and altered his trajectory. The first of these adventures occurred after his high school graduation. In the wake of World War II, Robert worked on a cattle boat sponsored by Heifer International, delivering livestock to bombed out ports around the Mediterranean, from Athens to Africa. For the rest of his life, he traveled with intention, more ambassador than tourist; undaunted by language barriers, he approached other cultures with curiosity, humor, respect—and a fearless palate. His next major trip was in 1959, when he and his young family hauled a DIY camper-trailer from Ohio all the way to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, for summer study at the Instituto Allende. In San Miguel they lived in a barely furnished apartment on a humble street, well away from the expat community. Robert’s prodigious output of watercolors and prints during and after this trip register the beauty, dignity, and vibrancy he found in the town and its people.

At the end of their Mexico trip, the Engles detoured through Michigan for a late-summer visit with relatives. There, down the road from his in-laws’ cottage, Robert spotted a for-sale sign; and with two signatures on a hand-written purchase agreement, he sealed the deal on an abandoned farmhouse and Christmas tree farm near the tip of “the mitten.” Thus, was born The Farm, as the family labeled their decade-long experiment in self-sustained rustic summer living—equal parts Swiss Family Robinson and "Mother Earth News." Year by year, the enterprise expanded, with: a dog and a third child; an enormous vegetable garden; water color classes for wealthy resorters; a hand-built ceramics studio, showroom and outdoor kiln; a pocket-size cabin for studio assistants; and finally, a residency program for college students, with an open-air potters’ classroom and campground. For the rest of his life, Robert held memories of The Farm close to his heart—both the rewarding hard work and delicious summer fun with his family.

The major turning point in Robert’s artistic career followed from a Ford Foundation grant in 1966, which funded an extended stay in Japan. Traveling alone, Robert embedded with several potteries, some rustic and remote, others major producers with dozens of workers. At the Taroemon Kiln Art Pottery, which has operated continuously for over 14 generations, Robert became close with its scion, Takashi Nakazato, whose father was a designated National Treasure. Together the friends toured the country on motorbikes; and the following year the Engle family hosted Taka-san in the United States. Robert’s exposure to Japanese artists—their discipline, mastery, and reverence for the beauty of accident—inspired a tectonic shift in his own art-making. Rejecting the sharp divisions between ‘art and craft’ that had defined his training and early career, he now aligned himself with the emergent Pop Art movement, which playfully combined media and drew inspiration from popular culture. His goal, he said (echoing his contemporary Robert Rauschenberg) was to “break down the barriers between art and life.”

Repurposing an industrial process for his own creative ends, Robert brought his photographer’s eye and potter’s hand into conversation for the first time. The resulting wheel-thrown and slab-built stoneware vessels featured close-cropped photos of iconic faces, rendered intimate and tactile as glazed surfaces. These “picture pots,” as Robert called them—along with the technique he perfected for transferring photo images onto clay—brought national attention. Major group exhibitions and acquisitions followed: among them, the Ohio Craft Museum, Butler Institute of American Art, the American Crafts Council, and the ground-breaking exhibition Objects: USA 1969, considered a watershed in the American studio craft movement “for blurring the lines between art and craft, artist and artisan.” Objects: USA 1969 opened at the Smithsonian, and toured twenty-two American museums and eleven countries. The collection was then dispersed to museums across the US, with Robert’s “Harlow” pot retained by the curators for the permanent collection of the Museum of Arts & Design (New York). A half-century later, Robert’s work from this era continues to be written about, collected and exhibited. A second decal pot was recently selected for the commemorative reboot Objects: USA 2020-21; and he is profiled in The Marks Project: Dictionary of American Ceramics, 1945-, the definitive reference work on American studio potters and ceramic artists from the mid-20th century onward.

