Summer/Fall 2018 | Vol 46 No 2
THE EDUCATION ISSUE
studio potter |
Mission
"Girls Night" at Studio T/M Pottery, Gainsville, Florida. Participants build flower vases of their own designs. See Truman's article, "Adventures in Rebuilding a High School Clay Program," page 18. Photograph by author.
Centered in studio practice, Studio Potter promotes discussion of technology, criticism, aesthetics, and history within the ceramics community. We are a non-profit organization celebrating over forty years of commitment to publishing the Studio Potter journal. We welcome hearing from potters, artists, scholars, educators, and others with special interests in writing and reporting on topics and events that matter in their personal and professional lives.
VOL 46 NO 2
EDUCATION
Sa Wanphet in her studio in Phitsanulok, Thailand, 2018. ⊲ ⊲ The Ebadi family have been potters for several generations in Iran.
In this issue BITS & PIECES
ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION
01 | Our Mission
Guys Walk into a Ceramics 06 | Three Studio...
BY MARK BURNS, STUART GAIR,
04 | Word from the Editor BY ELENOR WILSON
74 | Underwriters
79 | Donors
KATHY KING, SETH RAINVILLE
39 |
Developing Voice & Vision: A Studio Internship Model BY ERIC BOTBYL,
WITH KELSEY NAGY & ANDREW CLARK
43 |
Expanding the Definition of Successful Learning
48 | Working with Deaf & Blind Students BY ELIZABETH COHEN
of an Autodidact: | Confessions 51 Book Learning BY SUZANNE STAUBACH
Workshop Experience 65 | The for Mentor & Mentee
BY MAUREEN MILLS & JENNIFER MARKMANRUD
BY JILL FOOTE-HUTTON
GENERAL EDUCATION Eric Botbyl. Scraggler Cups, 2018. 5.25 in. tall. Collection of Rebecca Spector. Photograph by artist.
Notes for Engaging | Practical 36 the Restaurant Industry BY TIM COMPTON
69 | Of Jungles & Snow
BY ANTHONY RICHARDS, WITH SA WANPHET
Q&A
From using wild clay to layering slip to using thin ash glaze to firing schedules, the surface is the result of the entire pot.
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30
HIGHER EDUCATION
K-12
13 | Putting the Community in College
State of Clay Education 15 | The
BY FRED HERBST
30 |
Finding (And Teaching) the Ceramics of Iran in a Contemporary Context BY JILLIAN ECHLIN
in Rebuilding a High 17 | Adventures School Clay Program BY SARA TRUMAN
54 | Reinvention and Uncertainty BY WILL MCCOMB
a New Visual Language 56 | Developing for Political Ceramics BY LUKAS EASTON
History of The National K-12 22 | A Ceramic Exhibition Foundation BY BOB FEDER
Reflections on k12clay 27 | Teacher BY ANNE MAURICE, JOY JONES, &
57 | Discovering the Modern Relics BY STEVEN OSTERLUND
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BY STEPHEN CREECH
KELLY CLARK
Most Valuable Clay in the World 29 | The BY JACK TROY
Ask Me Anything: An ‘Instaview’ with Melissa Weiss IN MEMORIAM
Colton Winokur 63 | Paula (1935-2017) BY NANCY SELVIN
Sherman 64 | Bunzy (1923-2017)
BY STUART KESTENBAUM
studiopotter.org
EDITOR Elenor Wilson editor@studiopotter.org ART DIRECTOR Zoe Pappenheimer zoe@zoedesignworks.com CIRCULATION Jess Detweiler membership@studiopotter.org COPYEDITOR Faye Wolfe PROOFREADERS Hayne Bayless Donna McGee Jess Detweiler FOUNDING EDITOR Gerry Williams EDITOR EMERITA Mary Barringer PUBLISHING PO Box 1365 Northampton, MA 01061 413.585.5998 DESIGN Kt Craig Design www.katiecraigdesign.com
INDEXING Studio Potter is indexed by Ebsco Art and Architecture Index (ebscohost.com), and distributed to Libraries digitally through Flipster (flipster.ebsco.com). BOARD OF DIRECTORS Destiny Barletta Hayne Bayless Ben Eberle Bonnie D. Hellman, CPA Jonathan Kaplan Robbie Lobell David McBeth Jonathon McMillan Josh Teplitzky CONTRIBUTING ADVISORS Michael Boylen Doug Casebeer Neil Castaldo Louise Allison Cort Steve Driver Leslie Ferrin Lynn Gervens Gary Hatcher Tiffany Hilton Doug Jeppesen Brian R. Jones Chris Lyons Mark Shapiro Julia Walther
Volume 46, Number 2, ISSN 0091-6641. Copyright 2018 by Studio Potter. Contents may not be reproduced without permission from Studio Potter. Studio Potter is published in January as the Winter/Spring issue and in July as the Summer/Fall issue. For permissions, corrections, or information about digital versions of back issues and articles, please contact the editor. The views and opinions expressed in the articles of Studio Potter journal are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the editor, the board of directors, or the Studio Potter organization.
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Studio Potter
PRINTING Penmor Lithographers PO Box 2003 Lewiston, ME 04241-2003
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⊲ Illustration by Zoe Pappenheimer.
WORD FROM THE EDITOR
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n 2018, education in the U.S. has some problems: teachers are underpaid, school districts are in debt, unable to buy basic supplies for students, pre-K and higher education costs are astronomical. Student debt is one of the defining crises of our times, one in which I participate. I’ll probably be paying off my loans until my kid, who will be born just as this issue hits your mailbox, enters college. Claiming that ceramics is the answer to these problems is eye-roll-worthy, and arguing that it is a vital part of art education, or that art education is a vital part of education in general, would be preaching to the choir. But before you delve into these pages, let’s briefly examine why ceramics does play a role in improving the state of education and broaden our definition of education beyond formal settings, and even beyond mentorship, to include all experiences from which one learns, and in turn, creates. Thirty years ago, The Studio Potter Foundation and New York University held a symposium, The Case for Clay in Secondary Art Education. Keynote speaker Edmund Burke Feldman addressed, rather prophetically, the importance of craft in art education and of the arts in education: “Craft legitimizes and authenticates art because...it represents the crucial connection
Alternatives to formal education are plentiful, yet scarcely acknowledged and even more rarely celebrated.
mother whose children he tutored, and blossomed through his relationship with his sister-in-law, a Thai potter. Formal education is addressed in this issue, too. The unique perspectives of Bob Feder, founding trustee of The National K-12 Ceramics Exhibition Foundation, Inc., Sarah Truman, a high-school teacher in Gainsville, Florida, and Jillian Echlin, a PhD candidate studying in Iran, have improved and will continue to improve the state of education in our field and beyond. Many ceramicists teach in a classroom or workshop, or as a one-on-one mentor, but our artwork also teaches silently through its use and presence. The objects and images we create can be the most effective advocates of learning, of exchanging ideas, of the kind of empathy that breeds humanitarian solutions. Something we need, now, it seems, more than ever.
Elenor Wilson Editor
Studio Potter
Feldman made several more excellent points, but after the above statement, I imagine he could have dropped the mic, walked off the stage, and the scene would still have been pretty epic. Learning how things are made and understanding well-made things inform how people value things in the world and the work that they do. Having these experiences early on increases the potential for appreciation and participation. My
introduction to clay was a small summer program at the farm of Mr. Patterson, the fifth-grade teacher. We folded clay around a toilet paper tube and pinched the edges to make an owl, a project not unlike the one described in Jill Foote-Hutton’s article. Outreach programs in which professional artists visit schools that don’t have ceramics or art courses can sow the seeds for another generation of artists or patrons of the arts, seeds that may germinate five, ten, twenty years later. Alternatives to formal education are plentiful, yet scarcely acknowledged and even more rarely celebrated. Several articles in this issue do just that: Selftaught artist Melissa Weiss shares her straightforward approach to creating her simple, yet sophisticated forms; Suzanne Staubach picked up a book, then hundreds more, as her pedagogical path; Eric Botbyl’s interns had mad clay skills after undergrad, but learned how to make a professional living using them under his mentorship; and Anthony Richards’s knowledge of and profound appreciation for ceramics began with a grateful Japanese
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between art and society... First, bad craft discredits art. Second, discredited art discredits art education. Third, a discredited art education demoralizes and impoverishes students. Fourth, demoralized students make demoralized adults, irresponsible parents, bad workers and citizens, and uncongenial companions. Fifth, a society whose workers and citizens are demoralized is a failing society. In this context, a failing society means a society unable to compete in a worldwide economy; it means a reduced standard of living for most people; it means political instability and a great deal of personal suffering.”
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ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION I thought, I need to go find out what this thing is about. I can’t reinvent myself if I don’t do this thing. Going to Harvard was a godsend because it was a destination, a worthy destination and I’ve learned a lot since I’ve been here. MARK BURNS
STUART GAIR
SETH RAINVILLE
AUDIENCE MEMBER: How long were you doing
regular work, compared to your creative work?
This panel was organized, moderated, and recorded by KATHY KING at the Falmouth Arts Center, Falmouth, Massachusetts, November 19, 2017, then transcribed and edited for print by Studio Potter. The panel began with an invitation for the artists to discuss what brought them to the residency at Harvard.
Three Guys Walk into a Ceramics Studio... A conversation with Mark Burns, Stuart Gair, and Seth Rainville, the Harvard Ceramics Studio Artists-in-Residence, 2017–2018.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Do you guys think that MARK BURNS: Well, once upon a time, way
back in the Pleistocene… [laughter]
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KATHY KING
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BURNS: You mean regular work, like teaching? I would say sixty percent of my time was running that shop. I had a huge program of grad students, and I did it alone. I had no colleagues. Then, they made me the chair, basically because I was the onsite chair for the ’96 NCECA in Las Vegas. I’m the guy that made that happen. So the president went, “Oh, get him to be the chair. He’s pretty organized.” I begged not to be made the chair, and the last thing the dean said to me was, “I can appoint.” I knew I was doomed.
There weren’t these residencies like there are now. They’ve become a way of life, for a lot of people. I was in a very aggressive program: you made art, and you showed it, and you became famous. But also, you should get a job that will allow you to make your work three months out of the year, academically. And I did that, and I followed all the steps, and then, one day, I woke up and I was running a huge program all by
myself in Nevada, and I was the chair of the art department. You can’t serve two masters, let alone three, so the very first thing to go was my studio. I just couldn’t get anything done. And it dragged on and on and on and on and on. I was exhausted by doing the same thing that Seth was talking about, which was writing incessant letters to promote other people into things. I had turned down many things over the years, as my reputation—or dis-reputation, sort of—grew, and I thought, I can’t do this anymore. So I retired out, an emeritus, and sold everything I owned.
doing those jobs helped you? At least, maybe not artistically, but your name was out there? BURNS: Yeah, and you develop a skill set that, perhaps you didn’t even know you were capable of. You can ask this lady over here [points to Kathy King] about it. But it’s hard to watch the passion that you would use for your studio work, which really defines all of us, evaporate in service to something else. So I finally just sucked it up and said: This is my lot in life right now, and I’ll come back to this later. Coming to this residency was a way to try to recoup some of that lost time.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, that’s still creative. BURNS: It was, but like I said, it’s a different kind of creative. SETH RAINVILLE: Well, it’s like he resurfaced
at Harvard, and I was, like, “Oh, my God. Mark’s gonna be at Harvard.” [laughter] I saw him in a workshop in college, and the idea [for me at the time] was, you have space, and you attack a space, and you develop it. For me, that turned into the idea of curating. My mom was an interior decorator, and my dad was a photographer, so I [was influenced by] these things… Curating and owning a gallery and being in that mode, for years, gave birth to a ton of other stuff. I’ll never do it again, but I’ll never regret any of that time. I wasn’t in any magazines anymore, I wasn’t doing any books anymore, but I was doing enough major shows every year that I felt I was still part of the community. And I was helping to promote other people, which I appreciate, too.
STUART GAIR: Yeah, I’d say so. AUDIENCE MEMBER: You’re lucky.
KATHY KING: He’s a year out of his MFA, so the ink isn’t quite dry. … Let’s compare what we do to Archie Bray, which is a well-known residency Stuart completed this summer. In that kind of residency, you’re given space, support, all the equipment you need, then you’re left alone. There’s nothing else to it. You’re just there to make work. What we have set up at Harvard is more like a teaching residency. Residents don’t have to teach, but there’s a built-in community. You’ve got all the classes around you; why not participate in that? But that has, probably, pros and cons. So, [speaking to Gair] since you’re fresh off of those two, what are the pros and cons, in your head? GAIR: First of all, I love the fact that it’s a teaching residency. I went to [the University of] Nebraska because it offered opportunities to teach. I would like to eventually teach, one day, like these guys. I think the energy around teaching, and having all these students around rather than working in solitude, is just amazing. And I’ve been learning from my students, some who have been doing it for fifty-plus years. So it’s been a really good, reciprocal relationship. It’s taken a little while to get used to hundreds of people moving around and hundreds of people to interact with. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Stuart! Stuart! Stuart!
Stuart! [laughter]
▲ Stuart Gair. Teapot, 2018. 8x6x6 in. Soda-fired stoneware. Photo by artist. ⊳ Stuart Gair. Cup, 2018. 3.5x3x3 in. Wheel-thrown and altered soda-fired stoneware. Photo by artist. ▼ Gair teaching at the ceramics studio at Harvard University, winter, 2018. Photograph by Joe Zina.
Studio Potter
BURNS: I think I’m near the top of it, but— once upon a time I was. But I disappeared for almost a decade, and a lot of people had no idea that’s where I’d gone. I was writing reports that no one would read, trying to keep the department from going bankrupt— all of that other kind of stuff. And so the creative part of it—I kept my hand in.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Stuart, you said you were doing it a little bit more traditionally.
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AUDIENCE MEMBER: And you’re at the top of
your game.
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ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION RAINVILLE: But it was facing the hallway where everyone comes in and out. She was like, “If you want to hide, you need to go take that other space, way at the end. Stuart’s not coming for a while, so whatever you take, he’ll have to deal with whatever else.” KING: I did not say that. RAINVILLE: Well, kind of, a little bit. KING: A little bit. [laughs] RAINVILLE: But I wanted to be in the mix of
GAIR: Time management played a huge role. And knowing when to come into the studio and make work: really early in the morning or really late at night. [laughter]
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Studio Potter
RAINVILLE: I came a little bit early and was
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asking about studio space, and Kathy very graciously was giving up her space for one of us, because the studio hadn’t had three residents at the same time before. So Kathy gave up her space— KING: Yeah. [laughs]
everything that was going on, because why am I there otherwise? Plus, all the ceilings are open, so I get to hear Mark teaching his mold class, and I’m thinking, Oh, I’m catching a lifetime’s worth of information from my seat. As I’m pinch, pinch, pinch, scrape, scrape, scrape, Mark’s like, “And then you do…” I’m, like, sweet. And then, Stuart, same thing. I also have the luxury of going to the Peabody Museum [of Archaeology & Ethnology] on campus—going through the annex and looking at all these amazing objects. The curators and the staff there have this breadth of information that you’re like, “You’ve got to be kidding me!” You take that information back [to the studio], and then we’re doing these crazy firings, and everyone’s working together, and it’s all these wonderful puzzle pieces that you have to put together. That’s what makes it a truly breathtaking experience. I’m only teaching two classes there, and the main reason I feel like I belong in that environment is that the students drive the narrative.
KING: Is that pulling you away from having time for your own work, though? RAINVILLE: No. Well,…[I’ve been headed]
in a weird direction, where I was testing materials. Just like when I [was working in] Phoenix, I tested all the clay bodies, which I wasn’t familiar with, and the glazes. Everything went into this last wood firing. Now that the information’s out, I’m gonna make an incredible amount of stuff, but that needed to happen first. KING: Mark, how has it been for you? [laughs] BURNS: You want an honest answer? KING: Yeah, of course. BURNS: I didn’t like it at first, because I’m
basically a lone wolf. I’m a solitary creature when I work, because much of—there’s so much head play. Also, the engineering of my work doesn’t come easy, and so, it all has to be worked out. In the beginning, everyone was, “Mark! Mark!” One day, I said to Kathy, “How much do I owe these people?” [laughter] She said, “Well, well, I know. I’ll make you a sign.” Now I have this little sign in my space that says, “Artist on duty. Do not disturb”— to which they pay absolutely no attention. [laughter] But I’ve grown. I spent a lot of time alone, especially the last two years, so having all this bustle around me is pretty good. It’s energetic. I get cookies, and I know who’s sick and how many grandchildren, and nobody’s
yet given me the other half of that banana bread recipe… [laughter]
academia to a community studio, I thought, Well, this is actually a bigger challenge. Would you agree with that?
I think that the kindness and the interest they show is genuine. It reaffirmed my faith in working in larger groups of people. They’ve learned, too. If I just say to them, “I really need this time,” then they turn around and go bother Stuart. [laughter]
GAIR: Definitely, because there’s something expected in the university setting. There’s grades. There’s formal critiques. I’d never worked in a community studio before, and there’s just so many different levels of skill and experience. Some people in my beginners’ class have been throwing on the wheel for thirty years; then there are students who are just starting. I’m learning how to deal with each individual person, and like Mark said, letting them find their own way. I can offer individual critiques—that’s something I’ve found really helpful—some people take it; some people don’t. I give them information, send them articles and videos, things like that, and they can choose to watch those or read those, or not. That’s how I’ve dealt with [teaching here].
I think, in my own strange way, I was born to teach. I like teaching. I like the vibe that’s down here—free from academic constraints, in which grades are used as weapons. People come and get what they want from you. If they only want a small thing, that’s OK; if they want the whole enchilada, they’ll get it. KING: I talked to each of you before you entered in, and I’m always very careful to explain that we’re not a ceramics department. [The studio] is, in its ultimate sense, a community studio. We happen to do this other academic stuff, but when it comes down to it, we’re a community studio. And you said something very interesting, Mark, like, “People come and go and take what they need.” Stuart, you said, “Well, how much homework can I give them?” And I’m like, “Well, you can give them all you want, but… [laughter] …they may not do it.” I’m joking, but in a community environment, people are not students, living on a campus, going to their dorm rooms. They’re people with lives and spouses and kids and pets and all these other responsibilities. So when I went from [teaching in]
imaginable, and maybe in some ways, I had been indoctrinated by academia. So I get to this place, where I have to reconfigure what I’m doing. I’m free of the pain of grading, I’m free of having to chase people down if they don’t show up for anything, but I still want to give the students something, because they have a right to expect something, because Harvard brought me in and pays me to do something. My way of dealing with all that was [to offer a] kind of smorgasbord: I can give you these things, and if you want them, you can have them. The plaster class is a really, really great example of this. I teach it as a tool-making class, I don’t teach it as an art class. The results were like the difference between night and day. No longer are [students] afraid that this person they’ve read about or they saw in books is gonna come in and say rude things to them about what they’re doing. I simply ask them to learn to make a
⊳ Mark Burns. Plague in Lavender (HIV), 2017. 20x12x8 in. Porcelain, glaze, wood, plastic. ▼ Mark Burns. Godzilla vs. King Kitsch, 2017. 28x40x14 in. Porcelain, glaze, plastic, metal, cement.
KING: In teaching, whether it’s a community
or a traditional academic setting, there’s an overload [of information]. I teach a class at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and everyone is like, “Well, I watched a video on throwing on the wheel, so I’m ready for class. I’m way ahead of you people.” And I’m like, aww… [laughs] So all the access to videos and tips and techniques and whatnot— we’ll start with Mark—how does that affect teaching in the classroom? BURNS: Well, I had to make a big adjust-
ment, because I’m an old dog. Or, as a friend of mine says, “Old fire horses run when they hear the bell.” I’m an old fire horse, too. Academically, I’d done everything 9
ALTERNATIVE K–12 EDUCATION class to get carried away with everyone’s doing their own thing, we decided as a group, that this semester we’re gonna focus on two objects from all those hundreds of objects we looked at. So now we go to the videos. We go to the books. We go to wherever we need to go to find out about these two objects. And it has been fascinating. Technology helps in that way, but certainly in beginning classes, for me, it’s not a great idea. KING: (To Gair) What do you think? GAIR: I think [videos] can be really help-
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Studio Potter
tool, and if they have this tool, I never tell them what to cast. The students in the class all sort of blossom under this approach; it takes the fear out. My job is to take the fear out and give students what they want. A lot of them get up to two-part molds, and that’s as far as they want to go. They don’t understand the mechanics or the physics or the math to multi-parts. They don’t want to do it, they’ve gotten what they wanted. Then I say, “Great, make a couple more, now do something with them, and that’s up to you.” I think it has softened me up as a human being, to put myself in their shoes and simply say, “Look, I can facilitate any number of things for you. I’ll lay them on the table, and just take whatever you need.” And if that’s enough, then, that’s enough.
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RAINVILLE: Everyone here from Falmouth
that’s taken my class [will tell you], “Seth doesn’t allow you to do videos.” But at
Harvard, it’s a different thing. The reason I don’t allow them here is because I have ten weeks to give you a snapshot of success. And if you don’t follow this ten-week, little bit of info I can give you and put all of your blood and guts into it, you’re not gonna learn anything. If all you do is watch these snapshots of videos, you’re learning from 100 different people from all over the country, and they could’ve skipped and edited out, you know, “preparing a doughnut,” which I talk about all the time [in teaching wheel throwing]. No one talks about that step, and it’s hugely important. And then [students] are not learning anything, because they’re like, “Well, I watched this Hopper video…” Oh, come on, don’t do that! At Harvard, you’re talking about looking at tons of amazing videos and doing research at the museum, and you’re like, “Oh, my god, I can’t get enough of it!” But then, when we get back to the classroom, what do you do with that? So, rather than allowing the whole
ful. Everyone learns differently. I center differently than some other people may center, and going online and looking at that and figuring it out a different way could be really helpful, especially for lefties. But I think there is a danger if you’re a beginner in looking at online videos by someone who’s highly skilled and doing really advanced things with ease. And then you go to do it, and you might get a similar effect, but you don’t have the basics down, and that really shows through in that pot. KING: I think what’s unique in what we get
to do in the [Harvard] ceramics program through the academic [connection] is to [take note of] the students’ psychology as they learn here. It really is moving to watch people who are not coming from a place of a desire to work with clay, but they’re being made to, in this little lab, because they’re taking an anthropology or art history or humanities course. And I do see some people’s high anxiety. There’s a lot of “this isn’t perfect!” after a fifteen-minute try on
AUDIENCE MEMBER: How often are you all
there together, at the same time? KING: When the noise level goes up. [laughs] RAINVILLE: I travel from New Bedford four days a week up to the studio. I have to deal with my two kids’ school schedules, so my time is regimented. I blow in, do four hours of work, then leave, or teach. As I’m driving up, I wonder what has gone on in the three days I wasn’t there, over Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. And it’s always amazing to me, how much more life has happened when I’m not there. It drives me nuts [to miss it], but it is what it is.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Do you have a chance to
exchange ideas? RAINVILLE: Yeah. Stuart just gave me a piece to decorate, so we’re gonna do our first collaboration. I love doing collaborations. Mark’s gonna give me something, too, at some point. [Rainville and Burns trade glances.]
[To Burns] All my love. [laughter] BURNS: Yeah, we’ll make that happen. I think that’s important. All the work I have in the
KING: It’s really true. BURNS: So it’s really funny. You go by student work, and it’s like, “Oh, there’s something I didn’t make, but it looks like I made it,” or Stuart made it, or Seth made it. The students are trying their shoes on. That’s to be expected; all students do that till they find their own bliss and how to figure those things out. That’s been really [interesting] to watch. They’re hungry for things. KING: [Referring to Burns’s residency exhibition, From the Cerebral Dimestore, at
⊳ Seth Rainville. Contemplative Shot Cup, 2018. 4.75x 7.5x 2.5 in. Woodfired stoneware faceted brick and porcelain cup with slips and glaze. ▼ Seth Rainville. Where There Is Smoke, 2018. 10x 7x 4.5 in. Wood-fired porcelain with slips and glaze. All photographs by artist.
