John Tuska

Who is John Tuska?

John Tuska was an American artist and educator. He was best known as a sculptor and potter, but also as a draftsman, painter, designer and photographer.

Tuska was born in Yukon, Pennsylvania, as the eighth of ten children. He was a professor at the University of Kentucky. His classes and workshops, had brought art to a wider audience. Tuska's body of work can be found in collections and public spaces, both regionally and internationally.

The tiny town of Yukon, Pennsylvania, about thirty-five miles southeast of Pittsburgh, may seem an unlikely birthplace for a person destined to become a gifted, versatile, and prolific artist. But Yukon, then a coal mining locale, is where John Regis Tuska, with the assistance of a midwife, entered the world on January 12, 1931. His father, John Michael Tuska, was an immigrant from Landers, Czechoslovakia; his mother, Cecilia Marie Kuzma, haled from Irwin, Pennsylvania. Tuska was the only boy among their eight children, and two more daughters would follow in 1933 and 1937. So he grew up with nine sisters. Women thus held no mystery for him, as Tuska would remark in later life.