National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts
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Founded in 1966, the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) has been the most influential[citation needed] organization in the United States promoting ceramics as an art form for several decades. Most major American ceramic artists since the 1970s, such as Paul Soldner, Peter Voulkos, and Rudy Autio have been among its 4000 members.
NCECA began in 1961 as a committee of the The American Ceramic Society (ACerS), and became a separate organization in 1966. The organizations annual conference, begun that year, was the first truly national conference of ceramic artists in the U.S. With American appreciation of ceramics as an art form burgeoning in the 1980s, attendance at the conference grew to over 1000 attendees. For more than two decades, the NCECA conference has been the largest ceramics arts gathering outside of Asia.[citation needed]
NCECA has also changed from being almost entirely a group of teachers and professors to a more mixed membership including a large number of professional artists who are not educators. In 2004, the first full-time studio artist was selected as president of the organization.