Studio Potter
So, can we open it up to the room? Do we have any questions, either for the group or for individuals?
show up [in the gallery now] is generated out of every single thing that the place offers. And people were dumbfounded [when they saw it], because I did this terrible thing: I didn’t let them look at anything—I hid everything [I was working on]. In the old days, it used to be this really palpable thing: “So-and-so made new work.” You couldn’t go on Instagram or social media and see it [in progress]. So I was asked to speak about making my work in public, and I said, “You need to understand, I made everything here with what this place offers. There’s no magic clay. There’s no magic glaze. There’s no magic plaster. The only magic is in here.” And I said, “So these things are available to you. They’ve been in front of you all this time.” My gift is—as any of these three other amazing individuals can give, too—is look what you can do with this if you just look to the side. That’s one thing that the [Harvard] program does: it brings in really great, diverse people who can, through gentle persuasion, we might say, get people to look to the side and figure there might be something that will push their work a little further. It’s amazing how often [students], once they got comfortable with me, would say, “I don’t know what to do next.” And I’d say, “Just move a little. You don’t have to be centrist about everything. If you don’t know how to throw, go and learn how to throw. If you don’t know how to plaster, learn plaster. These are all tools in your toolbox.” And the program has been really great about that. They have so many things in front of them that, I think, sometimes they’re overstimulated; they can’t figure out which one of the three of us they want to be. [laughter]
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the wheel. But I do think all these things give you a different perspective of how to approach [teaching], especially with [various experience] levels in one class.
⊳ ⊳ Seth Rainville. Hopi Jar, 2018. 1x 10x 10 in. Wood-fired with porcelain slip and rutile wash.
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ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION
Biographies
the Harvard ceramics program Gallery 224, October 7 – December 1, 2017] It really was mind-bending that [Mark] decided not to show any of his work [before his exhibition], because again, it’s a community environment; everybody’s sharing. Even academic environments, you can always peek in somebody’s space, and you want to see what your fellow classmate’s working on. [Mark] made a really conscious choice to act against what we see a lot on Facebook and Instagram: the piece is still hot, coming from the kiln, and it’s like, “Look at this! Look at this!” So you know what people are making, and you could almost piece together the whole show by the time the artist has the show. To put importance back into exhibiting a body of work made over a period of time—that’s really amazing. That needs to be given respect. BURNS: Well, the big Godzilla piece was the
funny one, because it’s big. Somebody who works right directly adjacent to me said, “Where did that come from?” I said, “I took it out of here every night in a plastic bag. I carried this past you, dozens of times… [laughter]
where we came from and where we’re going. I just wanted to bring some of that back, that kind of magic, that you’ve worked really hard on this thing. It’s like seeing a brand-new baby. It’s like, wow. I was surprised how many people said, “I wish I had thought of that,” or “I understand why you did that now.” But I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t think there would’ve been some use in it. There was a kind of energy about it that was really amazing, I think. And it doesn’t cut down the hallway conversations, like, “Oh, that’s cute. How’d you make that?” And then there’s a forty-five-minute conversation about strontium, and then somebody runs back and says, “I’m gonna do that too.” So, I thought, Here, this is a slice of old-school. This is how it used to be. There’s something to be said for that passion that is in a big burst, all at once. I’m really happy it worked out.
I’m really big right now on history, that we can’t forget our communal history, our collective history. That’s why I talk about Howard [Kottler] a lot, I talk about Patti [Warashina] a lot, these amazing, groundbreaking people. We can’t lose sight of
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… and you never bothered to ask me what was in that plastic bag.” [laughter]
12 ▲ From left to right: Seth Rainville, Stuart Gair, Mark Burns at Falmouth Art Center, Falmouth, Massachusetts. Photograph by Kathy King.
Kathy King is the Director of Education in the ceramics program at the Office for the Arts at Harvard. She holds a MFA in Ceramics from the University of Florida, and a BA in Studio Art from Connecticut College. Formerly an Associate Professor at Georgia State University, she has given workshops and lectures at more than seventy colleges, schools, and art centers throughout the United States. In 2017, she received a Visiting Artist Residency from the Archie Bray Foundation, Helena, Montana; the Brother Thomas Fellowship from the Boston Foundation and Pucker Gallery; and a residency at the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park in Shigaraki, Japan, from craftschools.org. kathykingart@me.com | kathykingart.com | Follow @kathykingart Mark Burns, a MFA graduate of the University of Washington, has had a long and distinguished career as a teacher and maker. He has held teaching positions all over the country, working at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Rhode Island School of Design, among others. He most recently taught at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he was head of ceramics and chair of the department. Burns’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is held in numerous public and private collections. Burns has a keen sense of ceramic history and pop culture, which he uses to express complex cultural notions of sexuality and identity. markburns0591@gmail.com | Follow @markburns0591 Stuart Gair received his MFA in ceramics from University of Nebraska, Lincoln, in 2017, and his BAS in history at Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, where he also completed post-baccalaureate work in ceramics. Gair has been a summer resident at Archie Bray Foundation, Helena, Montana, and an Artist in Residence at the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Newcastle, Maine. He was recently featured in the March 2018 Harvard Ceramics Gallery exhibition HandCode: Makers in Proximity, exhibiting collaborations with Geoff Booras, an artist working in 3-D-printed ceramics. stuartgairceramics@gmail.com | stuartgair.com | Follow @stuartgair Seth Rainville is a potter, educator, and curator living in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Rainville received his BFA from University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He has taught at multiple programs, including Falmouth Art Center and South County Art Association, and has held the title of Curator/ Exhibitions Coordinator at the New Bedford Art Museum. Rainville sits on the advisory board of Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts and formerly sat on the advisory board of the Arizona State University Ceramic Research Center in Tempe, Arizona. sethrainvillehome@gmail.com | sethrainvillehome.com | Follow @sethrainville
HIGHER ED
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Community I
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BY FRED HERBST
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in the United States have had a mixed reputation, often seen as lesser institutions than four-year colleges and universities, with students incapable of getting accepted to those schools. Popular media has fed into this misconception, a prime example being the sitcom NBC’s Community, which featured a band of misfit students and their juvenile escapades (there was even an episode about a beginner pottery class). ommunity colleges
In reality, students’ experiences at community colleges are rich and complex. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (nces.ed.gov) 5.9 million students were enrolled in the fall of 2016 at public two-year colleges. While this is a significant number, it gives little indication of the diversity of the average community college. The mission of these institutions is to accept and educate all students. They might be high-achieving high school graduates whose families can’t afford the tens of thousands of dollars it costs to attend a university for a year; veterans on the G.I. Bill; or laid-off workers returning to school for job retraining. The mix of ages,
genders, life experiences, races, and all other demographics can make the community college classroom an incredibly varied and dynamic learning and teaching environment. What does this mean for ceramics in higher education? The top university ceramics programs have been established for quite some time, but high-quality ceramics education at community colleges has been gaining momentum. My theory as to why is that few teaching positions in larger university ceramics programs are available, so a large number of qualified applicants are competing for a small number of jobs. Many of those high-quality candidates are hired to
lead community college ceramics programs instead and bring the same energy and rigor to their community college courses that they would to a university program. There are numerous ceramics programs of high quality at such community colleges as Brookhaven College and Collin College in Texas, College of the Redwoods in California, Montgomery County Community College in Pennsylvania, Kirkwood Community College in Iowa, Lane Community College and Mt. Hood Community College in Oregon, and Waubonsee Community College in Illinois. The list gets longer each year. These programs expose students to experiences in clay early in their education, and that exposure often leads to a career in ceramics. Since the fall of 2000, I have led the ceramics program at Corning Community College (CCC) in Corning, New York. Teaching hundreds of students over the last eighteen years has reinforced my belief in the importance of community colleges to the future of the ceramics field. Because of CCC’s core mission of serving not only its students but also the surrounding community, I have been able to invite local artists to work with my students in ways that might have been much more difficult at a traditional university program. From the beginning of my tenure at CCC, I wanted to have a wood-fired kiln as a key part of my students’ experiences. In 2003, we invited wood-fire potter Simon Levin to our campus to build an anagama. Why would a community college need a kiln with the capacity to hold 600-700 pots and one that requires two days to load and up to four days to complete a firing? As a teacher at 13
▲ Fred Herbst. Earth Wave, 2017. 10x10x4 in. Press-molded, anagama-fired stoneware. Photograph by Molly Cagwin.
▲ Simon Levin is assisted up the side berm during the construction of the anagama kiln at Corning Community College, Corning, New York, in 2003. Photograph by Dr. Robert Tichane. ⊲ Corning Community College Library and Learning Commons, Holt Architects, 2015.
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▼ Vases by Corning Community College student Rob Sheldon from a 2008 anagama firing; 9x5x5 in. each. Photograph by artist.
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Brookhaven College in Dallas, I had learned that wood-firing was the best way to ensure that students from other institutions and area artists would participate in firings. Since the anagama and a second, smaller wood-kiln were built at CCC, my beginning students have benefited profoundly from working with a variety of artists, who each have more than twenty years of ceramics experience. The processes of handling and discussing work, loading kilns, preparing wood, stoking kilns, and telling stories at two in the morning around the firebox are not only well outside the typical classroom interactions, but also become life-changing experiences. This environment creates vital, direct learning and human connection. Creating an open and welcoming studio environment is one of my most important jobs as an educator. The studio provides a haven for students to be themselves and share with others, that is particularly true
for those whose personal communities (religious, ethnic, racial, and sexual- and gender-identity-based) are being targeted in our highly partisan culture. I work hard to create an atmosphere that changes students’ perceptions, that opens their eyes. Recently, I saw how this atmosphere can bring about change when a female student from Pakistan and a white male student from rural western New York shared a table during class. Their sitting and working together went a long way to breaking down the stereotypes they had of one another, allowing them to see each other simply as human beings. Developing safe spaces for real interactions has become a critical part of my teaching practice. My key message is that each person is significant and has an important role in making art and making change. The reality of living in a divided country with opposing viewpoints and constant, senseless fighting needs an antidote. The community college studio and all group-dependent studios have the potential to be spaces where humanizing interactions can take place, leading the way toward a more peaceful, connected planet. Take the time to seek out those spaces, and support them however you can. BIO Fred Herbst is Professor of Art and Chair of the Humanities Department at Corning Community College in Corning, New York. Among his achievements is working with the Corning Museum of Glass to create a hybrid wood-fired kiln design that allows for firing ceramics and blowing glass simultaneously. herbst@corning-cc.edu fredherbst.com Follow @fredthreestones
K–12
THE STATE OF CLAY EDUCATION
I have become increasingly aware of an issue that has potential to upset the future of clay in America. Each year the number of art educators leaving the classroom to enjoy their well-deserved retirement rises. According to a study by the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF), fifty percent of the K-12 educators in the United States are slated to retire in the next ten years, which constitutes the largest exodus of experienced teachers from the workforce in the history of our country. With the departure of these veterans ver the past five years
goes their knowledge of how to overcome the technical challenges that surround teaching ceramics in the classroom. I firmly believe that, as ceramic artists, it is our responsibility to fill this looming knowledge gap and help support the next generation of educators teach clay in the classroom, inspiring the future ceramic artists of America.
The Challenge
The number of students earning a college degree in education is at an all-time low:
4.2 percent of incoming university students plan to major in education, down from 9.9 percent ten years ago. This decline, compounded with the increasing number of retirees, is creating a large pedagogical void, which in turn is leading to the recruitment of people with less traditional credentials. For example, someone with a degree in painting could be hired to teach art to 500 elementary school students once a week. But without an art education background, that person might not be equipped to teach a broad range of art mediums. In
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BY STEPHEN CREECH
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K–12 artroom supply closets, kilns gather dust, unfired since their predecessors left long ago. Sadly, these kilns will remain cold and dusty unless we, as a ceramics community, build community networks and connect with local educators and businesses to support the growth and development of clay in local schools.
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Opportunity
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We—ceramists of all backgrounds—can help revitalize programs and improve the quality of the ceramics experiences for students by supporting teachers’ development in the medium. We know the value of ceramics in everyday life and have an opportunity to share this appreciation, fostering it in the hearts and minds of our local educators. If we can engage students as a result, we might secure a lasting appreciation for ceramics. Most K-12 students don’t have an opportunity to meet a studio potter, let alone to use clay. Exposure has the potential to allow them to see ceramics as a medium for artistic expression and as a viable career. Bill Strickland, a pioneer in community arts education who began his career at the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild in Pittsburgh, once said, ”Exposing a young person to new possibilities [is] seventy percent of the battle to change their future.” It is up to us to show young students the value and benefits of using ceramics at an early age. Worth noting is that where there is not a lack of ceramic education and exposure, we can still offer support for and contribute to the quality of the ceramics instruction through elevating the level of teachers’ ceramics prowess.
Call to Arms
Knowing where to begin the effort to ensure the continuation (or existence) of a quality ceramics education at the K-12 school level might be difficult. Starting the conversation with local and regional art teachers is always the first step. Ask your local clay supplier if they know of any art educators that you might be able to assist. Alternatively, a quick Internet search will turn up the art educator at your local school, and then you can connect with them via email or social media. Once in contact, ask if the educator would be interested in having you come to their class as a guest artist, demonstrator, or lecturer. Most teachers will rejoice at the thought of having someone visit their classes who has expertise and professional experience as an artist. You could also volunteer to train them on firing kilns, answer technical questions about clays and glazes, or provide ideas for future projects. Teachers work hard and spend a lot of time planning for each day; getting extra support from you might ensure that they include clay in their curriculum that semester. Initiating a dialogue and becoming active in your local school system could open doors for you as well. You may find that your local school doesn’t have an art teacher and consider applying for that position. According to a 2016 report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there will be 34,440 open K-12 teaching positions in the arts over the next six years—that’s a lot of opportunities for ceramic artists to have a direct impact in the classroom. The greatest influence we can have on the future of ceramics is to become
a teacher, wherever that may be. If that opportunity presents itself, feel empowered to take on that important role! I encourage you all as ceramic artists, to seize these opportunities by engaging with your local and regional school systems to help bridge the technical knowledge gap of ceramics, and to ensure that art educators nurture the creativity of America’s future studio potters. RESOURCES •
The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future. Unraveling the “Teacher Shortage” Problem: Teacher Retention is the Key (2002). https://nctaf.org/teacher-turnover-cost-calculator/ nctaf-research-reports/
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Bureau of Labor Statistics. Teaching For A Living by Dennis Vilorio (June 2016). https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2016/article/ education-jobs-teaching-for-a-living.htm
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Who Will Teach? Experience Matters by Thomas G. Carroll and Elizabeth Foster (January 2010). https://nctaf.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/NCTAFWho-Will-Teach-Experience-Matters-2010-Report.pdf
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National Education Association. Survey: Number of Future Teachers Reaches All-time Low by Mary Ellen Flannery (March 2016). http://neatoday.org/2016/03/15/future-teachers-atall-time-low/
BIO Stephen Creech is originally from Mt. Sterling, Kentucky, and currently lives in Indianapolis, Indiana, with his wife and cat. He earned his Bachelor of Arts from Morehead State University, and as a practicing ceramist, focuses on slipcast utilitarian objects. Creech is co-founder of National Clay Week and Director of Marketing at AMACO-Brent. stephencreech@gmail.com stephencreech.com Follow @creechoftheeast
K–12
u t r n e e s v in d A Rebuilding a High School Clay Program BY SARA TRUMAN
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I started my undergraduate career in the fall of 1999 as an art education major at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky. My decision to pursue art education stemmed from my experiences in high school and from the close relationship I had with my high school art teacher, Sharon Brown. She was nearing retirement and told me that I would be a wonderful K-12 teacher— and possibly her replacement. When the art program expanded during my senior year and a second art teacher joined the faculty, I got the opportunity to assist with the introductory art class and to earn an independent study credit. Armed with this budding teaching experience and Mrs. Brown’s blessing, I entered the art education program at WKU.
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Why I didn’t want to teach high school.
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K–12 After two years of coursework, I returned to my high school to complete my practicum hours. Something had changed. The students, no longer my peers, were frustrating to work with—they seemed lazy and apathetic. I couldn’t relate to them, to their behavior. I was extremely discouraged. By contrast, my studio art classes in college were exciting and a respite from my practicum. After spring break, I changed my major to studio arts and entered the BFA program. I knew I did not want to spend my days educating teenagers.
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Where my adventures in education took me.
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I took the scenic route through undergrad, ultimately finishing in the spring of 2007 with a double BFA in painting and ceramics. Then I set up a studio in an old building in downtown Bowling Green with some fellow graduates, and we spent a year making art. At the end of that year, I didn’t know enough about making pots or making a living as a studio potter to rely on it as my sole income source. Being able to quit my restaurant job seemed impossible. In 2008, I moved to Gainesville, Florida, to attend the University of Florida’s post-baccalaureate program. Things fell into place for me at UF. Every week, Linda Arbuckle, my professor (and clay hero), and I talked about pots, form, and surface, and it was thrilling. During that one year, I was accepted into graduate school, made several lifelong friendships, and most importantly met my wife, Naomi, a ceramic certificate student.
In my first year of graduate study at the University of Mississippi, I was the teaching assistant for Associate Professor Matt Long, then taught an introductory ceramics class on my own for two semesters. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed teaching and the way in which it energized my making in the studio. After graduating in 2012, I joined the LUX Center for the Arts in Lincoln, Nebraska, as a resident artist. At the center, I developed my work and managed the studio, but it was my teaching experiences in the Lincoln community that defined that year for me. I taught ceramics at homes for the elderly, in elementary after-school programs, in community-center adult education programs, and in community colleges as an adjunct. The education director of the LUX Center of Arts and I worked together to update its curriculum. We adapted some of the strategies that I had learned through teaching courses in graduate school to fit what we could do in an hour-long community class. The experience helped me to think about the unique ways in which each classroom flows and what each class needs in an educator.
How I started teaching high school. Naomi and I moved back to Gainesville in 2013 so that she could begin the accelerated nursing program at the University of Florida. Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU) in Fort Myers hired me as a one-year sabbatical replacement in ceramics. I stayed with my parents in Fort Myers during the week and
What my day looked like. My first year teaching at GHS was a parttime position (sixty-percent time) with full benefits. I taught three classes a day and had one planning period. The full-time teacher had retired a few years earlier, and by the time a few part-time people had rotated
⊳ View of Truman's wheel and work area, Studio T/M, Gainsville, Florida. ⊳ ⊳ Keyontee Patterson learns wheel throwing in the Ceramics 1 class at Gainsville High School, 2018. All photographs by author.
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an impromptu interview. They asked me what was the largest number of students I had ever had in a class and repeatedly asked if I was sure I was ready to teach high school students. I proudly reported that my most recent group had been twenty-eight in the advanced class at FGCU; they both laughed. I had no idea what I was getting into.
through the room, it had seen better days. Built in 1999 as an addition to a very old school building, the room had been designed by the last full-time teacher to accommodate Advanced Placement art portfolio students. Half the room was occupied by high-top drafting tables, the other half by low tables on casters. There were no potter’s wheels, no ware carts, and almost no clay. Taped to the kiln was a note from the previous teacher saying that the kiln wasn’t reaching temperature and she didn’t know why. Luckily, in my graduate program I had learned kiln maintenance and repair. There isn’t much I can’t fire or fix. Repairing the kiln was the easiest task in those first few weeks. Many days, I went home in tears after my last class. It was the most challenging work of my career, before or since. Teaching thirty first graders in an after-school clay club in Nebraska is nothing compared to teaching thirty-nine teenagers in a Florida high school day in and day out. After a few weeks and many meltdowns (both mine and theirs), we somehow got down to making with no budget and so little clay that by the second nine-week period I was almost completely out—and there were two more periods to go. Fortunately the University of Florida had tons (literally) of unclaimed student clay. I brought it into class and recycled it in five-gallon buckets. With this supply of clay, my assignments had fewer constraints. If it fit in the kiln, I could fire it. That first year, I had thirty-three ceramic students in Introduction to Ceramics and Ceramics 2 and almost forty students in Art 1, the introductory art course. Most students in Art 1 did not want to be there, and they
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made the four-hour trek up I-75 every other weekend to be with Naomi. When the year was over, Naomi and I were no longer willing to live apart. She had finished her nursing program, been hired as a nurse at a local hospital, and accepted into the doctorate of nursing program. This meant we would be staying in Gainesville. I had no idea what I was going to do for work. I applied for all kinds of jobs, from waiting tables (which I had done all through undergrad and after) to bagging groceries at Trader Joe’s. Every employer told me I was overqualified because I had a graduate degree. It seemed insane. How—after three degrees and two successful teaching positions—could I be unemployable? Neither the university nor the community college was hiring. After several weeks, Naomi suggested that I search for a job at a high school. I was sure that area high schools no longer offered art courses, much less ceramics courses, but I decided to look up the local school district job listings. . . and there it was. Posted that morning was a part-time ceramics teaching position at Gainesville High School. When I called the school, the nicest man answered the phone and told me they were interviewing that day, so I should come down to the high school immediately. I printed the application packet I’d used to apply for university positions, drove to the school, and walked into the principal’s office. He was surprised—it turned out that one of the janitors had answered the phone, and the school was not interviewing candidates that day. Nevertheless, the principal looked over my packet and invited the assistant principal of curriculum to sit in on
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let me know it every day. I was lucky to have support from the other art teacher, who was in her fourth year of teaching there and who, like me, had taught at the college level. She came down during her planning period to support me through my most challenging class, and gave me all her assignments for Art 1 so that we could pace our students together. She also helped me navigate the school system. I don’t know how I would have gotten through without her. The first year flew by. At the end I wasn’t sure I wanted to teach another year. The school wanted me back and to give me more classes. I am now in my fourth year at GHS. Our tiny program that had a questionable future now has more than 200 students enrolled and a waiting list. I teach all six periods a day with no planning period and have at least thirty students in every class. In the past three years, we have purchased pottery wheels, ware carts, and a new kiln and installed proper kiln ventilation. We are about to update the wiring in a former storage room to accommodate a new pug mill, which will help us recycle clay more efficiently. Some of my former students have entered college ceramics programs. Others are taking elective ceramics courses so that they can satisfy their passion for clay while working on degrees in other subjects. Most importantly, their experiences learning ceramics in high school have made them better creative thinkers and much better problem solvers. My class informs my students’ other classes in ways they might never know. And my class gives students in magnet programs that are highly challenging academically time to decompress.
How I support my community of makers and district art teachers. A few weeks into my first year of teaching high school, Diana Faris from AMACO contacted me about teaching ceramics education workshops for art educators in the area. She needed someone to host the event and twenty teachers to sign up. After discussing it with the district curriculum specialist and the GHS principal, I arranged for the school to be the host. The workshop was a success. The teachers who attended all seemed to love it, and got the chance to meet and discuss ceramics with other local art teachers. Many wanted to teach clay but didn’t have the necessary equipment or tools, some taught clay but had questions about processes or materials, and a few just needed help in firing their kiln.
