Melvino Garretti

Melvino Garretti (born 1946) is an American multidisciplinary artist who works in ceramics, painting, and performance. His visual works are known for their recognizable abstract motif, which often includes a variety of colorful emblematic shapes and symbols. He is an original member of the Studio Watts Workshop art collective, and a 1978 MFA graduate of San Francisco Art Institute.

Born in Los Angeles and raised in Compton, Garretti joined the nearby Studio Watts Workshop in 1967. Although originally a painter, the workshop introduced him to ceramics through two years of rigorous work at Great Barrington Pottery in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, where he received lessons in Japanese techniques and philosophy of production.

Garretti's paintings and ceramic works often include spikes, spiral forms, and jagged edges, to which he applies paints and glazes using a free gestural approach. In 1969, Garretti and ten other members of Studio Watts joined with the San Francisco Dancer's Workshop in Ceremony of Us, a dance performance art piece at the Mark Taper Forum.