Throughout his life Robert effortlessly adjusted his sails to new winds, ever the resourceful Eagle scout. Finding himself newly divorced at 40, Robert moved from Delaware to Columbus, where he settled in German Village. With the onset of mild arthritis in his hands, he gradually phased out wheel-thrown ceramics but continued his explorations in clay: the “picture pots” from this era are delicate slab constructions in porcelain, often featuring vintage group portraiture. After 17 years of teaching and several years as a commuter, Robert retired from Ohio Wesleyan in his late 40s. He made a living doing home renovations, and built a venture in commercial photography. In 1981 he remarried, and with his new wife, Chris Knisely, lovingly restored a log cabin in Southern Ohio. The couple also tried their hands at “gentleman farming,” as Robert called it—vending fresh eggs and home-grown produce at outdoor markets.

And Robert kept his fingers nimble making homemade music. As a child, he had struggled to learn to read; but music was a language that came easily to him. He’d studied French horn in high school (though he hated the sore mouth it gave him), and he loved to sing. His children still recall his musical antics—the ditties learned at Boy Scout camp, or made up on the spot, accompanied on harmonica, concertina, or a bugle pulled from a kitchen cupboard. During the folk revival of the 60s, Robert hugged his new autoharp to his chest and taught himself Appalachian tunes, hymns and carols, spending hours lost in a cathedral of sound. When his son gifted him a flea-market button accordion, he took to it with the same ferocity.

With the end of his second marriage, and with his own children well launched into adulthood, Robert’s life now assumed a nomadic shape. Living frugally, frequently shifting his base of operations, he found that watercolors, conversation, and music-making became his entree to new friendships and communities. A cross-country camping trip took him to Louisiana, where he savored Cajun food and culture and upped his button-accordion chops. Then he traveled across the southern states and up the Pacific coast, landing in Corvallis, OR. In Corvallis he taught watercolor classes, helped Japanese university students practice their English, and joined jam sessions with other acoustic musicians. At Christmas-time he worked for the Salvation Army, playing Cajun-inflected carols for holiday shoppers.

Over the next dozen years, Robert racked up pages of passport stamps on extended visits to Japan and Thailand, with side excursions to Korea, China, Bali, Australia and New Zealand. In Japan, he reconnected with his old friend Takashi Nakazato. He researched Asia’s rich puppetry traditions, and in Thailand he created his own traveling puppet theatre, entertaining the locals shopping in open-air markets. These rich experiences were documented with hundreds of photographs, sketches, and postcard-sized plein air watercolors. Robert insisted that these small works should be appreciated casually, in hand, not framed or hung up “as art.”

In 2012, Robert brought his journey to a poetic close with the purchase of a house just blocks from his grandfather’s home in Mattawan, MI. There he turned his musical pastimes into a serious avocation: busking at summer fairs and farmers markets. For nearly a decade the market communities of Saugatuck, Holland, Texas Corners, and Kalamazoo were treated to a lifetime’s repertoire of popular songs played on Robert’s signature street organ and arsenal of accordions. Sometimes he was joined onstage by a marionette of his own creation, a small Javanese boy who tapped his bare feet to a drum track and the sound of Robert’s skat singing. Summer tourists and market shoppers were charmed. Seated on pint-sized wooden stools that Robert built to give away, the children pulled in close.

Robert Engle is survived by his younger sister Molly (Engle) Remsburg; his three children, Rebecca Engle, Todd Engle, and Martha (Engle) Lawson; five adult grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. A memorial service and celebration of Robert’s life will be held Saturday, April 18, at 2 PM at Oshtemo United Methodist Church. Family, friends, and Robert’s many former students and acquaintances are warmly invited. Celebrate Robert’s life online by sharing favorite photos and stories on his dedicated webpage at BetzlerLifeStory.com.

Donations in Robert’s name may be made to Heifer International, the Salvation Army, or your local farmers market and street musicians.

Betzler & Thompson Life Story Funeral Homes, 60900 M40, Paw Paw, MI, 49079. (269) 657-3870.