James Prestini
Black Bowl, c. 1945

James Prestini (1908 – 1993) had a varied career as a mathematician, engineer, sculptor, professor of design, and woodturner. His artwork was influenced by his father, an Italian stonecutter, and by the Bauhaus aesthetic of Laszlo Moholoy-Nagy and Mies van der Rohe. From 1922 to 1924, Prestini attended a trade school in Westerly, Rhode Island, as an apprentice machinist. He earned a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering at Yale University in 1930 and attended Yale’s School of Education in 1932. He also studied at the University of Stockholm in 1938 and the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1939.