This first teacher workshop generated such interest that I have taught one every fall since, with AMACO as a sponsor. Every year at our back-to-school meeting, I take a poll of what my fellow art teachers across the district want to learn and then prepare a workshop to suit their needs. This year, I shared lesson plans that included how each of us can incorporate clay into the classroom. I prepared an informational packet for each attendee so they could refresh their memory when they use the lesson plans months later. I also address materials use and classroom studio safety, detailing proper methods for recycling clay and storing or disposing of hazardous materials. At the end of the year, programs that are unable to recycle clay transport it to my school, where we do it at the start of the following year. Working with our district facilities management department, we are working to ensure kilns in all classrooms are ventilated properly. My second year at GHS, I started teaching community classes in another potter’s studio. Many of my students were teachers that had taken the AMACO workshops. In 2016, when I had enough students, my wife and I opened our own studio. Studio T/M Pottery and Clay offers small community classes, girls’ nights, date nights, kids’ classes, workshops, and a one-year studio assistantship. I consistently have several district teachers in my classes. By developing their ceramics skills, they are able to increase the number of clay projects in their school programs and their teaching practices are improved. Two of my studio members now volunteer in district classrooms to assist art teachers during the year.
Why I teach high school. When I was teaching at FGCU, I took some students to their first NCECA conference. That year Theaster Gates was the keynote speaker. Admittedly, I didn’t know he is a well-known social practice and installation artist before the lecture that night. I spent the rest of the week talking about his amazingly inspiring speech every chance I got. These conversations with my peers about diversity in ceramics were exciting, and I felt they were sincere in their desire to respond to his message in a meaningful way. When I got back to FGCU, I looked at the composition of my student body with new eyes, and I was struck by what I saw. Although there were several Latino students in my classes, most of my students were white. GHS is located in the middle of Gainesville, and because of the magnet programs and our county school choice program, the student body is diverse. But my first ceramics class was still mostly white. The previous teacher had set prerequisites for the Introduction to Ceramics classes that required students to complete Art 1 and 2 first. Students also had to have a recommendation from their Art 1 or 2 teacher to move to the next class. I am opposed to prerequisites for any introductory course, college or K-12; the point of an introductory course is that it is the first. At the end of the year, we removed prerequisites from the intro ceramics class. This decision changed everything. The second year, my classes doubled in size and started to reflect the diversity of our school and community. Friends of my students started wandering into the room to
matter if students had art classes before they got to my class because they are all learning together to use their hands to create. With their hands busy, they are less likely to be distracted and to distract each other. They can get up and move freely around the room, which is a welcome change from their lecture-based courses.
⊳ Preston Beckner throws on the wheel during the Advanced Ceramics class at Gainsville High School, 2017. ⊳ ⊳ A view of the Gainsville High School student art show, 2018.
What we need for the future.
see what we were working on. My colleague and I revived the year-end student art show. We found display walls and pedestals stored in the back room; students painted them and patched the damaged spots. When the show was up, other teachers brought their classes to view what our students had accomplished. The year-end shows give my students a sense of pride in their work and get other kids interested in the art classes. It lets colleagues see what the students do in my room every day. There’s a potluck reception for the show, to which the students bring their families and a dish to share that reflects their culture. The potluck truly celebrates the students’ accomplishments. I see clay as a great equalizer for our students; it evens the playing field. It doesn’t
When I get frustrated or things feel impossible (and they still do sometimes), I recall Theaster Gates’s lecture and revisit his online TED talks. I am continually seeking answers to the question, how can we expand the field and make it more inclusive? I am doing what I can to build a more diverse clay community. In addition to updating equipment and safety, enrollment expansion, and student art shows, I’ve created an after-school Clay Club, established a visiting artists program, and partnered with university professors in offering scholarships. With college clay and art programs being cut across the nation because of low enrollment numbers and even lower funding, the clay community needs to re-evaluate its approach to recruiting students in both K-12 and higher education. Introducing students to clay in the K-12 system will lead to more demand for college clay programs. Fostering interest in clay in schools with a diverse range of students will result in more diverse collegiate clay programs (and colleges in general for that matter). Ultimately, what we teach from elementary school on will make the clay community representative of the multicultural world we live in.
BIO Sara Truman is a ceramic artist and educator living in Gainesville, Florida. She teaches ceramics at Gainesville High School. She is co-owner of Studio T/M Pottery & Clay, which serves as her studio space, in addition to offering community classes and a one-year studio assistantship. sbtruman@gmail.com studiotmceramics.com Follow @studiotmceramics 21
K–12
m e.”
Founded to Showcase the Best: A HISTORY OF THE NATIONAL K-12 CERAMIC EXHIBITION FOUNDATION
ill t , h t w i e y ild
“If you bu
co
BY BOB FEDER
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ORIGINS
Before 1990, in the founding members’ earliest years together, our group had no formal identity and plenty of frustration with the lack of support for the kindergarten through grade twelve ceramic education environments. We began to ask for support from the NCECA board. Lee Burningham, then a ceramic arts teacher in Utah, remembers us asking NCECA board members in 1991, “Why isn’t K-12 ceramics represented at NCECA? And how should the importance of the K-12 ceramics programs across the country be best showcased?” Their answer: “NCECA is member-driven. If you want it, you need to make it happen.” We solicited
feedback from attendees of the conferences in Cincinnati, New Orleans, and Minneapolis, ending in Rochester in 1996. Our goals seemed reasonable to us, but we were getting nowhere. We sought: 1. Breakout sessions that included K-12 ceramic education 2. Some K-12 clay programming for teachers seeking to improve their teaching 3. An event for lots of teachers that related to K-12 ceramic education 4. A dedicated space and support for a K-12 ceramic exhibition 5. A special interest group for communications, planning, and board representation At a frustrating K-12 strategy meeting during the 1996 NCECA in Rochester, Leah Pierce, an inspired K-12 art teacher at Ursuline Academy in Dallas, slammed her hand down and said, “That’s it, I’m not waiting. We’re gonna have a show in Dallas.” Lee Birmingham later commented, “Talk about a perfect challenge to a bunch of stubborn, disparate, and highly motivated ceramics school teachers.”
Two years later in 1998, Leah created the first K-12 exhibition. She remembers, “I was inspired by and blown away by the activities the K-12 teachers were doing in the classroom, and I knew my colleagues and I were doing wonderful things with our students. The members of NCECA needed to see what college graduates were bringing out in their ceramics students once they entered into teaching. I took to heart the importance that ideas must come from the members of NCECA. “I mentioned my dream to one of my trusted Ursuline nuns, Sister Dolores Marie. She was so supportive, and reminded me of the words of Saint Angela Merici, our patron saint: ‘Act, Move, Do Something, and you will behold wonderful things.’ She and those words encouraged me. “I mentioned the exhibit idea to the NCECA 1998 conference organizer, Dan Hammett, at a planning meeting, and he told me to do my homework, find out how to run an exhibit, and he would help. He sent Rick Parsons to Ursuline to help teach ceramics, and
⊳ Haley Martin, Northridge High School, Layton, Utah. Red Teapot Set, 2018. 6.5x17x5.5 in. Wheel-thrown, altered, carved, layered underglaze. Winner of three awards at the 21st Annual National K-12 Ceramics Exhibition, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. All photographs courtesy of the author and The National K-12 Ceramics Exhibiton Foundation, Inc. ▼ Katarina Breffeilh, Bridgewater-Raritan High School, Bridgewater, New Jersey. Octopus Teapot, 2013. 17x11x10 in. Hand built with underglaze and glaze; fired to Cone 06 in oxidation. Winner of three awards at the 16th Annual National K-12 Ceramics Exhibition, Houston, Texas.
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Every year in this exhibition, top ceramic art students from around the country honor their teachers and the ceramic tradition with new work that exceeds even the expectations of the show’s founders, board of directors, supporters, and volunteers. Val Cushing, the exhibition juror in 2004, has said its best work was “better than much of the work being done in graduate programs nationwide.” The show is magical and because it is sustained annually, the magic returns every year.
THE EXHIBITION BEGINS
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from the movie Field of Dreams is exactly what now happens each year at the Annual National K-12 Ceramic Exhibition. Thousands of people walk through what has come to be known as “the k12clay show,” held annually in whatever city is hosting the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA). This unique show has become a crowd favorite among hundreds of exhibits going on during the conference. Surprised newcomers typically utter, “Oh, I can’t believe a kid made that.” hat famous prediction
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K–12
BIO Dr. Bob Feder is the founding president of the National K-12 Ceramic Exhibition Foundation (k12clay), and credits the extraordinarily generous trustees and donors who helped move k12clay from fantasy to national tradition. His work with k12clay perfectly complements his fortyfour years teaching ceramic art, computer science, cultural ceramics, and social studies to pre-k through college students in Bridgewater-Raritan Schools and Raritan Valley College in New Jersey. bobfeder@k12clay.org k12clay.org
with Rick's help, I began the very first K-12 exhibit, with Don Reitz as juror in a small gallery on the University of Dallas campus. Don Reitz had come to Dallas to give a talk to St. Marks School of Texas, and he was happy to help.” Leah’s format for that first show was beautifully designed and emblematic of her concise and symbolic thinking. The show still uses Leah’s original design elements and oversight strategy. Our early successes created expectations that, in turn, created an increasingly stressful workload. At one point Leah was hospitalized because of cardiac stress. Our group fell in line to help her and to sustain the exhibition despite having little to no budget and few human resources. Originally, picking works for the exhibition was a labor-intensive jurying process that involved mailing hundreds of slides of student work to jurors and finding several host teachers and exhibition sites in the city where the annual NCECA conference was being held. Later on, we switched to using a centralized exhibition space and a web-based jury process.
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BIG CHANGES
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By 2001 I could not imagine us sustaining our work if we did not gain a reliable income and create an organization to make the work manageable. Leah agreed that Lee and I could reach out to the public for funding. During NCECA in Charlotte, North Carolina,
that year, we first approached Jim Skutt. Lee gestured to me and said to Jim, “Howdy. He’s the mouth, I’m the muscle, do what he says.” Lee is an enormous and happy man, and Jim agreed to my request for a thousand dollars a year for the rest of his life. Jim sent us to talk with Rick MacPherson of Aardvark, then Richard Arnfeld of Spectrum, and eventually Kenton Oakes of Creative Industries. By the end of the day, we had a total annual commitment of $4,500. We had established a budget and could start to become sustainable. We didn’t have an official organization that could accept the money, so we offered it to NCECA if they would sponsor a room and manage the funds. Much to our surprise, the NCECA board turned us down again, officially. After that decision, though, we got plenty of encouragement from Linda Arbuckle, Elaine Henry, and Anna Callourl Holcombe, all of whom told us not to give up. We left Charlotte motivated. Using a pro bono attorney, we created the documents for The National K-12 Ceramic Exhibition Foundation, Incorporated, and became a legally registered New Jersey corporation, which promptly billed our donors and got to work. We met formally at the Kansas City NCECA in 2002, elected officers, and began seeking a permanent structure to stage what Leah had designed. We applied to the Federal government for
501(c)(3) tax-exempt status with the following statement: The National K-12 Ceramic Exhibition is an annual juried ceramic competition for Kindergarten through Grade 12 (K-12) students in the United States. Designed to showcase the best K-12 ceramic work made in the country, the exhibition takes place in a different city each year in conjunction with the annual conference of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA). We built our foundation on that simple goal and structured our fund-raising on a “forever” basis, which meant that we sought only lifetime-commitment donations. We began to design our system to honor the teachers, the students, and the programs that support them. Our board of trustees included Steve Branfman, Paula Marian, and Clay Sewell. Leah and Lee became our vice presidents. Shortly after, Kenton Oakes, president of Creative Industries, joined our board and took over for me as secretary/treasurer, and I became president. Subsequently joining as board members were Judith Schwartz, Jim Connell, Susan Connine, Kevin Tundstall, Billie Sessions, and Barbara Sather. Keith Brockie was the first person to participate at every level; he was a student in the show who became a K-12 teacher, then a college professor, joined our board, and is now responsible for our print advertising program. THE SURPRISE IN BALTIMORE
By 2005 when the exhibition opened in Baltimore, it had grown and had growing pains, too. The work included large and
K12CLAY 2.0, 2008 TO 2018
In 2008, Lee was able to find a shipping agent, Glen Frick, the owner of the
Minnesota-based On Target Professionals, to centralize all the shipping for the exhibition and deliver it all at once, right to the exhibition floor, on time to the minute. Our lives changed. Glen so impressed the board, we invited him to become a trustee. In 2009, Kenton sold Creative Industries to Walt Glazer of Speedball, who agreed to continue the company’s commitment to supporting the Grand Prize, a professional potter’s wheel given to the best wheel worker in the k12clay exhibition. Glen took over as our treasurer. He had expertise in website management, and he took on that additional role for k12clay. Nancy joined our board as a trustee and eventually became chair of the Scholarship Committee, while helping Leah with our printing needs. In 2011, a bright and energetic ceramic artist and teacher, Nicole Dubrow, of Black
⊳ Kayla Baptiste, Elsik High School, Houston, Texas. Treasure, 2018. 4x4x8 in. Carved floral patterns with gold-enamled rim. Winner of two scholarship awards at the 21st Annual National K-12 Ceramics Exhibition, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. ▼ Aubrey DucharmeBrown, Wind River High School, Pavillion, Wyoming. Teapot and Cups, 2018. 12x12x15 in. Wheel thrown and decorated with underglaze pencils. Winner of one award and one scholarship award at the 21st Annual National K-12 Ceramics Exhibition, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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“I left the convention quite moved by what this very dedicated group was doing, and I vowed on the ride home that our family would get involved. After discussion with my family, the Scholarship Fund was created with the mission statement: The inspiration for the creation of these initial gifts was to honor the vision, dedication, and efforts of the ceramic educators, the students they mentor, and the many volunteers nationwide affiliated with bringing the National K-12 Ceramic Exhibition Foundation and its dream of having a scholarship fund to fruition.” The following year we gave out our first Ernst Family Scholarship and scholarships in memory of Jared Branfman and Lucy Roy. The Ingrid Mahan Foundation (established by Nancy’s mother and father) stepped up with a major grant, which came with instructions “to NOT put the money in a fund and use the interest for scholarships.” Instead she advised, “Spend the money on something you need. Don’t you need something? What do you need?” When I told her we needed a website, she replied, “Then go buy a website.” In addition, she sponsored a renewable scholarship for a deserving student. Our board reached out to Stephen Lewicki of L&L Kilns to serve as a trustee and chief corporate recruiter. He helped us work with Brent, Amaco, Olympic, Shimpo, Brackers and others to improve our sustainability. Geoff Flash, Richard Burkett, the Orton Foundation, Bailey, and Paragon all signed on to help us.
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spectacular pieces that took tremendous effort to ship, store, reclaim, set up, and then ship back to the schools. Teachers were shipping work improperly, without return shipping and with a wide variety of carriers. The previous year, Lee recalls, problems with shipping had “reached a nadir.” He says, “Packages were placed behind a boiler in the host school and only found late in the run of the exhibition. The close of the show, with rain pouring down and me hauling a large wheeled garbage tote filled with boxed entries through the streets of Indianapolis provided plenty of motivation to never have to go through a similarly frustrating situation ever again.” We struggled with these problems and others while continuing to raise our standards and solicit funds. Then an unexpected bounty came to us through Nancy Ernst. She recalls how she became involved: “Our family affiliation with the National K-12 Exhibition Foundation, Inc., began at Baltimore, when I attended my first NCECA. There I viewed the works submitted by students and met the organization members that were behind putting on this blow-away show. The work that year was stellar, with many large-scale pieces— breathtaking, and by high school students!” Nancy goes on: “I offered to help behind the tables and asked my long-time friend Bob Feder if I could trail him on the convention floor to help me understand his promotion model and requests for support to sustain this event. Bob also shared with me his dream that k12clay would one day be able to offer scholarships for deserving students and recognize the teachers as well, with the hope of sending the best students to the best ceramics college programs nationwide.
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K–12
the “Somehow, MAGIC
this dynamic exhibition generates seems to come back to us in generously unexpected ways.
arts education and with us at k12clay. Sierra Nevada College professor Rick Parsons, our first show’s co-curator along with Leah, came full circle by offering a similar high-value scholarship. Dick Wukich, Dan Hammett, the NCECA board under Josh Green, Jack Troy, and many others have created awards to honor Reggie Brown, Daniel Rhodes, Cushing, and Mary Bowron. And the list goes on—too many to mention them all here. Bryan Vansell of Laguna and the Spanish ceramics company SiO-2 stepped up to offer support beyond our Founder level ($1,000 a year forever), and we were surprised by donations from several others, such as the Burkholder Family Foundation, and gallery owner and artist, Jonathan Kaplan. LOOKING FORWARD
None of the founders of k12clay ever dreamed that we would be where we are now, twenty-five years later. Somehow, the magic this dynamic exhibition generates seems to come back to us in generously in unexpected ways. The NCECA board has made great strides regarding K-12 ceramic arts education, which makes us proud to work confidently into the future to support students and teachers across the nation. We work tirelessly to fulfill our founding mission and have become stronger through sharing our collective aspirations and common goals with the rest of the ceramic arts community. Today we seek the support of all who share these goals. Though we cannot always see where that support will lead us, we have all thoroughly enjoyed the journey, and look forward to seeing our teachers, students, supporters, and friends celebrate the magic with us year after year.
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Sheep Pottery in Pennsylvania, joined our board, improving our efficiency and innovation significantly. (Four years later, she became our secretary.) Together, these improvements have created a submission rate of more than 1,100 entries annually for adjudication. Our website and custom software system enables jurors to easily review and select the work and enables us to manage the process sustainably. Recent jurors claim our adjudication system is the best they’ve seen. In 2012, with the help and guidance of trustee Judith Schwartz and her earlier work on “The Case for Clay in K-12 Arts Education” conference at New York University, we published the final portion of what we see as part of our three-part mission: The Seattle Initiative. It specified aspects of our desire to promote ceramic arts learning, exhibit the best new work each year, and provide scholarships for students who want to continue to study ceramics. Since our founding trustees had been at this work for many years, we enlisted new trustees, including Barrett Ellis, Jerry Hendershot, Amie Larson, Robert LaWarre III, Cat Traen, Sean Burns, Nick Tomasic, Andrew Denney, Marko Biddle, and Russell Kahn. They are assuming responsibility for a program that exceeded our original expectations and continues to serve our mission: to help students and their teachers learn ceramics and benefit from their contact with us. Kansas City Art Institute raised the bar by offering at first four and now five scholarships, each with a value of more than $88,000. At the 2018 Pittsburgh NCECA, Alfred University joined them in offering a full tuition award in the name of Val Cushing, who was instrumental early on in American ceramic
26 ⊳ Daniel Beck, Waterford School, Sandy, Utah. Three Bottles, 2014. 9x18x19 in. Stoneware, Cone 10. Winner of three awards at the 17th Annual National K-12 Ceramics Exhibition, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
K–12 JOY JONES
Ceramic Art Teacher, Wind River High School, Pavillion, Wyoming joyjonesceramics@gmail.com joyjclay.com, Follow @joyjonesceramics
K12CLAY
ANNE MAURICE
Department Chair of Visual Arts, and the ceramics teacher at Marin Academy, San Rafael, California annemaurice.ceramics@gmail.com amaurice27.wixsite.com/website
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December, my ceramic students get excited to apply to the National K-12 Ceramic Exhibition, which often goes by the shorthand name of “k12clay.” They encourage one another and students who don’t think their work is strong enough to enter. About a month after the deadline, they start asking if I have heard any positive news. We have been very fortunate to have at least one entry accepted each year. In 2015, we were all astounded when six works were accepted and three received awards, including the Artistic Achievement Award. Students were stunned that their work had been recognized and honored. This really boosted their confidence and self-esteem. They very year in
felt affirmed, heartened, and very grateful. In the months that followed, I could see that these students started to have more faith and belief in their own talent and strengths. They were becoming more reflective and independent, relying less on my instruction and guidance. Their pieces became stronger because they were taking more risks and making thoughtful decisions on their own. The true joy of teaching comes in knowing you can step back and watch your students experience a flow of creativity as they become more autonomous and empowered by their learning. After these students graduated, they chose non-art majors and found they weren’t able to take classes in the art programs at their colleges. But, when they visited me, many shared their excitement in having found a way to continue working in clay. Some students set up a co-op, others purchased a used wheel to use at home, and still others took a class off campus. They all found ways to return to a joyful time in their lives and keep their love of ceramics alive.
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Teacher Reflections on
when I learned that my student had been awarded an $80,000 scholarship to KCAI. I remember standing there, blinking in disbelief as tears welled up in my eyes. I was embarrassed by my show of raw emotion, and I kept apologizing for it. I teach ceramics, painting, and drawing in a school near the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. The reservation is cradled on four sides by an ocean of prairie and the Wind River Mountain Range and Owl Creek Mountains. Poverty levels are high in the region, so my students are familiar with the daunting task of trying to succeed despite obstacles that most people can barely fathom. Empowering. Encouraging. Affirming. These are the words that describe the opportunities that k12clay has offered myself and my students. Prior to this experience, my students had rarely grasped the significance of their artwork. They dismissed my encouraging comments and turned back to the idea that art is just fun and couldn’t possibly lead to meaningful careers. My students struggle with their desire to work in clay and the pressure they feel to find work in other, possibly less rewarding fields. To pursue exhibiting on a national level requires faith in the intrinsic value of my cried like a baby
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Past Jurors for k12clay:
K–12
1998 • Don Reitz
students’ work. Even though we are living in a very isolated area, their work is on par with that being created elsewhere in the country. k12clay has opened to my students the possibilities of working as ceramic artists. It is the forum in which our work and our ideas have value at a time when the public school system tells us that core subjects, test scores, and proficiencies reign supreme, and art is just something to fill a spot in the schedule. Because of k12clay, my students’ voices are heard, and they are affirmed as artists whose work and ideas have national significance.
KELLY CLARK
Visual Arts Teacher, Middlesex High School, Middlesex, New Jersey clarkk@middlesex.k12.nj.us Follow @middlesexhighschoolceram
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is valuable, but exhibiting work or selling it enables students to participate in conversations about observation, criticism, use, and application of artworks. As a visual arts teacher in New Jersey, I’ve always sought opportunities for my students to leave the insularity of our classroom and make a connection with an audience. My students have more opportunities to present two-dimensional works than three-dimensional works. In 2008, even those opportunities were disappearing as the grants and foundation money that had he act of creating art
fostered them decreased, thanks to a national recession. Widening my search, I found the NCECA National K-12 Ceramic Exhibition (k12clay) online. We have participated for six years and are always impressed with clarity, affordability, and professionalism of the exhibition process. Our first year, two of our students were selected. Our pride and excitement was infectious. I threw parties and wrote articles for the local papers. I had always had a successful program, but I felt the ceramics department gained greater respect. Hanging a poster in my classroom with images of student work from our little blue collar, suburban high school impressed new students for years. I burst with pride whenever I find myself in a college studio, and I see those same posters pinned up for all to see. Like every teacher, I have to answer to school administration. For years I have used our students’ k12clay honors in board-of-education presentations, on our school website and in local media. The recognition for our program has allowed me to seek and receive support for new materials, wheels, and even a new display case for our work. Last year a senior in our program was selected for the exhibition. She follows several professional ceramists on social media. One day she came into school practically screaming because a favorite artist of hers had posted her k12clay work to his feed with positive comments. As a proponent of students’ participation in conversations about art with their audience, even I could not have predicted this level of engagement.
1999 • Linda Arbuckle 2000 • William Daley 2001 • Don Davis 2002 • Yoshiro Ikeda 2003 • Lana Wilson 2004 • Val Cushing 2005 • Robert & Gail Piepenburg 2006 • Michel Conroy 2007 • Dan Hammett 2008 • Richard Burkett 2009 • Elaine O. Henry 2010 • Dick Hay 2011 • Susan Filley 2012 • Louis Katz 2013 • Anne Currier 2014 • Randy Brodnax 2015 • Kathy King 2016 • Jack Troy 2017 • Julia Galloway 2018 • Pete Pinnell
Scan the QR code or type the web address below in your browser to download a free PDF of the The Case for Clay in Secondary Art Education, from Volume 16, Number 2, June 1988. https://studiopotter.org/ case-clay-art-education
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he longer we work in clay ,
the more we realize we all started too late—there is that much to learn. No matter at what age we are introduced to ceramics, as long as we keep working with it, clay will be introducing itself to us, sometimes gloriously, exceeding our expectations; other times mocking us, as if to say, “Not that way, dummy!” Touch-based learning changes our world by becoming a world we make.
