Rick Dillingham was born in Lake Forest, Illinois in 1952 and died in Santa Fe, 1994. Rick Dillingham, a master ceramicist, received his Bachelor of Arts at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque in 1974. His Master of Fine Arts was completed in 1979 at California's Claremont College of Arts and Crafts. A recipient of several National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist fellowships, Rick Dillingham was renowned for his work in contemporary ceramics and for his scholarship of the pottery traditions of the North American Indian. As a dealer of historic and contemporary native pottery, Rick Dillingham used his knowledge to provide the finest in Pueblo pottery to his clientele and worked to create several magnificent exhibitions of Pueblo pottery, as well as publishing classic texts such as Acoma and Laguna Pottery and Fourteen Families in Pueblo Pottery.

Rick Dillingham's own work reflected his interest in native pottery traditions, while his most famed forms, the shard vessels, are reflective of his restoration work at the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe, where he formulated a paradigm of pots as a whole, made of many pieces. His works are broken in countless shards and variously decorated with glazes, gilded, or painted before reassembling.

Refer to Adelman, Clark, Collins, and Wilson Rick Dillingham Santa Fe, Rotary Club: 1993 and Traugott, Rick Dillingham 1952-1994: A Retrospective Exhibition Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Art Museum: 1994.