Vivika Heino; Highly Regarded Ceramic Artist

Vivika Heino, internationally known ceramic artist whose works have been displayed in museums, galleries and the homes of private collectors from Los Angeles to New York and in France, died early Friday after a brief battle with cancer of the liver. She was 85.

A resident of Ojai since 1971, Mrs. Heino died at Ventura Community Hospital just four days after the doctors diagnosed her malignancy, said her close friend Mara Cantello.

In Los Angeles, Mrs. Heino’s ceramics were exhibited regularly at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Craft and Folk Art Museum.

Describing a visit to the studio the artist and her husband and partner, Otto Heino, had maintained in their Ojai home for the past 24 years, Ventura County Museum of History & Art Curator Tim Schiffer recently wrote:

“One comes away from the studio with a renewed appreciation for the importance of the handmade, of truth to the materials, and of the pleasure of pursuing one’s chosen craft.”

Born Vivika Place in Caledonia, N.Y., the future artist fell in love with ceramics when she was about 7 years old and saw a potter at work in a store in nearby Rochester.

“When I got home, I decided to try it myself,” Mrs. Heino told Schiffer for the catalogue of a recent exhibit. “Those were the days of Victrolas, and ours had a nice turntable covered with green felt. I took some sand from my sand box and tried to throw a pot as I had seen the potter do. But the sand wouldn’t stay together . . . Not for many years from that date did I make any pottery.”

Although ceramics was her passion, she did not receive any formal training until she was an adult.

After receiving a bachelor’s degree in art in Greeley, Colo., she joined a traveling puppet show, worked as a bookbinder in San Francisco, wrote for a newspaper in Carmel and taught American culture to immigrants.

While teaching puppetry to children, she took weekend ceramics classes at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco.

In 1942, she was offered a teaching fellowship at Alfred University, near her hometown in New York. After obtaining a master’s degree in fine arts, she opened a studio in Greenwich Village.

Mrs. Heino and her husband moved to Los Angeles in 1952, where she taught at USC until 1967. She then taught for five years at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence until the Heinos moved to Ojai.

Alfred University will hold a retrospective of Vivika and Otto Heino’s work beginning Oct. 14.