This miraculous material that used to be mountains might be connived into shapes our imaginations create, becoming mountain-hard again as we wait the good wait, while our kilns cool. Two years ago, I was invited to judge the National K-12Ceramic Exhibition at the NCECA conference in Kansas City—a joyful task that enlivened ten days of intense long-looking. If working in clay for more than fifty years tests one’s appetite for beholding ceramic achievements by people of all ages and backgrounds, I aced this one. Here was work capable of launching their makers onto the covers of ceramics magazines in a decade or so, perhaps followed by
teaching careers and eventually into NCECA geezerdom by 2050. That committed ceramic artists might have a future is evident every time we visit one of these exhibitions. “What was this person trying to do?” I asked myself as a juror, and, “How well was it accomplished?” No matter the maker’s age, these questions applied, and after looking at every image about fifty times—shuffling them to avoid memorizing their order—I found certain pieces insistently assertive. Some appeared in my dreams (a very good sign), while others nearly escaped detection for several viewings before surfacing with potential—a subtle sculptural gesture easy to miss, a lid’s surprising
⊳ April James, Lakeridge High School, Lake Oswego, Oregon. Algernon, 2017. 4x4x8 in. Clay, latex paint. Winner of two awards at the 19th Annual National K-12 Ceramics Exhibition, Kansas City, Missouri. Photographs courtesy of Michael Helle.
BIO Jack Troy is a potter, writer, and educator. Troy taught at Juniata College for thirty-nine years and has led hundreds of workshops across the country and around the world. He has published two books, including a collection of poems, and has written numerous essays and articles on ceramics. jgaylordt@yahoo.com | jacktroy.net
Studio Potter
BY JACK TROY
K–12
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THE MOST VALUABLE CLAY IN THE WORLD
knob. Selecting 150 entries from nearly 1,350 was hard enough, but choosing 108 entries from 966 submissions in the grades 11-12 category was equal parts exasperation and reward—a neurotic’s nightmare. But only once at the end (and may I be forgiven), did I flip a coin. “Algernon,” April James’s three-pound rodent, with its zen-like aura of calm was a prizewinner. As good as the entries have been in the past two years since, I haven’t seen a piece to displace “Algernon” in my memory’s hard-drive. James must have read the sci-fi short story (that later became a novel) “Flowers for Algernon,” with its theme of scientifically manipulating intelligence. A ceramic sculpture by an eleventh grader arising from a literary source is itself rare, but this critter also referenced Beth Cavener’s work, which struck me as being especially savvy. (It also played off of Ron Meyers’s renderings of the species’ demonic members). “Algernon” won both the Artistic Merit Award and the Monstrously Talented Award. Until I read the list of awards, I was unaware that the two top prizes carried a fullride four-year scholarship to the Kansas City Art Institute. Then I realized that a single clay object, maybe weighing less than ten pounds, must have been made from the world’s most valuable clay, and I vowed to support the exhibition to whatever extent possible, year after year, as a way to say, “Kudos! Keep up the fine work you are just beginning to make.”
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Finding (And Teaching)
THE CERAMICS OF IRAN in a Contemporary Context
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BY J I L L I A N E C H L I N
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In the 1960s, Iranian potter-sculptors began measuring the possibilities of a new role for clay, exploring the space between abstract sculpture and the vessel; reconnoitring fresh territory in two-dimensional and three-dimensional surfaces. Professional, educational, and artistic exchange during the height of modernism’s influence on the visual arts swept in a rather dramatic transformation: heightened interest in international dialogues about ceramics and advocacy for the status of the medium as fine art. Hamid Keshmirshekan, who has written what are probably the most comprehensive histories of Iranian modern art (though for whom ceramics as part of the modern art scene are, quite literally, a footnote) sees artists in the period just prior to the Islamic revolution as interested in “theoretical discourse and complex abstractions of themes such as contemporaneity, authenticity and transnationalism,” which resulted in “innovative artistic trends and production.” 1 A distinction crept in between “authentic” practitioners of traditional pottery and handicrafts—defined through historic form, shape, motif, and voluntary self-identification—and ceramics as modern art, which conveyed a more “sophisticated” image, allowing traditional skills to be refashioned and rediscovered by
⊳ ⊳ Architectural ceramics, particularly tile, is the subject of a significant part of Iranian ceramics discourse, past and present. All photographs by the author. ⊳ ▲ Underglaze painting remains an important dimension of traditional and modern contemporary ceramics. ⊳ ▼ With the easing of international sanctions in 2015, potters were able to export wares such as these to Europe.
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and educators from moving beyond a fashionable enthusiasm for the art of others and recognizing the unique contribution that Iran is making to contemporary craft culture. Stereotypes of Iran—of religious extremes, political maneuvering, and international posturing—should be cause for us to reconsider the ways in which we present both historic and contemporary ceramic objects. Whether formally or informally in these roles, we are responsible for offering richer and more nuanced ways to navigate discussions about ceramics in different global contexts. Iranian ceramics has been redefined alongside major sociocultural and political shifts, starting with the Qajar dynasty (1785-1925) and continuing to develop at the behests of the Pahlavis dynasty (19251979) and the Islamic Republic (1979-present). Beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, some Iranian potters responded to marginalization as a result of the global industrial revolution by reviving the artistry of their ceramics heritage. This historicism moved closer to situating pottery as symbols of identity—the embodiment of a desired cultural heritage. However, traditional potters struggled to compete with factory production, and many closed their doors over the next fifty-odd years.
an educated elite and wealthy patrons in the “cultured” settings of the urban studio and gallery. In emphasizing quality over quantity, such a view also moved clay work away from unpalatable associations as commercial, low quality, and derivative. Iranian philosopher Khosrow Bagheri Noaparast notes that after the Islamic Revolution in 1979 arts education in Iran “assumed a teleological orientation according to which art should be a process aimed at appreciating the manifestation of God’s beauty in the world.” 2 Despite early debates over the role that artistic practice should play in public life and an extended war with Iraq, ideological changes in the Islamic Republic framed ceramics as an inherently acceptable form of expression. Many ceramicists in Iran underscore governmental and institutional efforts to educate and encourage ceramics as an important factor in the explosion of interest and practical production seen today. International sanctions that isolated the Iranian economy also created a large, primarily domestic market for ceramics. Relying on objects to recall a particular memory or project a particular identity, Iranians support a shift from utility to art through their purchases of no-longer-purely-functional pottery, making a conscious effort to revitalize the role of ceramics in modern life. Keshmirshekan writes that for contemporary Iranian artists, “references to traditions and cultural values are formed in a rather critical, satirical, and ironic language… there is a frequent obsession with being up
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of the contemporary ceramic arts in Iran is a case study for the way ceramics has changed over the course of the last century and into this one. Iranian artists are answering the technological, ideological, and aesthetic challenges of contemporary artistic practice with unique responses in ways that, perhaps not surprisingly, are unknown to many people outside of the country. Unfamiliarity prevents Western artists he history
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“
Constructing a heritage of clay allows us to actively shape the meaning of the past in the present and to construct a particular vision of our shared future.
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to date and ‘of today.’ This obsession means living in, and with, perpetual flux.” 3 This state of flux is, in no small part, due to the existence of the digital world. Along with widespread use of platforms like Instagram and Telegram (although as of the time of this writing, newly blocked on internal servers) Iran has the world’s fourth largest population of bloggers, which suggests that digital integration is one of the defining features of contemporary ceramics, transforming the way Iranians participate in and share art.4 The ability of online culture to translate into real-life experiences and the ways in which people expect to be able to view and access information will only continue to expand. The recent international flow of goods and ideas facilitated by the loosening of sanctions in the last few years and the proliferation of digital technologies has had other effects as well, including artists’ increasing reliance on private sectors, foreign networks, and international exhibitions. Scholar Leili SrebernyMohammadi wrote that “Iranian artists are now continually exposed to other cultural values through electronic media, magazines, and books. They now admire their own culture more and understand why they do so; or they become more critical of their own values.” 5 Contemporary ceramics in Iran today embody the range of these viewpoints. One fundamental objection to this new post-revolutionary diversity is that it is a product of imported postmodern ceramic movements. In particular, artists who make formalist, abstract, and conceptual works can be seen as copying the style of western ideas without considering the “lived experience” that produced them. In other words, critics
see such contemporary works as somehow inauthentic because they speak a borrowed visual language. This criticism is especially strong when artists are seen to be trading on their heritage to meet foreign demand. In Iran today, ceramics are generally understood to be within the sphere of handicraft, where they receive much support but can also be promoted simultaneously as a fine art. However, Iranian ceramics biennials and art festivals rarely include rural, traditional potters, and often separate vessels produced on the wheel from their more sculptural counterparts. Defining what counts as “authentic” or “appropriate” production is contentious. Ceramic artists must navigate an ever-changing landscape of public and private sensibilities, while traditional potters are often criticised for the variable quality of their historically influenced work, especially goods mass-produced for roadside shops frequented by tourists. Iran has been one of the global centers of ceramic art since the earliest potter’s wheels first spun in towns and villages. Iranian potters have a wide and nuanced spectrum of history to draw on, a living heritage that has been powerfully, and intentionally, cultivated as part of Iranian identity. Although much of their ceramic heritage is to be found today in museums in Europe and America, firmly out of the reach of many ordinary Iranians, the practical art of working clay remains close to the national consciousness. The techniques of traditional pottery are of interest to a great many people and form an essential part of the contemporary ceramics scene in Iran. However, as utilitarian ceramics becomes increasingly a matter of factory production,
⊳ ▲ The Iran Cultural Heritage Handcraft and Tourism Organization operates a handicraft institute in Tehran to train and provide opportunities for work in heritage skills, such as a seven-color cuerda seca tile process on which these women are working.
field of technical ceramics engineering, although this is changing as more artists and teachers seek to publish. Ceramics professors are working towards professionalizing their field and often desire to adopt innovative approaches, such as practice-based research. Yet a university education remains a preoccupation for the young, wealthy, and urban. Only some ten percent of an age cohort is likely to earn acceptance at a public university, largely because of the stringent requirements of the national exam that determines college entrance. The majority of those passing the ceramic arts entrance exam now are women, a significant demographic shift. Students graduating from these programs are also generally aware of their collective role as a generation of entrepreneurs, opening galleries and marketing their work through social media. Many women, in particular,
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specific artworks and more concrete aspects of art history, culture, and psychology), developing skills (practical hands-on projects), and fostering insight (exploring intangible and abstract concepts in thinking about art). There is no specific written curriculum for ceramics. Teachers are provided guidelines and left to integrate the arts, including ceramics, into their classrooms. In high school, students can choose from various technical and vocational programs, which may include courses in handicrafts and ceramics (although a more comprehensive curriculum is currently under development). University departments devoted to teaching ceramics in a fine arts context are a relatively new but steadily expanding proposition. Written texts for ceramics are generally English-language books (and their unofficial translations) or materials drawn from the
⊳ ▼ With the support of their mentors, students associated with university art programs are seeking out private and cooperative studio spaces, such as this one in Kashan, to meet growing demand for their work.
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the role of traditional potters is moving closer to the kind of social construction that defines the fine arts. Also problematic is that scholars often consider traditional workshops to be outside of the modern project of ceramics-as-art, dismissing them as either too commercially focused or ignorant of contemporary concerns. Making sense of the diversity of Iranian ceramics is a challenge but also an opportunity to bring specific criticisms into the global conversation about contemporary ceramics. Consider the popularity of sculptor Parviz Tanavoli. Islamic art scholar Margaret Graves claims that his work represents a popular multicultural and easily digestible model for wealthy international collectors, one that “is presumed to render decontextualized historical material relevant and accessible to a contemporary audience… supposedly achieving this through its combination of a demonstrable modernity with an identifiably ‘Islamic’ mode of expression.” 6 We do not speak of Parviz Tanavoli as one of the select few ceramic artists whose work can fetch record-breaking prices, but as an Iranian modern artist (this despite the fact that he spends a considerable amount of time living in Canada). Of course, as an English speaker outside Iran, Tanavoli can more easily express and define his works. Tanavoli fits better into a model of art that is used to dealing with artists as individuals within discrete bits of history, unlike the traditional potter, whose work is more often known by its location or typology. Since 2007, Iranian arts education in the elementary years has been divided into three categories: building knowledge (discovering
⊳ These turquoise pots represent a changing pottery tradition. The fish motif is traditional to the area around the village of Shah Reza, but the forms and color cater to current fashions.
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HIGHER ED
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Looking at and understanding art is a negotiation, one that is continually unfolding, renewing, and changing
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▲ A spray booth at Sofale Mehran studio. This pottery in Lalejin borrows ideas from neighboring factories.
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find that they can adapt kilns and studios to fit into their urban homes, providing a means of employment outside of the largely male-dominated labour market. Other avenues for ceramics education open to the two thirds of high school students who do not pursue admission to universities include traditional apprenticeships, government handicraft training centers, and community courses offered through museums and heritage organizations. However, such programs may have limited facilities and little exposure to theory and design. It has been my experience that the need to justify access to arts education and, in particular, resource-heavy programs such as ceramics, has led to a considerable amount of anxiety among Western teachers of the craft at all levels. They are often so busy teaching
basic skills that unravelling the complexities of historical, social, political, religious, and cultural contexts of places such as Iran seems a luxury. But the history of ceramics is also the history of ceramics pedagogy. The backand-forth influence of changing artistic aims reflected in educational practices is multifaceted, and perhaps something we do not think about often enough. Offering an education in aesthetics, taste, and art practice walks a fine line in an uneasy history of paternalistic Western interventions in the arts and crafts industries of places considered in need of such guidance. Many teachers who have included Iranian ceramics in their teaching do it safely within the confines of history and as objects for inspiration or imitation. While this may have been a reasonable approach given the relative
inaccessibility of the country in the years following the Islamic Revolution, I believe it is no longer justified. As actors in the field of contemporary ceramics, we should seek out such contexts rather than ignoring them. Art historian and educator Caroline Jones has written that she is “not interested in adding the objects of ‘other’ cultures to survey courses without teaching the epistemological and social systems that give them value and propel them into the global exchange today.” She goes on to claim that until the theoretical framework is put in place to “convey something of the interpretive frames that give (local) value, discover the (local) knowledge they are able to produce, and learn how such situated knowledge contributes to a world picture,” teaching the objects of other cultures may be counterproductive.7 Where does this leave contemporary potters? While Jones underscores the vital importance of seeking out such context, to relegate Iranian ceramics to the art of the “other” and apply postcolonial theory wholesale would be to miss the point. Iran’s ceramicists participated in the same movements that characterized twentieth-century western ceramics history, which were, in fact, international movements, and have since engaged with and innovated in the arcs of craft as a form of social and cultural critique. The story is complex, with influences, technologies, and inspiration moving in all directions. If we limit ourselves to the standard twentieth-century narrative centered in Britain and America, we will miss much. Transnational exchange is a vital ingredient of the shared narrative of ceramics,
ENDNOTES 1. Hamid Keshmirshekan, “The Question of Identity vis-à-vis Exoticism in Contemporary Iranian Art” Iranian Studies 43, no. 4 (2010), 510. 2. Somaye Rezaei, “Arts Education in Iran: An Interview with Khosrow Bagheri Noaparast,” Arts Education Policy Review 116, (2015), 51-56. 3. Hamid Keshmirshekan, “A New Wave of Iranian Art” Journal #3, 1 no. 3 (2011), 13; 16. 4. Grigor, Talinn. Building Iran: Modernism, Architecture, and National Heritage under the Pahlavi Monarchs. New York: Periscope, 2009. 5. Leili Sreberny-Mohammadi “The Practice of Art: An Alternative View of Contemporary Art-making in Tehran” in Raminder Kaur and Parul Dave-Mukherji, eds., Arts and Aesthetics in a Globalizing World. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014, 64. 6. Margaret Graves, “Feeling Uncomfortable in the Nineteenth Century” Journal of Art Historiography, no. 6, (2012), 13. 7. Caroline A. Jones, “Globalism/Globalization” in James Elkins, Zhivka Valiavicharska, and Alice Kim, eds., Art and Globalization. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010, 136.
BIO Jillian Echlin began working with clay in a high school ceramics program. After a BFA in Studio Arts and an MA in Art Education, she taught and consulted for public schools and community organizations, with particular emphasis on interdisciplinary curriculum development. She is currently pursuing a PhD, tracing the development of the ceramics arts in Iran during the last century. She can be reached via email at jce511@york.ac.uk and is in the process of setting up a website that will serve as an international collaborative research portal for Iranian contemporary ceramics at iranceramicarts.org.
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artworks are representations of experience and a living manifestation of our places within a growing interconnected web of ideas. Looking at and understanding art is a negotiation, one that is continually unfolding, renewing, and changing with the interactions between each of us who see and the collective understanding that we can somehow read meaning into an object that extends beyond its objective presence. Making ceramics has, of course, always been informed by cultural dimensions, but now not only to be aware of such networks but also to explicitly tap into them through artistic practice is part of the contemporary rubric. Despite, or even because of, an uptick in political tension and uncertainty in recent months, our pots place upon us a responsibility to be conscious of our world view. Our pots should make us think critically about the ways in which we speak about the art of others. And when we look closely at the assumptions we make, and the backgrounds we bring with us, then the restless search for authenticity and construction of a multiplicity of identities for ceramics in a globalized world takes on new possibilities. We can develop new ways of comprehending and working within—but not limited by—tradition, national identity, ethnicity, religion, digital technologies, and artistic ideologies. Education shapes ceramics practices globally and provides an opportunity to offer a historical view that sees the intermixing of ideas at its most adaptive and productive, not as a homogenizing force, but one which through connectivity, deepens our collective understanding.
