Katherine Fu

katherinemfu@gmail.com
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Katherine Fu (b. 2003, Ohio) is a ceramist, educator, and writer invested in the intersection of historical and contemporary symbols—both natural and unreal—as seen in their surrounding cultural narratives. Raised in Maryland by Chinese immigrant parents, they work with ceramic craft as a framing device to highlight and bridge the disparate narratives and symbolism of their dual upbringing. Writing not only supplements their studio practice but activates the formal process of distilling complex meaning into singular moments. 


Katherine graduated with honors from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) with a BFA in Ceramics and a concentration in Theory and History of Art and Design. They are continuing into a fifth year Master of Arts in Art + Design Education with a focus on learning outside the traditional K–12 art classroom and craft as pedagogy in art education. Katherine is a recipient of the 2025 Herbert and Claiborne Pell Medal for History and has exhibited at the Bell Gallery (Providence, RI), Gelman Gallery (Providence, RI), the Franz Collection (Taipei, Taiwan), and MenLo International Studio and Gallery (Jingdezhen, China). Presently, he is interested in exploring ideas of provenance—how do stories about our ancestry become personal mythologies that both retroactively shape legacy and mold the future?















2026
Woodfired Vessels

Porcelain Collection
2025
Diorama for:

Tenth Arrow and Sun for Lord Archer

Pottery Collection
2024Sun Series 

Squire 

Old-growth 

Celestial Pursuit: Tiangou’s Flight

Top Knot
Drawings
Writing
What I’m thinking about right now:

“4.) Take a red magic marker and draw a 9 on your naked chest. Draw the 9 from the bottom up. Start the tip of its tail at your naval and sweep UP to have the round circle of its head in the middle of your breasts. Put on a shirt that conceals the 9 from other eyes.“

^ From (Soma)tic Poetry Exercises, CAConrad

Writing
Review for
Girls Just Want to Be Dead and in Your Inbox: The Bastardization of Folkloric Oral Tradition for Digital Social Capital
Winner of RISD’s inaugural Redefining Writing Essay Contest
Spring 2024

With its humor, mystery, introspection, and universal themes, this essay beautifully embodies writing redefined. Overall, it lays out a compelling critique on a cutting-edge topic. Readers are taken in by an engaging voice that blends personal and scholarly genres, discussing historical context, personal experience, and careful analysis with casual vernacular uncommon in academic texts. All this is done in a multimodal form that does a lot of work for the piece. The incorporation of images provides real-world texture; the all-caps headings and star-shaped bullet points reinforce voice; and the color scheme of green and white text on a black page evokes nostalgic html aesthetics as well as the “dark forest” beyond the campfire. This piece seems to take up the invitation to push boundaries at every opportunity, but fine-tunes those choices to be purposeful and effective.
—Meredith Barrett

Read here.
Excerpt from
Starchive: Kobe Jackson
Artist Interview
Spring 2025


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Excerpt from
On Common Ground: The Weight of an Empty Promise (A Critique)
Fall 2023

I felt particularly watched at this Wednesday dinner. As I ate my carrots I kept making fleeting eye contact across the table, conscious of the many conversations around me, the vast skylight above, the weight of my fork. By the time I finished I was an appetizer and an entrée deep into BArch ’88 Adam Silverman’s Common Ground. Conceptualized in 2019 as a series of vessels, this iteration in March 2023 broadened into a dining experience within the RISD Museum’s Grand Gallery. The dining set consists of 56 bowls, 56 cups, and 56 plates, each made with a conglomerate of dirt and clays from each American state and territory. The sentiment was that as we all shared a meal together, we would look past our differences to instead celebrate our diversity and commonalities. Dinner certainly did satiate the little gnawing cavity I had been nursing since the opening. Still, I could not ignore the implication that there was something I should have been doing but could not bring myself to do. That looming feeling of obligation. To what degree of illusion would I have to convince myself in order to partake in this meal?

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Excerpt from
Fat Halos and Whatnot . . .
Fall 2022



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Excerpt from
someday i’ll love katherine fu
Spring 2022



Read here.