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and it’s not uncommon to hear people speak—only half in jest—of undertaking a pilgrimage to St. Ives, Mashiko, or Jingdezhen. Ceramics are often viewed as a shared global chronicle, linking contemporary makers to a deep, collective history. These narratives allow us to understand and appreciate the past but also bring forward problematic assumptions about race, civilization, and our ability to borrow the forms of other cultures. As makers, we can watch videos, we can visit as tourists, we can recognize and appreciate the techniques, the artistry, the skill—shared through creating in this medium—and we can recognize it even in those whose language we do not speak and whose government we are taught to fear. However, as practicing artists, teachers, and scholars, it is also essential that we view apolitical and ahistorical borrowing of motifs and techniques with a critical eye, examining the motives and effects, intentional or not, that influence our thinking and actions. Importantly, Iranian potters see themselves as participating equally in the dialogues of twentieth-century ceramic arts. That this is not self-evident, that it needs to be said that Iranian ceramicists (regardless of where they fall on the spectrum of artistic practice) share many of the same values and preoccupations and are exploring many of the same topics which underpin the Western studio pottery movement, means that we need to be asking different questions to make space in our approach to contemporary ceramics. Contemporary ceramics is defined by a desire to understand the context of the clay objects we are making, a situation in which
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GENERAL EDUCATION
PRACTICAL NOTES FOR ENGAGING THE RESTAURANT INDUSTRY BY TIM COMPTON
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and fine dining have gone hand in hand for a long time, but as each hip new restaurant works to find its niche in the culinary community, some are turning to handmade dishware for an advantage. My journey into the culinary arts was first as a busser and server, then as an artist by way of decorative functional pots. The restaurants at which I bussed and served used the same china found in every diner in America. It was rugged and functional and most importantly a blank canvas for food. Later, in my life as an artist, I struck up a conversation with a food writer at the opening reception of a show of my work. I shared that it was my dream to host a collaborative dinner with a chef, and to my surprise, she responded, “I know a chef that could make that happen.” She connected me with a prominent local chef who most importantly had an interest in merging the worlds of art and food. We met, and he agreed to host a dinner in which his food was served on my work. During preparations eramic wares
for that first dinner, we were constantly negotiating timelines, material capabilities, and color contrasts. I learned a lot about the way the restaurant industry sees the ceramic dish and the limits of the unique intricacies of handmade pots in such an industrial environment. If you are interested in collaborating with chefs or restaurants, and haven’t had a serendipitous interaction with a food writer, I suggest starting the conversation by talking to people who work in the food industry. Find a restaurant that is interesting and engaging to you and be confident but understanding when proprietors are hesitant. I have offered an initial “taster” of twenty small dishes for chefs to play with and get a feel for what a handmade dish can provide. While it is certainly exciting to have your work featured in dining halls for thousands to see, I would like to share some of the realities of working within the restaurant business that any potter should first consider. Your work is not the star of the
show anymore. There is a reason the white dish is ubiquitous: it stays quiet and out of the way. While chefs are not afraid of unique traits in serving pieces, they want their food to remain the primary eye-catching part of the presentation. Imagery, flashes of color, and modeled surfaces are great for the art gallery, but only detract from what a restaurant really wants to be known for. If you do push for a surface treatment beyond a solid color, ensure it is versatile. One plate is typically used for two to four different dishes, so it needs to play nice across the food color spectrum. One of the best ways to get a feel for a chef’s preferences is to ask to see their favorite plate. In my case, the chef’s favorite plate resembled a fourteen-inch white vinyl record. We discussed the plate’s benefits and attributes using words like stage, uninterrupted, and clean. Chefs see the dish as a canvas on which they can be the artist. If a form is too specific, it can restrict their creativity. A ceramist’s typical timeline for production of wares is unfathomable in the restaurant world. Food is often selected just days (if not hours) before it is prepared and consumed. Ceramics on the other hand—making, drying, firing, glazing, and firing again—consumes months of time. Be prepared for some crunch-time production and always make more than you need. In the early stages of making restaurant ware, I found the lack of response from a chef during production infuriating. Even with a six-month timeline, sometimes a month would go by without receiving approval on a shape or color. To a potter that amount of time might become essential if the kiln
chef is the person who runs much of the business for the kitchen and will often have not only the ability to negotiate prices and make purchases but also the vision to see how your work can enhance food presentation. Restaurants prefer to spend ten to twenty-five dollars for an eleven-inch round plate. Their margins are tight, and if you want to work with them, yours will have to be, too. The ceramics industry developed hump molds, jiggers, and other production shortcuts to drive down costs. If you can make some of these shortcuts
work for you, they will help you along the way. One trick I developed was working plate forms over a hump mold and throwing the foot ring onto the molded form rather than going the traditional throwing and trimming route. This allowed for more consistency (something the chef liked) and an average savings of 1.5 pounds of clay per plate. Once I started making plates in large numbers, hump-molding cut down on preparation, too, drastically reducing production time. All of that said, you must charge a fair rate. Restaurants that are
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gods act unfavorably to a firing. Finding tricks that can save time and ensure better results relieves stress and ensures better success for future projects. Recently, to gain additional lead-time, I have even gone so far as to develop a pricing structure that offers price breaks to clients who give me advance notice of deadlines or preferences. Working toward a dish “library� of successful forms has helped me complete orders within a shorter timeline and with less casualty. Most restaurant proprietors are used to super-low price-points. The executive
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Leak ash dumplings being prepared for service. Steamer pots by Tim Compton, 5 in. diameter each, wheel-thrown Cone 10 stoneware. Photograph by Audra Sternberg, 2017.Â
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GENERAL EDUCATION
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willing to purchase handmade wares are typically higher-end, and if they want that edge, they will often pay for it. Regardless, always remember that if you make a quality product, they know that, too. Think about basic ergonomics. Stacking, stability, and weight are important factors for food service. If the dishes take up too much space, they won’t fit in the kitchen’s storage spaces. If the diameter of a pot’s foot is too small, the chef can’t serve anything that needs to be cut, because the serving dish will tip over. Sturdiness and reliability are prioritized over elegance in food service. Most diners only see a restaurant bowl from the top, so the visual line of the foot is irrelevant in that view. Lastly, while most people don’t hold a dish in their hand while they eat at a restaurant, servers need to be able to move the dishes to the table quickly and efficiently. One thing that I didn’t consider until I started working with restaurants is how the dish will be presented at the table. The server can’t put their fingers on the food side (top surface) of the plate, so some “standard” forms can actually be very difficult to set down. Now, I often finish pieces with a raw (unglazed) rim because the contrast of textures not only creates visual interest, but also makes for an easy place for the server to grip the form. Durability is the key to longevity. Restaurants don’t want to mess with
purchasing replacement dishware. Make sure your work will last a good long while. Do your testing and know your clays and glazes. Those who have never bussed tables may not realize that wear and tear on pots in your home is nothing compared to that in a commercial kitchen. To pass health and safety regulations, restaurant dishes must be able to be cleaned effectively, and being sent through an industrial dishwasher is a dangerous experience for any dish. Plates and cups need to fit in the racks’ slots seamlessly. Everything goes in the dreaded open skid before each rack is jostled into the washer for a good scrubbing. A pot needs to fit into the rack snugly because an improper fit will ensure movement and result in chipping. If possible, ask a restaurant if you can try some prototypes in the washer during the design phase. Some design features that work best are quarter-inch or larger termination lines (rim and foot rings), smoothly rounded corners, and high-fire stoneware or porcelain whenever possible. Think in volume. Even the smallest of services typically requires thirty matching dishes. Then consider that tasting menus can range from six to twenty courses, and you can do the math. Prior to working with restaurants, my average “set” was five to ten pieces. Scaling up allowed me to work through the
differences from piece to piece and find a rhythm in my making processes. I find that the first five I make are all different (working out the kinks), the next ten help me find consistency and rhythm, and regardless of the total number made, I am always surprised by the consistency of the pieces when the lot is complete. I’ve learned that persistence, patience, and a lot of making are what it takes to produce handmade wares for the restaurant world. And, that communication is the key to bridging the differences between it and the ceramics world. My advice is to approach the chef with clear guidelines and to document expectations. Plan to explain your process several times and get responses later than you would like. Persuade your client to give you creative freedom with the process but expect to change, learn, and make compromises as things progress. Lastly, meet your deadlines, because if you don’t, you will leave them no choice but to use a plain white dish. BIO Tim Compton received degrees in art education and ceramics from Ball State University. His career has focused on academic and community education of ceramic arts, including working at the Indianapolis Art Center as a teacher, administrator, and artist. trceramics@gmail.com trcompton-blog.tumblr.com Follow @trcomptonceramics
ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION
Developing Voice + Vision:
BY ERIC BOTBYL, WITH KELSEY NAGY & ANDREW CLARK
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studio ceramics and self-employment was a series of obstacles and mistakes. Everyday seemed to present new and unexpected challenges. For example, charging sales tax—I had no idea how that worked. At the state house, I was told I first needed a business license. Every word was new to my vocabulary; I was completely lost. As it turned out, none of these obstacles was impossible. y introduction to
I learned about selling my work from making mistakes: I had to learn the hard way how to build an efficient sales booth, what kind of tent to buy, and why tent weights are important. I learned how to package work for shipping through trial and error, reverse-engineering packages I received and improving on them. When a customer flaked
out on buying a sixteen-piece dinnerware set, I learned the importance of taking a deposit. When my first website was hacked to pieces, I learned to always spring for the security package. My introduction to social media was MySpace, and it was invaluable, albeit cheesy. Through that precursor to Facebook and the myriad similar platforms we now have,
I learned that posts with phrases like “for sale” or “buy now” were a scarlet letter, while posts simply showing images or discussing processes led to questions, then purchases. When I began teaching community clay classes out of my studio, I learned that I needed to learn how to teach. Being able to throw did not mean I knew how to explain it. Being able to explain it one way did not take into account different ways of learning. I learned how to program a computerized electric kiln by accidentally entering a 100-hour hold on the first Cone 6 firing of my brand-new Olympic oval kiln. That debacle led to self-directed tutorials in changing elements, relays, thermocouples, and grinding kiln shelves. It was a crash course in heat-work, and the importance of the decimal. Sigh. When it came to wood kilns, I built my teachers. At first I went by the book, but building beyond the book taught me valuable lessons in proportion, draft, dampers, and passive dampers. Sometimes, there is no substitute for learning through failure after months of work. With every failure, by which I mean lesson, my enthusiasm for clay and pots was wind in my sails. The idea of paying dues makes me smirk because I’ve certainly paid mine, and then some. My undergraduate professor, Lee Benson, gave me a great foundation in ceramics. He taught me how to throw and to appreciate and seek out critique and instilled in me a genuine love for art beyond clay, too—figurative and environmental sculpture and bronze casting. My formal education and the opportunity to work as the shop technician at Union University for two years were essential to where I am now. Yet even with such a strong foundation, there were pitfalls that
Eric Botbyl botbylpottery@gmail.com companiongallery.com Follow @ericbotbyl Kelsey Nagy kelsey.l.nagy@gmail.com etsy.com/shop/kelseynagy Follow @kelsey.l.nagy Andrew Clark andrewclarkpottery@ gmail.com andrewclarkpottery.com Follow @andclark 39
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only self-employment and a continual studio practice would reveal. Eventually, all the stumbles began to add up to knowledge— hard-won, with the scars to prove it. By 2012 I was a decade into my career, and with the help of faithful friends and my wife, Jill, I’d renovated a 1,200-square-foot block barn and opened a second, larger studio. I had launched Companion Gallery, which occupied the front third of the space, with studios, classroom, and kilns in the back. I was behind the wheel forty hours per week, teaching six classes, traveling to teach workshops, and nursing the startup gallery. I was constantly applying to national juried shows, had several hefty wholesale accounts, and participated in weekend craft sales whenever possible. During our Valentine’s Day Sale, I met Kelsey Nagy, a senior earning a BA in ceramics. She invited me to look at her work, and afterward we discussed the possibility of her helping in the studio post-graduation in exchange for guidance and studio space. I definitely needed the help. The three months until her graduation gave me time to think about what I might have to offer. I haven’t regretted my learning experiences, but Kelsey’s interest in being a studio assistant got me wishing that I’d had a roadmap that could have helped me steer clear of some of the bumps along the way. I reached out to friends to see what kinds of internships they had established. I also got feedback from a few folks who had been interns with other potters. The models varied: unpaid with no studio, unpaid with the option to purchase materials and buy kiln space, paid with no studio, and so on. Gaining the ability to turn thirty cents of
clay into a fifty-dollar pot using one’s skills and wits is a good goal for someone starting out, and figuring out how to develop a personal and meaningful body of work as you go is essential. With that in mind, I decided to offer an intern the basic means to pursue these goals, which came down to fifty square feet of studio space and ten square feet of shelf space, a work table, a wheel, unlimited shop clay, glaze materials, and firings. If interns wanted to test a bunch of glazes, they could go for it. If they wanted to experiment with cooling cycles in the kiln, they could fill it with pots and do it. An intern would have a key to the studio and 24/7 access. In exchange, I would ask for fifteen to twenty hours’ work a week in the studio and gallery. An intern’s responsibilities would include bagging and tagging student work the morning after a night class, setting up for afternoon classes, loading kilns, making clay, and keeping the studio clean. The arrangement I decided to go with has worked out well. So far, I have had two interns: Kelsey was the first and stayed with me for five years. Andrew Clark is my second and current intern. My studio has never been a production one; rather than focusing on how many pieces might be produced in a day, we focus on what goes into making a single cup. Form is paramount, and imbuing work with a personal style is a close second. It’s equally important to me that my interns are not clones of me but develop as “single cups,” with purpose, vision, and a unique voice in clay. I don’t push a particular tradition or aesthetic or have a hidden agenda. I have spent a fair amount of time on my front porch with Kelsey or Andrew sipping
In college, we were always told that the way to be an artist was to “do something every day,” and “be in clay every day.” These mantras were intimidating. How do I do Day One? I graduate from college, and then what? The only thing that I was vaguely certain about was that I did in fact want to be an artist. Eric Botbyl helped me answer these questions. In early 2011, I traveled twelve minutes
north to Humboldt, Tennessee, my first trip to Companion Gallery. Eric was a graduate of the same university I was attending, and an accomplished local artist, so I assumed he
must be famous (he wasn’t). While perusing the gallery, I worked up the nerve to ask Eric for a critique of my work. A few weeks later during that critique, he broached the subject of my post-graduation plans. He subsequently offered me a summer job teaching a kids’ clay camp. It was the best summer job I ever had, and I did it for four more summers. When I arrived as an intern, Eric provided me with a sense of security, then he helped me to baby-step my way into fullfledged artist adulthood. In exchange for working, I was given clay and glaze supplies and gallery representation for which I received an eighty percent commission on sold work. Gradually, I took on more responsibility, buying my own clay and supplies, and the commission normalized to fifty percent by the time I left. Eric encouraged me to purchase studio equipment: a wheel, a kiln, a light booth, and a backdrop. He worked with me on the presentation of my work, including helping me build a craft fair booth, design business cards, and set up an Etsy store. All these steps made me feel secure and capable. By being in a working studio every day, I learned how to work in a gallery, teach classes, and prioritize my studio practice. My time at Companion Gallery was the finishing school I needed to become a professional. My wide range of duties included basic studio maintenance, glaze mixing, kiln loading and firing, yardwork, and occasional babysitting. I learned that I was an obsessive squeegee-er, hosing down our studio two to three times a week. Typically, I would come in early and get the studio straightened up and ready for the day,
⊳ Kelsey Nagey, Untitled (Pitcher), 2017. 14 x 7 x 5 in. White stoneware, underglazes, trailing slips. Photograph by artist. ⊳ ⊳ Eric Botbyl. Cumulus Bottle, 2018. 19.5 in. tall. Thrown and altered stoneware, multiple slips and underglazes, multiple firings to 2232°F. Collection of Calvin Dalke Jr. Photo by author.
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KELSEY NAGY
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coffee and discussing our work. These conversations have helped me get to know them and informed my critiques of their pots. Knowing them has helped me ask measured questions, which I hope has kept them thinking as they work. The exchange is reciprocal; I ask for their thoughts on how my work could improve, and cherish their insights. It has been interesting to see how and in what ways the interns have grown during their time with me. Kelsey did not enjoy teaching adult classes but thrived teaching children’s Clay Camp each summer. Andrew has taught Clay Camp a few times but seems much better suited to teaching adults and working in the gallery. When their internships began, each was working several jobs, but eventually they were relying solely on the income they earned from selling pots and teaching. I encouraged them to apply for inclusion in shows and, to my delight, both were accepted into the Strictly Functional Pottery National, as well as into several others. Having a fully-equipped studio and a relatively risk-free environment in which to work, both Kelsey and Andrew have been able develop their skills and their craft—and avoid the expensive obstacles that threatened my practice for a decade. When they are approached about wholesale accounts or special commissions, I can pass along what not to do, what I learned, and how to approach these situations professionally. When they express interest in craft shows, we discuss booth design, and build a booth— something they will have forever. I am inspired by my interns, and their energy and curiosity gives me a continual charge in my own studio practice. I asked Kelsey and Andrew to write about their experiences; here are their perspectives.
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ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION
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Andrew Clark. Whiskey Cup, Wine Goblet, and Coffee Mug, 2018. Cup 4 in., goblet 7 in., mug 5.5 in tall. Thrown and altered stoneware, fired to Cone 6. Photograph by artist.
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making clay, loading kilns, and prepping for community classes. Being more of a night owl, Eric usually arrived mid-morning and worked late into the night. During classes, I worked on my pots and enthusiastically eavesdropped on all the juicy West Tennessee gossip. After class, I’d continue my morning chores, then resume my own work until the end of the day. During my time there, I worked a variety of-part time jobs, such as the early morning shift at a local daycare, with schedules that allowed me to be in the studio. Eric’s daily question to me during that time was, “How many diapers did you change today?” (Answer: 12.) I worked weekend events at a nearby winery, and for a short time, I was the secretary of the university art department. As these other jobs began to encroach on my studio time, I finally decided to be a full-time potter (still babysitting on the side). My final year, I focused solely on improving my work and participating in outdoor craft fairs. I would have worked at Eric’s studio and gallery forever. One day, Eric asked me what my goals were for my fifth year. FIFTH YEAR??! How did that happen? That question was the wake-up call I needed to start applying for residencies and looking at future options. To my utter shock and amazement, I was accepted as a resident artist at Morean Center for Clay—getting that news was one of the best moments of my life. Last summer, I completed my two-year residency at the Morean Center for Clay, which led to a full-time position as assistant curator at the Morean Arts Center gallery. I have a small home studio where I continue to make pots.
ANDREW CLARK As I approached graduation from college, the numerous conversations ending with “So what will you do after school?” were intimidating because I didn’t have a clear answer. I was looking for a way to keep making pots, and graduate school was not really an option. I already had school loans to pay off and my work was not developed enough to apply. A week after graduation I started in the work-study program at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts. Arrowmont was a great place to make connections with other potters and to find options other than grad school. Around that time, my friend Kelsey Nagy was leaving her internship position at Companion Gallery to go to the Morean Center for Clay. Kelsey encouraged me to talk to Eric, and after a couple of phone calls, I was convinced it was the right opportunity for me. The internship started as basically a shop-tech position in exchange for
materials and a place to work. I made clay, cleaned, organized student work, loaded/ fired kilns, and did all other studio upkeep. I worked two part-time jobs as well. Over the years, I was able to quit these jobs and start working full-time at the gallery and studio. Currently I am teaching classes, selling work, helping manage companiongallery.com, and shipping out pots. As the gallery has grown, Eric has added another full-time intern and hired part-time help during the summer. My undergraduate education at Union University was centered around the skills and techniques of throwing. My professor, Lee Benson, encouraged some style development, but the focus was on getting a solid skill-based foundation. As the saying goes, “You have to know the rules before you break them,” and from my college education, I gained the ability to throw pretty much whatever I wanted. My internship with Eric has enabled me to apply the skills I learned as an undergrad to create a unique body of work, and I am constantly pushing that work forward. In the past three years, I have had numerous critiques with Eric, and many talks with the potters that the gallery represents, who have given me a wealth of knowledge. My decision to intern at Companion Gallery was not especially informed. I was just eager to keep making work, and Eric was offering me a chance to do that. Now I realize how important an opportunity it has been. I have received an educational alternative to the grad school experience that has focused on running a studio, which is just what I needed.
ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION
memory reclaiming
By Jill Foote-Hdtton and Northern Clay Center Storytelling & Communications Department
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“ define learning ” into a search engine , and more than 500 million hits come up in less than a second. In 2018, the various contemplative strains floating through the stratosphere on how we learn, why we learn, what we learn, how we increase learning, and how we measure learning are legion. Amongst the virtual stacks of data on learning is a section targeting another equally vast area of interest, debate, concern, and research: memory care, a distinct form of long-term care designed to meet the needs of a person with some type of memory problem. In 2001, the National Endowment for the Arts began a long-term research project with George Washington University that has come to be known as the Creativity and Aging Study.1 The study identified many benefits of participating in creative activities, not the least of which was improved health.2 Over the years, the study has led to further research related to the creative arts and aging, and has supported the work of individuals and organizations who ask, “How can acquiring a new skill stem the tide for an individual who has not only ceased acquiring knowledge and skill, but is actively losing both?” ype
▲ A teaching artist's sample of the umbrella project, which gives participants autonomy; they may give their creations as gifts to family and friends or use them to decorate their private spaces. All project sample photographs by Mackenzie Catton.
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ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION
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It was at the corner where aging and learning meet that Northern Clay Center (NCC) found itself in 2008. Serving the Twin Cities region, NCC had just received a Wallace Foundation Excellence Award Grant to support the development of new programs that would bring in more participants age 55 and older.3 NCC envisioned creating a program that would support healthful aging and capitalize on the progress and momentum of its outreach program, ClayToGo!, through which NCC provides short visits and extended artist residencies using the ClayToGo! Van, tours and artist demonstrations for groups, and public programs with neighborhood festivals. All activities are taught by professional teaching artists.
The grant enabled NCC to invest time and staff resources into the “Clay 55+” outreach initiative. Clay 55+ was the purview and responsibility of one senior staff member, who oversaw all educational objectives. After the award, it became ART@HAND, now managed by a team.4 As stated above, ART@HAND’s original goal was to broaden participation in ceramics by people age 55 and older, involving them in a range of clay activities. Its strategy was to overcome such barriers as seniors’ access to information about clay activities and their physical access to the material. Interests and abilities among seniors vary widely. Within the 55+ demographic are several subgroups, defined by such variables
as life experiences, education, disposable income, and physical mobility, as well as cognitive aptitude. NCC employs teachers who are also practicing artists as a commitment to the significance of creative inquiry and the ability to deliver information. Armed with deep creative and pedagogical skills, NCC’s ART@HAND teaching artists aimed to reach as many seniors with varying degrees of ability as possible. Many seniors have dementia, an umbrella term for a range of disorders affecting the brain. A subgroup battling a variety of lesser cognitive impairments lies at the far edge of the ability spectrum. Next to that group on the spectrum is the subgroups battling Alzheimer’s, a disease that accounts for forty to seventy percent of all dementia.5 Focusing on improving quality of life for people in both these groups—the main goal of memory care—is critical. NCC teaching artists are important agents in the work of memory care, and they do it through engaging students in tactile, experiential learning. The original question that NCC sought to answer was “How can acquiring a new skill stem the tide for an individual who has not only ceased acquiring knowledge and skill, but is actively losing both?” Because NCC supports and empowers teaching artists to have autonomy in the classroom, over time that question evolved to be, “How do you create a learning experience in clay that subverts the traditional model of building upon skill sets from session to session but still achieves qualitative and quantitative measures?” After ten years in the field, NCC’s teaching artists, supported by the organization’s commitment to responsive, professional development, have developed a
to facilitate mutual respect for all skill sets at the worktable. Professionals working in assisted living facilities, specifically those working in the memory care wings, have an intimate understanding of the residents.7 They may be able to share an insight about a resident’s past or about where they are in the progress of their disease. The residents have lived full lives and bring their backgrounds to every new encounter, even if memories of those backgrounds are slipping away. It is also important to respect the disease
600 people to 13,000, NCC can point to one of its biggest achievements being its impact on experiential learning. Equally significant is its ability to eliminate preconceived notions of quality, teaching people to trust their hands and that their handwork is more significant than any resultant object.
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with experiential learning can be all about getting traction and maintaining momentum. For example, NCC teaching artists use books to engage students who arrive early, lessening their frustration in uccess
⊳ ⊳ NCC teaching artist Angie Renee assists residents at Martin Luther Meadow Woods memory care facility, 2017. Photograph by Alison Beech. ▼ A teaching artist's sample of the folded-owl project, in which participants can build texture with limited manual dexterity.
and to meet residents where they are on their journey. One teaching artist explained that memory care participants are more variable in mood, attention span, and physical abilities over time than other adult participants, and not all have the same condition. The burden of gaining the trust and respect of gatekeepers can rest heavily on the shoulders of teaching artists and arts administrators, as they gently win over care center residents and staff to the main objective: process. Prioritizing product over process is a misconception about creative activity teaching artists may face in any learning environment. NCC, in most of its programming areas, is an arbiter of quality craftsmanship, setting a standard for ceramics culture. However, over the years of developing outreach programs that have gone from serving
waiting for the rest of the participants and their aides to enter the classroom. To accommodate shorter attention spans, teaching artists become entertainers and joke tellers. What learning looks like in a memory care setting varies from one person to another. Learning can mean a resident’s attention span stretches out. Another begins to eagerly anticipate going to clay class rather than contemplating an empty horizon. A sullen character looks happier or becomes engaged in conversation with new friends. Sometimes a teaching artist will introduce simple, random objects, such as a feather, a stone, or a stick, in class, drawing out recollections and stories from students. Their stories feed the making process, regardless of the original intention of the particular lesson plan. The “folded owl” lesson is a great example of how this technique works. When the
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When a person with memory deficits is able to tap into a memory, the experience can be grounding.
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deep understanding of the human brain, of aging, and of healing that has helped shape the practice of ART@HAND. Throughout the tenure of the multiyear Wallace funding, NCC interviewed and evaluated every stakeholder involved in any project, including site administrators (the “gatekeepers” who ensure care and communication are consistent and professional), site staff, residents and their families, and teaching artists. These efforts led to successful connections with individuals over age 55 through experiences in clay and created a model of assessment that remains very active today. The research revealed distinctions between generations, among them that a significant number of individuals over age 80 experience a drop in autonomy.6 The majority of these people seek supportive living situations and community programs. NCC formed several collaborative partnerships with these places and programs and found an important new audience to enrich with clay experiences. Early conversations with gatekeepers were all about identifying a solid foundation for the architecture of meaningful memory care programming. Crucial to any successful query that involves working with target communities is the facilitator’s ability to understand their specific needs. To continually adapt to changing needs, NCC actively observed from start to finish, measured beginning and ending points, and adjusted one variable at a time. Not surprisingly, flexibility seems to be the most important skill for NCC teaching artists to hone, followed closely by a need
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NCC teaching artist Lucy Yogerst (in NCC apron) works with partner staff and residents at Bethesda Hospital, 2017.
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teaching artist and aides have most of the participants engaged (sometimes, learning in memory care just means the participant made it to the classroom), each is given a ball of clay and asked to add texture. They are shown how to pound it and poke it with sticks to make it resemble feathers, then fold it over to resemble wings. When teaching artists were asked if things ever get out of hand with this lesson, one response was, “Oh my, yes! Holes so deep, the owl is lacy! But I’d rather have them energetic than sleeping.” Teaching artists can facilitate learning for site gatekeepers, too. Motivated by good intentions, they tend to want to over-help. A caregiver may struggle to focus on process rather than the final product. A teaching artist’s job is to help reshape the caregiver’s definition
of successful learning so that it is emphasizes experience, atmosphere, and process. The work NCC teaching artists do within memory care is not an exact science. And the field of memory care is challenged to keep up with growing need. One statistic states, “Every sixty-five seconds, someone in the United States develops [Alzheimer's] disease.” 8 Researchers have made progress in understanding Alzheimer’s and working toward a cure, but no clear methodology has emerged for navigating an illness that affects 5.7 million people in the United States alone. Conflicting research results indicate how much science, caregivers, teaching artists, and arts organizations have yet to learn. An increasing body of research does seem to show that kinesthetic activity can be a
bridge to memories for those living with various manifestations of dementia. When people lose access to their core self, they deflocculate, to use a chemistry term: their consciousness breaks up into tiny particle and disperses. That dispersion is an opportunity for anxiety and fear to take over. When a person with memory deficits is able to tap into a memory, the experience can be grounding. Conventional wisdom in the area of memory care, in a time when science has not yet gained a means of “erasing the eraser,” emphasizes the importance of gaining access to grounding experiences. Under the heading “Doing Rather than Talking,” the Social Care Institute for Excellence suggests this tactic: “Sometimes it can work well to invite a person to show you a particular skill that relates to their past.” 9 NCC teaching artists have found the part about doing is definitively successful, but it is important to note that the quote states that it can work well. Just because it can work doesn’t mean it will work. As one teaching artist said about a student who had been an artist throughout her professional life, “It was hard watching her because she got so frustrated [due to] her own expectations of her abilities. Things rarely turned out the way she wanted them.” On the other hand, there was the student who made a figure of Linus, from the Charlie Brown cartoons. His wife was an artist who had worked as an illustrator for Charles Schulz. The student spent most of his time in that session recalling how wonderful his wife’s work was. Teaching artists have learned not to present lessons that take more than an hour to
Objects may not be better made, but made with less anxiety and improved dexterity. In thinking about how to create a learning experience in clay where the traditional model of building upon skill sets from session to session is subverted but still achieves qualitative and quantitative measures, we can consider what teaching artists and partner staff have observed and learned: “In settings where memory is an issue, I have to look deeper to find those growing skills. Most often it shows not so much as facility [with the medium], but in their comfort and confidence. Objects may not be better made, but made with less anxiety and improved dexterity.” 10 The woman who spent her life as an artist never completely overcame her frustrations, but when she saw the NCC teaching artist step out of the elevator with a cart full of clay, she’d say, “Oh it’s the clay lady! I love doing this!” Over the course of each class her positive attitude declined,
that the ritual of high tea seems to revive memories and ease anxiety. NCC’s ART@ HAND program and its documentation of its progress is adding to the growing database of memory care work and expanding the definition of successful learning. BIO Jill Foote-Hutton is the Northern Clay Center (NCC) Coordinator of Artist Services & Storytelling. Since 1990, NCC has continued to advance the ceramic arts for artists, learners, and the community, through education, exhibitions, and artist services. It reaches a regional, national and international audience with programming that brings national artists to the region, continually feeding a lively exchange of ideas and aesthetics. jillfootehutton@northernclaycenter.org northernclaycenter.org Follow @northernclaycenter
ENDNOTES 1. Camp, Linda J, and John McGough. Final Report: Clay 55+ Project Northern Clay Center, pp 5-6. Turning Point Consulting, 20 June 2013. 2. Cohen, Gene D. The Creativity and Aging Study, Final Report. George Washington University & National Endowment for the Arts. April 30, 2006. 3. Based in New York City, The Wallace Foundation is a philanthropy working nationally to answer important questions that, if solved, could help strengthen practices and policies within a field. NCC’s mission is to foster improvements in learning and enrichment for disadvantaged children and the vitality of the arts for everyone. 4. ART@HAND is a series of accessible programs for enjoyment of the ceramic arts. Intended for individuals 55 years old or greater (and their families), ART@HAND incorporates lectures and tours, drop-in workshops, and hands-on activities. Supported by the Wallace Excellence Award, the Minnesota State Arts Board’s Arts Learning Grant, and the Archie D. and Bertha H. Walker Foundation, the program aims to increase access to the ceramic arts for adults who are 55+. 5. https://kateswaffer.com/dementia/ 6. Camp, Linda J, and John McGough. Final Report: Clay 55+ Project Northern Clay Center, pp 19-21. Turning Point Consulting, 20 June 2013. 7. Foote-Hutton, Jill. “Interview with Sally Peterson, Campus Director of Community Programs at Martin Luther Homes, and Krista Okins, Therapeutic Recreation at Carondolet Village.” March 2018. 8. Alzheimer’s Organization. Report: Latest Alzheimer’s Facts and Figures. Alzheimer's Association, 19 March 2018, www.alz.org/facts. 9. https://www.scie.org.uk/about/ “The Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) improves the lives of people who use care services by sharing knowledge about what works.” 10. Foote-Hutton, Jill. “Interview with Teaching Artist Claire O'Connor.” March 2018. 11. Foote-Hutton, Jill. “Interview with Teaching Artist Angie Renee.” March 2018.
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but the teaching artist remains optimistic: “It’s always heartening when they can remember that [the experience is] positive.” 11 Teaching can be a lot like mopping up the ocean, regardless of who the student is. The task is endless, and the learning experience will vary depending on the facilitator’s or teacher’s approaches. Success in memory care has been achieved through programs using therapy animals, music, and other art mediums. Several places have even noted
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complete. “Memory care is slower than other teaching assignments. Often, it’s hand over hand, it’s step by step, and you are dealing with frustration.” They have learned not to teach during “sundowner time,” that period toward evening when the person has used up all their energy getting through the day, and confusion and frustration are taking over. The teaching artists also keep groups small (under twelve participants), so each can receive proper attention.
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ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION
WORKING WITH DEAF AND BLIND STUDENTS
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BY ELIZABETH COHEN
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hrough thick - lensed glasses ,
Joey, age 18, assessed the properties of the plastic texturing tool, holding it some two inches from his acned face. He was my third student that morning to exhibit this behavior. On my first day of teaching in the deafblind program at the Perkins School for the Blind, I was doing my own assessing. This was a new experience for me, and I had to learn on the fly.
Since many of my students were completely deaf, the classroom was, for me, unusually quiet. I used the gift of silence to observe. Mille, a tactile-defensive deafblind nine-year-old, pulled away from the feel of clay but was willing to try using a hand-overhand method to push a texturing tool into a small ball. Some students preferred to interact with the clay via an “extension” of their hand, e.g., a tool, while others gravitated toward the immediacy of touching, pushing, smashing, rolling, and poking. Katie, age 13 and completely deafblind, grunted with pleasure when the teacher's aide put a ball of clay in her hands. She held it close to her body, rocking back and forth, intensely squeezing and “reading” with her hands for a solid twenty minutes. She asked for more clay and firmly resisted giving it up when the teacher signaled it was time to go. She stubbornly insisted that she take the clay with her. While she needed constant monitoring, because of her complicated medical conditions, the aide and I agreed to let her take it because the clay was nontoxic, talc free, and posed no other safety risk. Antonio, a higher-skilled, energetic young man of twenty, came independently to class. I had limited American Sign Language, and he had garbled speech, but we were able to communicate effectively. Antonio was a curious, charming student. He wanted to know about where clay came from and about the firing process. After I demonstrated a few techniques, such as coiling, slab rolling, and pinching, Antonio declared his love for coiling. He came each day ready to coil pots at a steady and rapid rate, creating his own
I offered to fire work in my studio and to volunteer my time. My proposal dovetailed with Perkins’s overarching curricular goal for deafblind students, which is to offer “a total communication environment, where any and every means of communication that works best for each student is taught and encouraged.” This approach helps Perkins “meet each student at his or her own level of communicative ability.” I hoped to provide a place where students could explore and be curious, develop their gross and fine motor skills, express themselves, observe cause and effect, experience
and nontoxic. Other modifications of the typical ceramics classroom setup included having on hand varying shapes and sizes of tools and materials to accommodate students’ different abilities and preferences. Typically, the deafblind have complicated medical conditions, which may include low muscle tone, no sense of smell, developmental delays, tactical defensiveness, limited mobility, deformation of hands, and sensory integration dysfunction. Sometimes deafblindness is a result of genetic disorders, such as CHARGE and Usher’s syndrome. According to the
⊳ ⊳ Students work with clay at the Perkins School for the Blind, Watertown, Massachusetts. Top, center: author Elizabeth Cohen (left) with a student. ▼ Some students preferred to interact with the clay via a tool, while others used direct manipulation with their hands.
new tactile sensations, and even take pride in the results. My classroom was regularly used for art and music. There were basic tables, chairs, and a storage cabinet, but no sink. Perkins purchased a few bags of clay and tools I had recommended. We used cafeteria trays and paper plates as work surfaces, and I brought in texturing tools from my home studio. In some class periods, there was only me and an independent, older student, while others were crowded with students, teacher aides, and bulky wheelchairs. I taught a total of seventeen students, ranging in age from seven to twenty-two, enrolled for a five-week summer session, which met every Tuesday. These students’ needs required the clay body and glazes to be hypoallergenic
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I watched with fascination. He was passionate, focused, and determined, and he was communicating.
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production line. His goal was to give his pieces as gifts to his family, whom he adored and talked about during class. Unlike many students in the program, he chatted breezily as he pinched away. The idea of introducing visually impaired people to working with clay intrigued me because of the physical and psychological benefits it might offer them. Consider this: the deafblind experience the world around them only as far as the fingertips can reach; their understanding of the world depends on what or whom they touch. They are effectively alone if no one is touching them. Having worked as a high school English teacher, then as a studio potter, I yearned to combine my two career interests, and teaching the deafblind seemed a rewarding way to do so. My research of this area of teaching uncovered no formal ceramics curriculum for the deafblind population (and that still holds true). Not knowing where to start, I mentioned my quest to everyone I could think of, at cocktail parties, at open studios, and of course, on Facebook. Eventually, I found Dr. Arnold Kerzner, a psychiatrist and pediatrician who consults for the worldrenowned Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts, one of the few programs worldwide dedicated to working with deafblind students. He introduced me to Perkins School staff, who work with about fifty students. I proposed a clay course to Perkins, which had few resources to provide, but the course required little from them: simply a space in which to hold the class, a few bags of clay, simple tools, and a water source.
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American Association of the Deafblind, there are more than seventy causes of deafblindness, including premature birth, complications during childbirth, meningitis, and brain injury. There are an estimated 10,000 deafblind children, ages 0 to 22, and 35,000 deafblind adults in United States. Two of my students, Mohammad, 18, and Osamah, 15, brothers with Usher Syndrome, had recently arrived from Kuwait. Deaf, vision impaired, and nonverbal, they did not read English or know American Sign Language. To say that navigating a new country, with its unfamiliar norms, language, and customs, was a challenge for them would be a huge understatement. Nonverbal students are especially motivated to use symbols and gestures to communicate while making art, and this was certainly true of Mohammad and Osamah. At first, Osamah did not like touching clay, but learning that he adored the animated Minions characters, I helped him to approach the clay by first using a rolling pin to make clay slabs, then drawing on the slabs with a variety of smaller tools he could hold with his long, beautiful fingers. Focused and engaged, he created his own Minions, and his joy and pride was evident when he kissed his clay characters upon completion. Here, there was no language barrier. Mohammad was more serious and orderly than his younger brother. A quick study, Mohammed dutifully copied my coil bowl, slab, and pinch pot examples. He was a perfectionist, carefully smoothing the rim, cutting precise lines, doing everything with
excellent focus. He enjoyed building on a large scale. He developed advanced skills but seemed a bit bored. During the last class, that changed. Uncharacteristically, he grabbed a ball of clay and furiously began modeling. After a minute or two, the ball had four legs, a neck, a head, and a tail. He pulled the neck back, sliced it with a fettling knife, dipped his finger in the cut, and brought it to his lips. Smooshing the creature back into a ball, he repeated this modeling, “slaughtering” and “tasting” three times. I watched with fascination. He was passionate, focused, and determined, and he was communicating. Knowing him to be an observant, conservative Muslim whose family had recently celebrated End al-Fitr, the feast at the end of Ramadan, I surmised that he was illustrating the ritual slaughter of a lamb. Satisfied, Mohammad wiped his hands with a wet towel and neatly pushed in his chair. The program director, teachers, and students at Perkins all responded enthusiastically to my clay course, but because of budgetary issues, Perkins could not hire me to continue teaching the course. I was disappointed, even though I knew that this might turn out to be the case when I volunteered to teach the pilot class. In the future, I hope to teach more deafblind students, and with them, create public art projects, such as textured tile installations, kinetic sculpture, and braille signage, and a studio show and sale. More broadly, I am open to a wide array of the possibilities for connecting with deafblind students through this kind of work, and I am hopeful that this article will inspire others
to engage with the deafblind community or jump-start collaborations between medical organizations and academics or professional studio potters.
Resources: American Association of the Deafblind aadb.orgw Helen Keller National Center for Deafblind Youth and Adults hknc.org National Consortium of Deafblind nationaldb.org National Family Association for Deafblind nfadb.org Living with Usher Syndrome e. v. usher-syndrome.org The Charge Syndrome Foundation hargesyndrome.org Perkins School for the Blind perkins.org
BIO Elizabeth is an independent studio potter living in the Boston area, creating wheel-thrown and altered functional and sculptural work in porcelain. Organic elements in nature, such as flowers, fruits, seeds, shells, and plants, inform her work. She explores varied metaphorical nuances, such as family, security and comfort, in nesting sets. She holds a BA in English from Tufts University and a MAT from Simmons College. elizabeth@elizabethcohenpottery 56 Yarmouth Road, Wellesley, MA 02481 617.775.9734 elizabethcohenpottery.com
ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION
CONFESSIONS OF AN AUTODIDACT:
Book Learning BY SUZANNE STAUBACH
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BIO Suzanne Staubach is a potter and writer. Her books include Guy Wolff: Master Potter in the Garden and Clay: The History and Evolution of Humankind’s Relationship with Earth’s Most Primal Element, both from University Press of New England (UPNE). She writes and pots in Ashford, Connecticut. willowtreepottery.us suzy@willowtreepottery.us A few of the many, many shelve of pottery books in the author's home in Ashford, Connecticut. Photograph by Joseph Szalay, 2018.
o potter is entirely self - taught .
We learn from every other potter we meet. I started with excellent teachers, some lessons with Lois Eldridge at her home and then a stint at Wesleyan Potters with Betsy Tanzer. But both were more than an hour away from my home at the time in rural Connecticut. I drove a dilapidated 1959 VW bug. My youngest child was not yet in school. It was a struggle. One afternoon, I was driving home with a few of my poorly made pots and my fouryear-old son, Aaron, in the back of the bug. Aaron complained that it was getting smoky. “Mom,” he said in his quiet voice, “the car is on fire.” I looked in the rearview mirror. Yes, we had a fire! Terrified, I pulled off the road and got him out. Apparently, the battery had shorted, igniting the coir stuffing in the back seat. Once I was sure Aaron was okay, I wrangled the seat out of the car and stomped out the smoldering fire. I carried a couple of the pots as we set off to get help but left
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IT WAS THE “BIBLES” THAT MADE MY HEART RACE.
the rest behind. This was the early seventies. We did not have cell phones. While we were gone, the pots, bad as they were, were stolen, which, in a way was encouraging. However, I knew that my treks to classes were over. Yet, I had only begun to learn. There was so much I didn’t know, couldn’t do, hadn’t mastered. At home, I had a Lockerbie kick-wheel, an unheated work room, some clay, and only rudimentary skills. So, I turned to books. And thus, you could say, I actually benefited from many hundreds of teachers. Potters write a remarkable number of books and magazine articles. Archaeologists, art historians and critics, architects, horticulturists, scientists, and others also write about ceramics. There are how-to books, books about antiques, memoirs, biographies, histories, travel books, books on various specialty topics, and even fiction and children’s books. I began with four books Ceramics Monthly had published: Throwing on the Potter’s Wheel by Thomas Sellers, Potter’s Wheel Projects edited by Thomas Sellers, and Richard Behrens’s Ceramic Glaze Making and Glaze Projects. Oh, how I read and reread those books! Then I read Pottery-Step-By-Step by Henry Trevor, carefully studying the how-to photos, and Ceramics Techniques & Projects (with color photos!) by the editors of Sunset Books, plus F. Carlton Ball’s Syllabus for Advanced Ceramics. But it was the “bibles” that made my heart race. Like so many potters, I read Bernard Leach’s A Potter’s Book. It felt like I had stepped into a gathering of artists, each with fascinating lives, a party where I overheard conversations filled with ideas about pottery and art and travel. I wanted to stay forever. In those early years, it did not occur to me to question a single sentence that Leach wrote. Published in 1960, Glenn Nelson’s Ceramics: A Potter’s Handbook was my BFA, MFA, and apprenticeship! He opens with an international survey of ceramic history covering thousands of years. I was hooked. The next section is a look at contemporary ceramics throughout the world. After this
thorough foundation, he goes on to discuss the technical aspects of ceramics with clarity and depth. I did not have a kiln. I built dangerous fires in the living room fireplace using heaps of kindling wood and reaching temperatures close to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, until the stone chimney developed a crack. I did some pit firing and built a sort of updraft affair out of clay and straw. I wanted a serious kiln. The electricity in my old house was less than reliable and money was tight, so an electric kiln was not an option. I rescued a mountain of hard firebricks from an old factory furnace near the Connecticut River that had been demolished and spent months chiseling the mortar off. I was ready to build. With Daniel Rhodes’s book Kilns: Design, Construction and Operation as my guide, I built a “small catenary arch gas-fired downdraft kiln” and fired it with the “atmospheric gas burner[s] made from pipe fittings” that he described. Firing the kiln was another matter. After much trial and error, I had the burner orifices enlarged, and replaced the three propane cylinders that were manifolded together (they kept freezing up) with a five-hundred-gallon tank. The kiln took three days to fire because the burners were inefficient and hard firebricks heat slowly, but both the clay and glaze colors were beautiful. Rhodes’s book still gets a reread every now and then. Meanwhile, I think I read nearly every book on kilns that was published, and visited other potters’ kilns whenever possible. Thirteen years later, after moving to Ashford, Connecticut, I relied on Frank A. Colson’s Kiln Building with Space-Age Materials and built a cross-draft kiln using new insulating firebricks, ceramic fiber, and Ransome Venturi burners. The book calls for building a chimney of fireplace flue liners held together with plumber’s strapping but after some scary fires on windy days, I took that one down and built a brick chimney. I fired this kiln with pretty good results for quite a few years, but in time, it deteriorated, and I tore it down.
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Watkins’s Early New England Potters and Their Wares and the Ceramics in America series. Leonard Todd’s Carolina Clay: The Life and Legend of the Slave Potter Dave begins to fill a gap in our history annals. Emmanuel Cooper’s Ten Thousand Years of Pottery should be required reading for all potters. There are books on various time periods and regions, particular potteries, and types of pots. Pottery also turns up in books about the history of wine-making, bread-baking and gardening. Through looking at historical ceramics, these books offer inspiration for the present and for everyone, not just potters. Today we can view pottery videos from all over the world on our phones and computers. Like everyone else, I like to watch other potters at work and to peek at their workshops and kilns. The Goldmark Gallery makes some stunning video portraits of their exhibiting potters. The Internet offers a tremendous amount of information and a way of connecting. I love the potters’ groups and pages on Facebook. Yet, there is something about the depth of information that can be shared in a book, the intimacy of the reading experience, the direct connection to the author’s mind that enriches like nothing else. This is not to discount other ways of learning: workshops, apprenticeships, demonstrations, classes, and university programs. We don’t have to choose one over the others. My life in clay has been fueled by books. It has been a rich and ongoing odyssey. New books on our topic are released every year. There is still more to say and discover. I read on. My ceramic library fills a wall of bookshelves, plus there are multiple stacks of books in three different rooms. Happiness! As I enjoy my “golden years” I think about what should be done with my books after I am gone. I can’t part with them just yet; I am still reading and rereading them, acquiring, looking at the photos, pondering and absorbing. I will keep them until I can no longer read. But when the day comes, I would like my books to have a home where other potters, whether they be autodidacts or MFA graduates, can read them, too.
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MY LIFE IN CL AY HAS BEEN FUELED BY BOOKS.
My current kiln is a forty-cubic-foot downdraft built using plans modified from a 1973 Studio Potter article on “the Brookfield kiln” (I save all my copies!) and from Jeff Zamek’s plans. It has a hinged door and its own metal shed to protect it from the elements, and I still use the Ransome Venturi burners. All the while I was reading and learning. I fell in love with Michael Cardew. His Pioneer Pottery still astonishes and inspires me. I was enchanted with Marguerite Wildenhein’s The Invisible Core: A Potter’s Life and Thoughts, which I think sets the standard for potters’ memoirs. I read Beatrice Wood’s I Shock Myself and Leila Philip’s The Road Through Miyama. In the past few years, Yale University Press has published well-researched biographies of Lucie Rie and Michael Cardew, giving them the scholarly attention they deserve. Is there another endeavor with as many generous practitioners as pottery? Potters share their ideas and philosophies, what they have learned, how to make glazes, throw a teapot, and fire a climbing kiln! On my shelves are books by Robin Hopper, Phil Rogers, Susan Peterson, Simon Leach, Frank and Janet Hamer, Jane Jeremy, Robert Fournier, John Britt and many more—all emptying their heads onto the pages so that others can benefit. Of course, just because something is written in a book by an accomplished potter does not mean it will work for everyone. Potters can disagree. I single-fire my pots, glazing them when leather-hard by pouring. But before I learned that this was the best practice for my clay and studio conditions, I tried glazing bone-dry pots, as several authors had advised. The results were disastrous, with the pots splitting in half a few hours after glazing. Books on ceramic history dominate my shelves. How could they not? With more than ten millennia of pot-making behind us, there is so much to investigate, explore, and write about. One lifetime is not enough time to fully absorb it all, especially as new information about past techniques and tools and even about the potters themselves is discovered. I love the very local histories such as Lura Woodside
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Reinvention & Uncertainty BY WILL MCCOMB The following three essays were written by recipients of Studio Potter’s merit award for the National Juried Student Exhibition held during the 2018 National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, March 14–17.
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Studio Potter
The award includes a one-year subscription to the journal and the opportunity to write an essay on any topic for our Summer/Fall issue.
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demands that we tackle moments of upheaval and uncertainty head-on. I see my studio practice as a process of coming to terms with the uncontrollable and unexpected. In 2010, I graduated from the University of Kentucky with a Bachelor of Arts degree in ceramics and a resolve never to step foot in an academic institution again. My only goal was to get a job and try to make work in my spare time, imagining that ceramics would never be more than a fulfilling hobby. My job in retail drained me, and even though I was only sporadically engaged with clay, my passion for the medium grew. In 2015, exhausted, exasperated, and desperate for more time to make my artwork, I was fortunate enough to stumble into a residency at Lighthouse Art Center in Jupiter, Florida. The residency included a part-time assistantship with wood-fire potter Justin Lambert. As excited as I was for this unexpected opportunity, the move was emotionally draining. I had never lived outside of Kentucky and only briefly outside of my hometown. Dragging my then-girlfriend (now-wife) along, I was afraid that she eing an artist
would be bored and unhappy, and I had no idea how it would affect our relationship (for the better, as it turned out). Through conversations with Justin during the residency, I was challenged to think earnestly about my personal reasons for making artwork. I faced the reality that the work I enjoyed making was not personally meaningful, and that by extension, it probably wasn’t meaningful to my audience, either. New ideas came, and my work began to change, but the results were often disappointing. The downside to exploring unknown territory was that I often had no idea what I was doing. Slowly but surely my work improved. It began to reflect my interests and personal history—it felt honest. After a little more than two years in Florida making this new work, I applied and was accepted to graduate school at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. There I encountered many of the same challenges. Again, moving was stressful, although this time it was less so because I was married and not leaving my home state. Again, I was challenged to delve into my work, to make it even more personal, to experiment
with new technical approaches, and to explore my work’s relationship to art history. I was proud of the body of work I had developed in Florida, and even though I knew it could still be better, it felt comfortable. As a graduate student, I was asked to explore processes and make things that made little sense at the time, that weren’t comfortable. Additionally, I was expected to explain what all this experimentation had to do with me or anything, for that matter. I struggled to accept a decline in the quality of my work and reminded myself that the decline was in service to a longer-term gain. Slowly, little breakthroughs accumulated. As I write this essay and approach the end of my first year, I can see the first glimmers of a deeper voice emerging—little visual moments in my work that reflect me, that feel real, and may even be important. I realize that not only has all of this has happened before but also that fear leads to a deeper understanding. I am negotiating many uncertainties, contrasts, and tensions in my work. To some degree, my work is a reflection of my experiences of the last few years, but it feels more like trying to grab hold of a lesson waiting to be learned; like trying to leap into spaces where experiences don’t all come together in a neat package, where features that don’t “go together” coexist in harmony, where the limits of my comfort are dissolved, where all the parts of me that don’t quite meet up are forced into a solution. Being forced to deal with change has ultimately made me a better artist and a stronger person. It has helped me see that uncertainty and absurdity are part of the beauty of life. Looking forward, the challenge is to make that realization into art.
Will McComb. Biomorph, 2018. 12x6x5 in. Stoneware, Cone 10 oxidation. Photograph by author.
CONTACT INFO
wwmccomb15@gmail.com willmccomb.com Follow @mccombwill 55
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Developing a New Visual Language for Political Ceramics BY LUKAS EASTON
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Lukas Easton. National Priorities, 2017. 5 ft. tall. Cone 10 Stoneware. Photograph by Hollis Engley.
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ver the past few years ,
and particularly since November 8, 2016, the language of socially engaged ceramic art has changed. Emerging and established artists alike are producing art that explores issues of feminism, minority discrimination, poverty, police brutality, Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ rights, immigration, environment, climate change, and war. The passion and voice of ceramic artists addressing these issues in their work excites and inspires me, but the importance and emotional impact of the message is lost when the work lacks craftsmanship. As I look at the work from my 2017 BFA exhibition, I struggle with how to continue to make meaningful work that addresses difficult topics. I wonder if the images I carve into my vessels seem too direct and obvious, and question their lasting emotional impact on my audience after the awe wears off. In this age of great political tension, is subtlety the answer, or do these times warrant direct and confrontational
Contemporary Relics BY STEVEN OSTERLUND
CONTACT INFO
lukaseastonceramics@gmail.com Follow @lukaseaston
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in high school, where I realized my ability to produce attractive and functional forms in clay. After several years of working on the potter’s wheel, I was proficient with simple forms and wanted something more from the medium. I began studying studio art at Palomar Community College in San Diego County, where I worked as a student technician in ceramics, learning about firing the kilns and mixing glazes. My professors pushed me to make more advanced forms and to develop more sophisticated concepts. After I transferred to California State University Chico, I began to use the potter’s wheel for the creation of sculpture. I completed my BFA degree in 2017. My process involves a combination of building techniques, incorporating wheelthrown forms with slab-built, extruded, and molded elements. The desire to create complex forms led me to develop an organized and disciplined studio practice, focused on strategic construction and careful timing. I’m challenged by the task of bringing drawings began my ceramics journey
Studio Potter
To call what I saw “bad art” would be too simple. Much of the work was made by highly skilled and respected artists, but its visual language seemed undeveloped for the ideas of this time. On the one hand, the work has a sense of urgency and immediacy. This desire to get the ideas out into the world is very exciting. On the other hand, the desire to incite social change is no excuse for a lack of visual and technical self-criticality. The political artwork I saw in Pittsburgh speaks about new issues using language from a distant past. If political ceramics is to have any significant impact on the world, a new visual language must be developed and refined to connect emotionally to the modern viewer. As a ceramics community, we need to evolve our expressive language so that we can effect change.
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visual language? While content is important, without strong formal elements to frame that content, the work risks failing in its primary purpose as art. These concerns have led me to take a hiatus from using imagery on my vessels in order to develop more nuanced ways of communicating through form first. To that end, I am exploring the styles of imagery and form that have the highest emotional impact. As the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts conference in Pittsburgh (2018) approached, I was eager to be inspired by contemporary political art exhibited during the conference and excited about the possibility of seeing how other artists were handling these issues. I did see a lot of political art, but much of it spoke through a neophyte visual language. The content was often overt, and the message trivialized by poor craftsmanship. In Pittsburgh, I found no clear answers to my question of subtlety verses explicitness, and so I continue to struggle with it in my work.
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Studio Potter
from my sketchbook into a three-dimensional forms in my studio, then sucessfully through the firing process. Conceptually, I am interested in the prowess and permanence of the industrial machines that emerged during the rapid technological advancement of the past century. I am attracted to and find beauty in the derelict and discarded. I’m inspired by junkyards and abandoned industrial sites that exist as relics of recent history. Through creating unusual but somewhat recognizable forms, I am using the ceramic medium to communicate humans’ relationship with machines and to ask my audience to make assumptions about the use and meaning of objects. I aim to transcribe outdated industrial vessels and apparatus into a modern vernacular through the medium of clay. The historical importance of ceramic vessels for transportation and storage is often overlooked in today’s world of plastics and metals. I plan to continue this work, expanding it to address issues of cheap labor, unhealthy working conditions, environmental degradation, and cultural pollution surrounding global trade and manufacturing. Postgraduation, maintaining an active studio life has been challenging, but several wonderful institutions and many generous educators and fellow artists in the ceramics community have supported me and I am confident in my ability to continue to work within it— the challenges of being a ceramic artist are undoubtedly worth it.
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CONTACT INFO
stevenosterlund@gmail.com stevenosterlund.weebly.com Follow @stevenosterlund
Steven Osterlund. Means of Production, 2018. 32x17x15 in. Cone 6 oxidation.
Q &A
Ask Me Anything:
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Melissa Weiss. Basket (left, with circles), 2018. 20x12 in. Coil-built. Bucket (right, with triangles), 2017. 12 x 10 in. Slab- and mold-built. Both wild clay custom stoneware body, slip, ash glaze, iron wash; fired to Cone 10 in gas-reduction and reduction-cooled.
Studio Potter
An “Instaview� with Melissa Weiss
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Q &A
Instagram Follower: If there was no more clay left in the world, what would you do next? Melissa Weiss: Work at a bakery, and make quilts. IF: How much of your work is “preconceived” when you start, and how much is “go with the flow”? MW: I always have a specific idea, but often in the making process, the pot will transcend that idea. IF: How did you find clay on your land and learn to extract and refine it, and how do those parts of your practice connect you to place and natural history?
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tudio Potter sponsored an award at Craft Boston Holiday, an annual sales event organized by the Society of Arts and Crafts. SP board members chose Melissa Weiss as our 2017 awardee, and the award included an opportunity to have her work and/or writing featured in this issue.
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Studio Potter
Weiss makes functional pottery from wild clay that she digs from her land in northwest Arkansas. She makes a custom-blended stoneware from this clay, fires to Cone 10 in a gas-fueled reduction-atmosphere kiln and, using wood as fuel, reduction-cools her kiln. Weiss has recently written a book, Handbuilt: A Potter's Guide, which will be released in January 2019, and is available for preorder wherever books are sold.
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For this feature, Weiss used Instagram as a public interview forum, prompting her followers to “ask me anything.” The following is an abbreviated version of the resulting questions and answers. You can read the full post on Instagram @melissaweisspottery and learn more about Melissa on her website, melissaweisspottery.com.
MW: The clay on my land is very obvious; you can pick up a chunk and make a pinch pot. I dug a bucket of it and took it home, then made a couple test pots and fired them. They vitrified at Cone 10. I amended the clay formula for certain faults by asking for advice from my fellow potters and reading about the properties of clays and the roles specific materials play in the formula. I tested many versions with varying ingredients until I came up with a durable and beautiful clay that threw well. The process of digging my own clay has kept me connected to my land as I go to the deposit every year and dig one ton of clay. It forever changed the way I look at dirt and rocks everywhere. IF: What made you want to hand-build functional pottery instead of throwing it?
MW: I do both but started hand-building more often because I wanted to make larger forms that I was not strong enough to throw on the wheel. I wanted to make pots that weren’t round, and did not want to alter round forms from the wheel. I wanted to use a technique
your cracker baskets?
MW: I assume this is a reference to the kurinuki trays I carve and call cracker trays. [Kurinuki is a Japanese term for a technique that employs carving out a shaped solid block of clay to obtain interior space.] I pound out the clay into my desired solid shape, then carve out the bulk of the inside. I let it get leather-hard, then carve to refine and thin. IF: What qualifies as artistic success or failure? MW: It depends on your goals; I’ll speak for mine. Success for me is working out an idea that comes to life as it was in my head; selling enough pots to make a living; testing ingredients to come up with a new glaze, clay, oxide, or slip combination. True failure usually comes from my being lazy. I have learned that most “failures” are a springboard to success, a new door opening, a learning process that is ultimately crucial to success. IF: Why do you dig your clay? MW: It is alive in a way that store-bought clay is not. It’s dirty and real. I have access to a lifetime supply of it. I like having a voice and a hand in what I make from the very beginning.
IF: How did you start to be a full-time potter? MW: I quit my “real” job. IF: What are the top three issues that are currently swirling in your head?
MW: How to fight white supremacy and the patriarchy and save the planet. IF: Do you have any tips on building your suc-
and should not stick up more than the rim. I cut a sharp edge on the lip of the spout, but I don’t obsess over it being dripless. IF: If you’re self-taught, can you describe that process?
I started by taking some classes at the community college and the local clay center. I then joined a studio with some experienced potters and asked them lots of questions. I did work-trade for a few local wood-fire potters. I applied and received scholarships to assist and work-study at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, and at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Tennessee. I read lots of books and looked at lots of pots and made lots and lots of pots.
⊳ ⊳ Images of Weiss's work from her Instagram feed. Clockwise from top left: kurinuki cups, a wheel-thrown pitcher, platters, a handbuilt vase. ▼ Melissa Weiss, Carved mug with Fluting, 2016. 2.5x2.5 in. Wild clay custom stoneware body, slip, ash glaze, iron wash; fired to Cone 10 in gas-reduction and reduction-cooled.
IF: How do you take care of your body as a potter? MW: I have had two carpal tunnel surgeries
cess as an artist?
MW: Don’t separate yourself from your art. They are the same thing. IF: Do you have basic rules you stick to when designing new forms, such as a logical progression or part of the “family” of forms? MW: Most of my ideas for forms either come from a previous form or a mistake, so they are always a progression. Logical? That’s debatable. If I’m making it, it’s part of the family.
IF: How do you schedule making for a week/ month?
IF: How do you make dripless spouts for your pitchers?
MW: My schedule is dictated by shows. I will write down what pots I want to make and how many of each. I think of this as a wish list. I
There are a few “rules” I stick to when making a spout, such as that it should stick out farther than the widest point on the form,
Studio Potter
IF: How do you carve the middle out of one of
take stock of the pots I need. This list consists of specific serving dishes, plate settings, mugs, tea bowls, and tumblers. Then I choose forms I am currently excited about, such as sugar-andcreamer sets, mortar and pestles, vases, pitchers, etc. I start with the larger work that takes longer to dry. I always make one new form per cycle. About two weeks before I need to leave for a show, I finish up all the wet work and bisque everything that is still green. I glaze, decorate, and fire for the remaining time. The last thing I do is sand, wash, price, and pack all the pots.
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that resulted in a less refined look. I also wanted to be able to teach something accessible, something that didn’t require students to have prior experience with clay.
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Q &A
and TFCC [triangular fibrocartilage complex] wrist surgery in the past six months, so I might not be the best person to ask. I run and do yoga and visit the chiropractor, but [the physical damage] of repetitive work is hard to counteract. IF: Who are three of your favorite artists (any medium)?
MW: Alice Neel, Paul Cézanne, and Makoto Kagoshima. IF: Who are your favorite artists right now? MW: Candice Methe, Mitch Iburg, and Stephanie Pierce. IF: What do you do when you have no motivation to create? MW: Read a book, walk in the woods, go to a thrift store. IF: How did you define your style, and how did it evolve?
MW: Testing and accidents. It evolved from making lots of pots and not being scared. IF: Do you ever have work come out of the kiln with seemingly disappointing result, that leads you to new exploration? MW: Yes, often. Disappointment is my favorite teacher and motivator; always has been.
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Studio Potter
IF: What full-time jobs did you have prior to pottery?
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MW: Bartending, waiting tables, and singleparenting. IF: How do you balance work as a maker with other commitments?
MW: I try to stick to the schedule dictated by my daughter being in public school. I drop her off and go to the studio, then come home to meet her after school. She’s 14, so she doesn’t necessarily want to hang out with me, but I like to be home making dinner and doing domestic stuff when she is home. I also do volunteer work and attend as many protests of the current atrocities in our society as I can. It’s hard. There is never enough time to get everything done. IF: What mistake or problem taught you the most? What did it teach you? MW: My wrist problems taught me to slow down and make pots with a different method. IF: What does your studio look like? MW: It’s in an 8,000-square-foot warehouse that I share with about twenty other artists. My designated area is about 2,000 square feet. In my space, I have a gallery of finished pots, work tables, an electric wheel, a kick wheel, a slab roller, pictures of people and things I love, bookshelves, plants, a collection of pottery made by myself and others, a woodstove, a couch, and a snack and coffee area. The warehouse has a communal kitchen, electric kiln area, and a yard with fruit trees, a garden, my gas kiln, and dogs.
MW: About eight years ago. I combined iron oxide with an ash glaze and began experimenting with reduction firing. IF: What advice would you give me and other artists to avoid and manage hand, wrist, and shoulder pain? MW: I don’t know how I could have done things differently other than not making pottery full time. There are things such as switching tasks every hour and stretching and shaking things out often throughout your work day, that I didn’t do religiously, so maybe a commitment to doing those things? I think as humans our bodies’ abilities are limited when it comes to performing the tasks needed to succeed in a capitalist society. IF: How do you achieve the beautiful surface quality of your pots? MW: By not thinking about them in terms of surface. It’s deeper than the surface. It’s everything from using wild clay to layering slip to using thin ash glaze to firing schedules. The surface is the result of the entire pot.
IF: Who do you make pots for? MW: The people who buy them. IF: Do you make drawings of your forms and decorations before you start building? MW: No. IF: When and by what path did you start working in all black-and-white?
Weiss digging clay from her property in northwest Arkansas.
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In October 2017, Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts honored Paula as a “Watershed Legend” at a moving presentation in Philadelphia. The following remembrance is excerpted and arranged by Winokur’s friend and colleague Nancy Selvin, from her tribute to Paula at the ceremony.
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PAULA COLTON WINOKUR 1935–2018 —— By Nancy Selvin
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W inokur was an extraordinary artist; climate change and environmental research were at the heart of her work. Paula cared. Not just about what she made but about what other people made, too. She cared about humanity, about the future. Paula was at once kind, thoughtful, and knowledgably outspoken. In the 1950s as a student at Tyler School of Art, Paula was introduced to porcelain clays by Professor Rudy Staffel. In the sixty years or so that followed, she went on to transform porcelain into an amazing body of work. Notable were the monumental, jagged, and nuanced works shaped from huge slabs of porcelain that serve as metaphors for the calving glaciers and the melting icebergs she saw on her travels in Iceland and Greenland. The clarity of her vision and the intuitive handling of her material are tactile reminders of our eroding environment. Paula was a delightful conversationalist. In an interview, she laughingly explained: aula
“Yes, my work has been about nature since the first landscape box…in the mid-80s. … Sometimes I wish that I could do something else, but I can’t. … Porcelain is… usually thought of as delicate and transparent. But as the primary clay from which all other clays are derived, it comes from the earth—pure, white, durable. Fired, it can resemble both snow and ice. … Because of these [rugged] qualities…[porcelain] has allowed me to explore issues in the landscape without making literal interpretations…but rather to present… 1 ideas lurking in my memory.”
Paula was fearless. She trusted herself. She trusted her vision. In the distant past, I was organizing a woman’s exhibition and called her to ask if she would lend work to it. She was very clear: NO! Wow, was I taken aback. Over time, I came to share her opinion that women should not be isolated into gendered exhibitions, that the way to be seen and heard is to have your work in the same museums, the same galleries, and the same history books as men. Paula Winokur pulled that off. Her work is in major museums and collections around the world, from Russia to Texas, California to
Jingdezhen, Arizona to Helsinki. When asked how she saw her work fitting into the art historical canon, Paula modestly replied, “I feel like I stay within the landscape tradition.” In 2008, at my studio in Berkeley, California, Paula and Bob Winokur, her husband and fellow ceramist, each gave presentations as part of my lecture series “From the Studio.” The audience was a large posse of Bay Area ceramists. After Paula’s talk, she whispered to me that none other than Jim Melchert had just told her, “Paula, you are better than you know!” She was thrilled. Paula’s unwavering generosity to and support for her colleagues and fellow artists drew everyone into her orbit. She had a long, warm friendship as well as a working relationship with her dealer, Helen Drutt (English). As a member of the International Academy of Ceramics, Paula sponsored other artists, bolstering numerous professional careers. For years, Paula worked her social magic as a member of Watershed’s board, introducing her circle of donors, collectors, and curators to the organization. Artist and University of Washington professor Jamie Walker spoke of her “criticality and passion as an educator.” Paula motivated her students. One student commented on her “stern tone: pushing me, stretching me, encouraging me.” “Great! Now do it again,” Paula famously cheered them on. Hired to teach ceramics in 1973 at Arcadia University, where she taught for thirty years, Paula was honored as Professor of the Year in 2003. Paula’s family was the emotional anchor in her life. She deeply loved her husband; she furthered his skills and work whenever she
Paula Winokur photographed by her son, Michael Winokur, 2005. Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
BIO Nancy Selvin lives and works in Berkeley, California. She is on the faculty of California College of the Arts (CCA) in Oakland, California. Selvin also serves on the Board of Directors of Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Maine and the American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona, California. nselvin@selvinstudios.com selvinstudios.com Follow @selvinstudios 63
1. Interview with Paula Winokur, 2011, July 21-22, by Mija Riedel, Archives of American Art's Nanette L. Laitman Project for Craft and Decorative Arts
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had an opportunity. She often joked about “the wall,” the studio partition that “kept their marriage together: the white side and the dark side.” She loved her two sons, Stephan and Michael, and bragged about them often. Michael’s film Pieces of String: A Short History of Artist Robert Winokur was awarded the Outstanding Non-Fiction Film of the 2018 Short Sweet Film Fest, Cleveland, Ohio. Michael’s photographs and a video he produced on Paula are poignant and expressive portraits of an artist at the top of her form. After her death, Jack Troy wrote to me of his high regard for Paula, “whose nature it was not to use her work to draw attention to her person, but to the reasons that motivated what she made.”
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BUNZY SHERMAN 1923–2017 —— By Stuart Kestenbaum
BIO Stuart Kestenbaum is a poet and former director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. He's currently serving as Maine's poet laureate and is the host of the podcast Make/Time. stuartkestenbaum.com Follow @stukestenbaum
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Thelma, I never heard anyone call her that. I first met Bunzy Sherman in 1989, soon after I became director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts on Deer Isle, Maine. She and her husband, Irving, were one of a few legendary couples who took workshops at the school every summer. They’d begun coming to Haystack in 1972. Bunzy always took pottery workshops, while Irving took workshops a few different studios. They were also enthusiastic participants in the other creative and lthough her given name was
improvised activities during a session. Irving once dressed up as Cardinal Richelieu for a Bastille Day costume party. Bunzy was at all the impromptu dance parties and, unlike many of our inspired dancers, really knew dance steps. Irving and Bunzy would bid up items at our benefit scholarship auctions and take many objects home with them. Both were linguistically and culturally rooted in New York City, so it came as surprise to us at the school when in 1989 they announced that they would be buying a house on Deer Isle (which is about the same length as Manhattan, but with only 3,000 year-round residents) and living there year-round. At 67, Bunzy learned to drive, and she and Irving involved themselves in the life of the island, supporting Haystack and other nonprofits and volunteering in the schools and community. Bunzy set up a pottery studio, Irving set up a papermaking studio, and they continued to take workshops at Haystack.
64 ▲ Bunzy Sherman at her studio, Deer Isle, Maine. Photograph by Barbara Toole.
Irving died in 1994; Bunzy, born and bred in the city, was on her own in the country. Her involvement in the life of the small town of Deer Isle only deepened: judging the floats in the annual Fourth of July parade, acting in the “Cabin Fever Reliever” community musicals each winter, reading to students in the elementary school. She endowed a fund in Irving’s memory to provide an annual scholarship for an island student or artist to attend Haystack. She had many dear friends on the island and around the country. And she continued to make pots. Bunzy took 39 workshops at Haystack—her last one was in 2014, when she was 90. She pursued pottery as an avocation. Schools such as Haystack bring together people of varied ages and experiences. Bunzy was an integral part of that mix. She was equally comfortable with graduate students and beginners. By the end of any session, everyone knew who she was. She became an inspiration to many as a lifelong learner—and as a stylish dancer into her eighties. She was forthright and had opinions, which she shared freely. She cared deeply about working in clay and about being part of a community of potters, not just on the island but around the world as well. The late Paulus Berensohn used to talk about the etymology of the word amateur, which when compared to the word professional, can have a negative connotation. The root, he would say, is the Latin amare, which means to love, as in loving the work that we do. Bunzy loved to work in clay. In 2005, she opened a small shop in her barn and hung a sign, “Bunzy the Potter,” by the road. No need for a last name. Everyone knew who she was.
ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION
The Workshop Experience for
Mentor & Mentee
The North Country Studio Workshops, set in beautiful southern Vermont on the campus of Bennington College and offered every other winter, has been a recurring opportunity to spend dedicated time working in a manner that I might not otherwise be willing to in my own studio. As a five-day workshop, it offers an intensive experience for artists and craftspeople. During the workshop’s fall enrollment period, colleague and friend Teresa Taylor (also a past president of NCSW) suggested I apply for the Mentor Program scholarship. I was excited at
the idea of sharing my “student” experience with one of my students from the New Hampshire Institute of Art (NHIA). NCSW’s Mentor Program aims “to ensure the future of fine craft by encouraging and enabling the next generation [and foster] a lasting relationship between an experienced craftsperson (the Mentor) and an emerging craftsperson (the Mentee).”
Own,” the handbuilding workshop. Jennifer had been creating simple vessel forms with landscape-based surfaces, so I thought her working with Beasecker could challenge and impact her studio practice. I needed a workshop that would ask me to work differently from my usual vessel-based wheelwork, so I was excited about participating in Carpenter’s workshop.
I knew just which student to offer this opportunity to: senior Jennifer Markmanrud. I knew she had never participated in, and probably wasn’t aware of, these types of workshops. After submitting our applications, resumes, and portfolios, we were awarded full tuition and room-and-board scholarships, thanks to Polly Allen, longtime benefactor and board member of NCSW.
During our time at Bennington, we both experienced break-through moments and challenging ones, and the general levels of energy, excitement, and exhaustion throughout the event was exhilarating. I was mindful not to interject into Jennifer’s workshop time, but I let her know that I was available if she needed my input. For both of us, eating together in the cafeteria was about decompressing and welcoming new experiences with new people. The beauty of sharing this opportunity with a student was that we brought different perspectives to the workshops and took away very different experiences.
NCSW offers a wide range of professional-level workshops in a variety of media, but it always offers two clay workshops: one on the wheel, the other on handbuilding. Since Jennifer and I worked closely in the classroom studio, my instinct told me that we should take separate workshops. Our instructors would be Peter Beasecker, on the faculty at Syracuse University, teaching the wheel workshop titled “Pots and the Person,” and Syd Carpenter, from Swarthmore College, teaching “Places of Our
On our trip home after the workshops, we talked non-stop. I wish I had recorded the whole thing! We formulated some questions about the workshops as a way of documenting and sharing some of our perspectives and the breadth of our individual experiences.
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or a professional artist, the workshop experience can be a complicated one, subject to many variables. The location, calendar, subject, experience level, not to mention the quality of the instructor, can make selecting a workshop, let alone participating in one, a rather daunting task. As an artist, college professor, and workshop leader, I view a workshop as a time to step out of my usual roles and back into being a student again. Making time for the studio doesn’t always rise to the top of my priority list, but this past winter a unique opportunity to share the workshop experience with one of my students presented itself through the North Country Studio Workshops (NCSW).
Studio Potter
BY MAUREEN MILLS & JENNIFER MARKMANRUD
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ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION
MM Bio: Maureen Mills is Ceramics Department Head at the New Hampshire Institute of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, and the author of Surface Design for Ceramics, a Lark publication. She lives and works in her studio in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with husband and potter Steven Zoldak.
n e e r u Ma
&
mmills@nhia.edu sliptrail.com
JM Bio: Jennifer Markmanrud will receive a BFA in Ceramics from the New Hampshire Institute of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, in May 2019 and will also earn an MAT in 2019. She is looking forward to continuing to work with clay while teaching art to high school students in New Hampshire. jennifermarkmanrud@ nhia.edu jennmarkmanrud.com
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Jennifer
Q: How did you feel when you learned you had
each got to experiment in our own way. M: The theme of my workshop was personal space. I knew what physical space I wanted to explore, so that alleviated one level of anxiety, but I felt very intimidated about doing sculptural work—I expected to struggle with what to make.
Maureen: I was so grateful. NCSW offers a number of different scholarships, but this one, which offered to expose a young artist to this experience, was really special.
Q: How did you feel about working in separate
gotten the scholarship? Jennifer: At first it seemed too good to be true, and it didn’t click with me right away that I’d be able to go to a workshop like this, since it was just at the start of a new semester. As a student, I would never have been able to afford to go without a scholarship.
Q: What expectations did you have for your
workshop? J: I expected to be in a room filled with very knowledgeable potters, which seemed intimidating but also a great opportunity. The class turned out to be a lot more laid-back, and we
workshops but close to your mentor/mentee? J: We traveled through an ice storm to get there and arrived a little late. After we walked in and went our separate ways, I was nervous. It seemed as though all the other workshop participants were already there and already knew everyone else. Soon, though, I felt more comfortable. Because we work closely outside the workshop all the time, working separately
was valuable and allowed me to reflect on my experience. Without an ongoing personal critique from my mentor, I could work and explore more comfortably on my own. M: I was glad to work in a studio separate from my mentee so that she wouldn’t feel she had me looking over her shoulder and worry about what I might think. I wanted to give her space and freedom but be available to her when or if she needed me. While we were able to talk a lot about each day’s progress, I really think she felt freer to explore without me. And I might have felt nervous if she had been in my workshop; working sculpturally was so unfamiliar to me. I felt exposed and a little cautious about my work, so I was glad to have some independent space.
Q: What was your most important takeaway
from your workshop? J: Sitting down to have a one-on-one talk with the instructor really opened up my mind. His encouragement made me realize that I should consider similar opportunities, such as artist residencies, in the future. Most importantly, he helped me gain confidence. The eight other participants were older and had more experience than I, but I found that I could hold my own, work side by side with them, and contribute to the experience. M: I chose this workshop because I wanted the conceptual and philosophical challenges of working sculpturally. I realized more connections existed between working sculpturally and my vessel-based work than I had thought there might be. The subject matter was very personal to me, and working through it helped me value concept development in my vessel-making.
Q: What were your relationships like with the
other participants in your workshop? J: The other participants were definitely supportive and participated fully in conversations about the work. They were full-time potters and I was a student, but surprisingly, they took that into consideration during our conversations. I felt equipped to engage in critical dialogue with the others, and they listened and responded to what I had to say.
ed writing workshops at the beginning and end of each workday. I took advantage of several of the afternoon, hour-long writing sessions. Stuart, a very sensitive, humorous, and compassionate facilitator, led writing exercises in which everyone was able to contribute, develop their writing themes, and dig deeper into the meanings behind their studio work. Some of us read aloud, and a few were moved to tears to have reached a new place of expression.
would be able to do what I needed to do technically, on or off the potter’s wheel. What challenged me was the process of building a personal story in clay that conveyed a sense of space and place. Finding a path to making personal work remains a challenge not only for me, but also for my students; and I will encourage them to make deeper connections, also.
The opportunity to step out of our routines, from the classroom, the kitchen, or the studio, is important not only to our studio practice but also to our overall well-being. M: The participants in my workshop ranged from beginners to professionals, but everyone was supportive of the group. We worked constructively to help each other think through our respective projects, which were deeply personal to each artist.
Q: How did you use your studio time, and were
there opportunities outside the studio for personal development? J: Most evenings, I went back to the studio. It was nice to stay late and work because I don’t always get a chance to do that at school. M: I worked during the day in the studio, discussing my progress with Syd Carpenter and with other participants. Because this was the 25th-anniversary of the workshop, there was extra programming. Stuart Kestenbaum, Maine’s Poet Laureate and former director of Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, conduct-
Each evening, the instructors of the various workshops—fiber, drawing, wood-carving, encaustic—presented talks about their practice. Some were independent artists and others were faculty at universities, and I enjoyed learning about the rich and productive professional practices of each.
Q: Did you feel challenged by your workshop?
J: I had expected there would be demonstrations and assignments, but it was much more independent than that. I was challenged by the instructor, though. He knew I needed to be pushed. He saw that I was reserved in my approach to what I was making. Not knowing if any of the work would survive being transported back to New Hampshire, I felt freer to let go and push my ideas a bit further. M: I went into the workshop knowing I
Q: How has this experience impacted your
approach(es) to your work? J: To elaborate on my answer to the previous question, I had made a form with two curves in it, but it was still rather rigid. Peter said I could manipulate it a few more times to develop fullness in the form. After I did that, I could see the difference, and I knew that I could always figure out how to push my forms beyond what I had originally thought was possible. Being somewhere other than my studio space at school meant I could let go of the preciousness of each piece. M: While I don’t intend to continue with sculptural work, this workshop led me to think about storytelling in a different way. I continue to think about how to apply my experience to my practice—how can storytelling enter my work differently or be expanded through it?
⊳ ⊳ Left: Maureen Mills gathers wood for the New Hampshire Institute of Art (NHIA) Fushigigama (meaning wonder kiln) in Sharon, New Hampshire, 2018. Photograph by Jennifer Markmanrud. Right: Jennifer Markmanrud on the wheel at the NHIA, Manchester, New Hampshire. Photograph by Maureen Mills.
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ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION
⊲ Maureen Mills. Text Vase, 18x8x8 in. Woodfired stoneware. Photograph by Glen Scheffer. ⊲ ⊲ Jennifer Markmanrud. Mountain Cups, 2.75x 2.75x 3 in. Woodfired Stoneware. Photograph by Glen Scheffer.
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Studio Potter
Q: What is uniquely valuable about this kind of
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workshop experience for artists? J: This workshop experience changed the way I approached my work. I also met people who care deeply about their craft and are doing what they love; it was exciting to be a part of that. I wouldn’t have normally tried for a scholarship; I would have assumed I wouldn’t get it. But someone has to get it, so why not me? I’d encourage anyone to apply for workshop or residency scholarship, because you just never know how it can change your life. M: The workshop experience is valuable on so many levels, and the NCSW participants have exceptional levels of accomplishment, so it is much more about personal exploration than some other workshops might be. We artists
and teachers expect this kind of experience to impact younger participants like Jennifer, but it is valuable in many ways to an artist at any stage of a career. The opportunity to step out of our routines, from the classroom, the kitchen, or the studio, is important not only to our studio practice but also to our overall well-being. It is worth the effort to make it happen once in a while! Including young artists early in their careers is invaluable to these workshop experiences. I hope NCSW and other similar programs continue to develop their scholarship programs. These organizations encourage the continued development of individuals’ studio work and bring diversity to our communities not just through age or gender but also through race and culture. They rely on countless volunteer hours to make a meaningful experience for all participants and deserve support. Supporting scholarship programs and the organizations that offer them will ensure that they succeed at their mission, so we can succeed at ours.
Q: Now that you’ve had a mentor-mentee relationship experience outside your professor-student relationship, how has your relationship changed,
and what do you expect of it in the future? M: I know Jenn gained a lot of insight from this experience, but I think it also empowered her to be more independent and realize her ability to contribute in a group of artists more as a peer than a student. And while it is a challenge for me to step away from my role as teacher, I value her input in the studio and in the classroom— she steps up to some tasks around the studio that she might have shied away from before. J: The experience brought us closer and made me realize how a mentor-mentee relationship could be valuable to my professional growth. I am confident that I could call on Maureen in the future for personal and professional support.
Q: What pedagogical approaches has this
workshop helped you develop? Maureen, what from this experience will you bring into your teaching at NHIA? M: I enjoyed being a student of Syd’s, witnessing her teaching techniques, the way she brought sensitivity and humor to the process, and talked about the history of pottery and clay. Her patience with our group, which had a broad range of experience, empowering each of us to explore our ideas, was beautiful to witness. She cultivated a level of trust that allowed everyone to grow. I hope I can bring that same thoughtfulness to my classroom.
Q: Jennifer, what from this experience will
you bring into your future classrooms, in high schools or other arenas? J: What I took away from Peter’s classroom was his humbleness and openness. I will reiterate to myself how important these qualities are in teaching any level of student. I will remind myself to be patient and approachable.
GENERAL EDUCATION
Sa Wanphet sits beside a rice paddy and experiments with surface texture on a clay vase, Sukhothai, Thailand, 2017. All photographs courtesy of Sa Wanphet.
Of Jungles & Snow BY ANTHONY RICHARDS, WITH SA WANPHET
T
tube-shaped and, from its one rounded wall, windows jutted like thick battlement fortifications. A maid ushered us inside and disappeared in whispers, allowing a silence heavy with the architecture of dark wood and concrete to press in. Groomed and suited, elderly and frail, the Thai-Chinese gentleman who shuffled across the foyer presented a counterpoint to the robust 1960s brutalism of his manse. We brushed through the pleasantries of greeting, followed him as he unlocked the kind of stout he house was
door that needs shouldering to open, and descended stairs plush with deep dark-blue carpet to his private, subterranean museum. The edges of the vast circular space were dark—the walls and ceiling seemed lost—so that the cubic glass cabinetry was the focus, and their lighted contents the only things one saw or remembered. Here, a complete dinner set of colorful Benjarong, rimmed in gold and glazed in playful twists of flowers and birds, used more than a hundred years ago to serve a Thai king and his queens. Two rows over, a Chinese
blue-and-white ceramic opium pillow. Next to it, the ceramic pipe that unlocked those wild, Coleridgean dreams. And in pride of place at the end of the main aisle, a Ming Dynasty porcelain vase, which the gentlemen released from its protective case into his hands, turning it over and admiring it, then offering it to me and my awe-struck companion. Despite the soft carpet underfoot, we both declined. The gentleman insisted there was something else we must hold; it would surprise us. He led us to cabinets sheltering cruder vessels and jugs, whose colors were 69
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Studio Potter
GENERAL EDUCATION
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the ochers and reds and oranges of clay, their decorations simple. This was Ban Chiang, the 3,000-year-old Bronze Age pottery from what is now Udon Thani province. From its chunky appearance, I expected to have to heft the wide bowl he handed me, but it was light. It deceived the neural connections between my eyes and hands like a magician. My companion that day was a well-connected, middle-aged Japanese woman. Grateful for my tutoring her children, whenever possible she ushered me to places in Bangkok and its surrounds that few farang get to see and introduced me to people few get to meet. One excursion might be to a museum beneath a wealthy man’s mansion, another to the clattering wooden silk looms in an unpainted shack, where septuagenarian women sat weaving rough rugs to support their families. Those outings lighted in me a love for Thai pottery and handicrafts. So, when finances permitted, I bought: hand-dyed silk tapestries, delicate baskets woven with the stems of maidenhair ferns, Benjarong bowls, blue-andwhite porcelain, and ethereal celadon pottery. None of them antiques; these were modern items made by artisans keeping ancient traditions alive, purchased in places far from tourist throngs. Many of these items are stored in Bangkok waiting for the time I can get back to pack them up and ship them somewhere else, to some other house, in some other country. The time between my cellar museum tour a quarter-century ago and now seems as weightless as the Ban Chiang bowl I held. The world outside the train window is white, as completely as it is black when the train spears through a mountain tunnel. I’m traveling with my Thai sister-in-law, who wants to capture this
Norwegian snowstorm with her camera, but there is no way. She contents herself with marveling at the void beyond the frosted glass—this trip is the first time she has seen snow. Actually, forget the in-law. Sa Wanphet is my sister. It’s better to claim her as a full blood relative because I love her, and because she’s an amazing person. Sa is about to complete a doctoral degree in visual arts and
I expected to have to heft the wide bowl he handed me, but it was light. It deceived the neural connections between my eyes and hands like a magician. design from Burapha University. Of our many relatives, Sa is the first to visit my partner and me in our new country of residence. She has come to our sleepy, snowy, western Norwegian town after being in Munich, where some of her ceramic work was displayed at Museum Fünf Kontinente. We have the whole day to ourselves as we travel to Trondheim, Norway’s third-largest city. The last few times I saw Sa were in her hometown of Phitsanulok, Thailand. The friendly mayhem of family dinners allowed me only the opportunity to blurt a few questions about her pottery and studies between courses of spicy Tom Yum Goong, Gaeng
Ped, and Pla Thod. I’ve never even seen a picture of what she makes. We speak each other’s language with something less than fluency, but together we create a hybrid mash of sentences and words and embellish it luxuriously with gestures and facial expressions and tone. I ask Sa to show me some of her pottery, and for the next hour I barely register any of the spectacular winter scenery streaming past. I am transported back to a place of heat and humidity, and verdant greenery. The first images on her phone are simple—a dirt road, a muddy river, trees suffering through the hot season, low mountains bordering the background, and no houses or people. It is too remote for me to recognize the location. “I did this every day,” Sa says. “After I dropped the children off at school, I got in the car and drove. In Phitsanulok, there is only one place where local potters get their clay. But the city is surrounded by streams and rivers. I thought, there must be other places to get good clay.” “And did you find one?” “After a couple of months. But first, every day I did this, looking in the jungle.” She gives a rueful laugh. I’m wondering how Sa didn’t get killed by either heat stroke or a python when she shows me a picture of the clay she found, then extracted with help. It is moist, wrapped in thin plastic, and stacked like giant building blocks—it’s beautiful. I want to put my hands straight through her camera screen and feel its smoothness between my fingers. If I had a potter’s skill, I could shape this into anything. “Was it good to work with?” I ask.
Clockwise from top left: Size samples for selection of clay vases Sukhothai, Thailand, 2017. Wanphet Fueling the kiln furnace to fire large water jars, Sukhothai, Thailand, 2017. A finished vase with hand-woven water hyacinth trim by Wanphet, 2017, approx. 8x6 in. Wanphet finishing clay souvenirs (part of her PhD exhibition at Pibulsongkram Rajabhat University) at her home workshop, Phitsanulok, Thailand, 2018.
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“At first I couldn’t get the time and temperature right in the kiln. The pieces kept breaking. But then…” The next picture shows a jug with a wide body and shoulder, but narrow foot and neck. “I wanted to make something in the old Thai style. It’s very thin and quite light,” she says. “Oh, when this came out of the kiln!” Sa taps her chest, above her heart. She is beaming at the memory, and I recall the piece of Ban Chiang pottery. Sa shows me the pictures of the workshop and kiln she has at home, in an area
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Studio Potter
I have to have a good feeling about it. If I don’t have that feeling and I try to push it, it won’t work out. It just wastes time.
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▲ Wanphet unloads a kiln at her home workshop, 2018.
▼ Holes are being drilled in clay souvenirs that read "Na Kai Khia,” the name of a village in Thailand, 2018.
next to her garage; there are orderly rows of metal shelves, pieces of pottery stacked on them, palm-size flat clay tablets—a hundred of them and more hanging on a metal lattice. “Those are part of my doctoral work.” But something catches my eye; little bands of color around tubular clay pieces. “What are those?” “Vases. I wanted them fired but unglazed, so that when you put water in them, the clay changes color up to the water level. As there is no glaze, I wanted to add color in another way.” Around the vase, about a third of the way
from the top, is a plaited section of colorful weaving. The material is dried water hyacinth— something I have bought baskets made of, when I lived in the heat rather than the snow. The effect of the colorful weaving wrapped in miniature around the terracotta vase is arresting; it is fine and coarse at the same time. The ethnicity is pure rural Thai heartland. There is no influence of delicate Chinese blue-and-white, no trace of the kaolin-based Benjarong. It is folk art. Rustic. The people in the Thai countryside who make these types of treasures are warm and welcoming, and I miss them. Just this single piece of Sa’s pottery evokes this emotion in me. Her vase speaks without language. When a painting, or a silk tapestry, or a pottery vase means something that I can’t put into words—that is beyond words, as so much of what is in our minds is beyond words—then, for me, it is art. Sa deflects my praise and shows me variations of her weaving-wrapped vases, including a picture of a woman plaiting thin strips of dried water hyacinth. “This lady was able to adapt the way she does the weaving to my idea for the vases. We worked together to get it right, the shape and fit and colors. It was a collaboration, just like the clay vases.” “Didn’t you make the vases yourself?” “Yes, but I needed more than I could make on my own. I knew I could give the extra work to someone and pay them, which would help them out.” Sa shows a picture of herself at a makeshift outdoor table, molding a piece of clay. In a paddy behind her, the vivid green of young rice is almost shocking. Sa explains that she went out to the rice-growing areas around Sukhothai,
⊳ Sa Wanphet in the snow for the first time in Levanger, Norway, 2018. Photograph by Phalangchok Wanphet.
knee-high snow to frolic through in the parks, two pottery galleries to visit, a thousand photos to take, and several cafes to visit. The day will go by too fast, as days always do when I see family. But the memories will gleam. They’ll be light as air. BIO Anthony Richards was born in Australia and has lived a life sometimes a little too interesting in Indonesia, Thailand, India, China, and the United Arab Emirates. He now lives in Norway, enjoying social democracy, clean air and white winters. He'd like to write about those parts of a robustly misspent youth he can recall but is worried nobody would believe any of it. antchazrich@gmail.com Sa Wanphet thita_wanphet@hotmail.com Follow @pottery_by_sa
Studio Potter
our journey is where Sa finds the time and energy to do all this. When her children were toddlers, home life sometimes got so overwhelming that she would lock herself in the bathroom for a few minutes of peace. But it never took long for little fingers to start reaching under the door, accompanied by little voices asking to be let in. It’s one of my favorite stories of hers. I start counting, “Sa, you’ve got two young children, a husband. You live with your elderly parents. You have a job, plus you have your children’s art school business, and you’re about to finish your doctoral degree. How do you have time to make any pottery or find clay?” Sa is quiet for a second, thinking, her face framed by the snow-laden world outside the train window. “You know the truth? Sometimes I don’t find the time. When I make something, it has to come from inside. I have to have a good feeling about it. If I don’t have that feeling and I try to push it, it won’t work out. It just wastes time. So, if it doesn’t happen, I let it go for a while. Jai yen yen. I’ve barely made anything lately. I’ve been concentrating on my Ph.D. dissertation defense.” Sa shows me one last picture of herself standing in front of the defense committee. She has the Thai quality of jai yen, which translates literally as “cool heart” but means “to be serene.” In the picture she looks self-assured, in control; a lot more serene than I would be in her place. As the train pulls into Trondheim Central Station, Sa looks out the window, and I can tell she is running through her head all the things she has to do in the next couple of months. Right now though, we have some
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the site of the ancient Thai capital and a place famed for its history of ceramics. She found a potter there in a farming community and wanted to know if he was someone she could work with to make more of her vases. She took her time building her relationship with him, working with him over days and weeks in his wall-less studio, under a rickety roof. “I showed him I could do everything, work the wheel, mold the clay, use the kiln. Here’s a picture of him laughing. When I first went there he never smiled or laughed. But after a while we became friends.” I remember Thai smiles. It is said there are thirteen kinds, some for being serious, some for being annoyed, some for being angry. But, as in other places, the smiles for happiness create the bonds between people. “I was nervous also,” Sa says. “The chimney on his kiln was too short, and I was worried he would be offended if I told him that. In the end I just got up my courage and told him what the benefits would be if he lengthened the chimney.” “And did it work?” “He called me after he did it and told me he was able to fire his pieces more quickly and using about thirty percent less wood fuel. He was really excited. My feeling was so—” Sa taps that same place on her chest, above her heart, again. “How did you know that making the chimney longer would work though?” I ask. “I learned it while studying for my degrees. I felt so happy that I could help my friend. But I was also happy that I could take something I learned and teach it to a person out in the countryside who had never been to university.” What I am wondering at this point in
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Bailey Pottery Equipment | PO Box 1577, Kingston, NY 12402 info@bailey pottery.com | (800) 431-6067 | baileypottery.com
SMITH-SHARPE FIRE BRICK SUPPLY ARTAXIS
Often imitated, never equaled. ADVANCER® is the only LO-MASS® nitride-bonded kiln shelf with 25+ years of proven performance. Made flat to stay flat. Light, thin, strong, glaze-resistant shelves for gas and electric kilns. We are dedicated to supplying the highest quality silicon carbide kiln furniture and kiln building materials at fair market prices.
Featuring over 600 international ceramic artists, Artaxis aims to engage the ceramics community through promotional, educational, and networking programs while celebrating diverse artistic practices and being a resource of aesthetic values.
Artaxis | contactartaxis@gmail.com | artaxis.org
2129 Broadway St. NE, Minneapolis, MN 55413 | (866) 545-6743 kilnshelf.com | Photo: Advancer © shelves in Warren MacKenzie’s Kiln.
CERAMIC MATERIALS WORKSHOP
BEN CARTER
Ceramic Materials Workshop offers online classes and consulting about clay and glazes for artists of all experience levels. Online classes start every January, April, July, and October.
24 Deer Trail Rd., Abbottstown, PA 17301 | (347) 878-2529 ceramicmaterialsworkshop.com
TALES OF A RED CLAY RAMBLER Episode 61: Michael Kline, Julia Galloway and Kristen Kieffer talk trends in studio pottery. Pictured: Ramen Bowl by Michael Kline.
talesofaredclayrambler.com
We help people make great things!
SKUTT CERAMIC PRODUCTS INC. The people at Skutt have been providing potters with quality equipment for over 60 years. For more information visit us at skutt.com.
6441 SE Johnson Creek Blvd. Portland, OR 97206 | skutt@skutt.com | T. (503) 774-6000 | F. (503) 774-7833 | skutt.com Studio Potter Half Page.indd 1
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HAYNE BAYLESS SIDEWAYS STUDIO Hand-built stoneware for sale at the studio and these fine galleries: charliecummings gallery.com Gainesville, FL clayakar.com Iowa City, IA dowstudiodeerisle.com Deer Isle, ME fairhaven-furniture.com New Haven, CT freehand.com Los Angeles, CA plinthgallery.com Denver, CO ploughgallery.com Tifton, GA schallergallery.com St. Joseph, MI spectrumartgallery.org Centerbrook, CT theclaystudio.org Philadelphia, PA
Ivoryton, CT | hayne@sidewaysstudio.com | (860) 767-3141 | sidewaysstudio.com
Velvet Underglazes: the watercolor effect.
Thin down the Velvets & use them like watercolor paint. I can change thickness of the paint and I can mix multiple different colors to create color I want, also I can layer multiple velvet underglazes to create depth on the surface of the work.
The most versatile underglaze, Velvet Underglazes 6060 Guion Road, Indianapolis, IN 46254 I (800) 925-5195 I salessupport@amaco.com I amaco.com
FRIENDS OF
Studio Potter April 1, 2017 – March 31, 2018
We express our deepest gratitude to the following donors, and those who chose to remain anonymous, for their generosity in supporting the work of Studio Potter.
studiopotter.org/support INDIVIDUALS Richard Aerni Normandy Alden Jerry Alexander Stephen Alpert Daniel Anderson Marion Angelica John Arnot Peg Astarita Posey Bacopoulos Noel Bailey Anderson Bailey Marian Baker Destiny Barletta Delphine Barringer-Mills Bruce Barry Susan Beecher Fumiko Beppu David Beumee Sandy Blain Lucy Breslin Jasper & Lindsay Brinton Robert Briscoe Sue Browdy John A Burkholder Lorimer Burns Kaye Camille Byrd Jacob Hasslacher Rev. Paul F. Campbell Mary Campbell
Roger & Opal Cocke Susan Cohen Joyce Cohen Mark Coppos Louise Allison Cort Mark Cortright Kevin Crowe Cheryl Lee Crowley John Dorsey Benjamin Eberle Daniel J. & Edith Ehrlich John Clark & Elizabeth Barringer Raymon Elozua Hollis Engley Kathy Erteman Anne Fallis Alice H. Federico Leslie Ferrin Liz Fletcher Geoffrey Flickinger Mazal Foundation Barbara Frey Roberta Gillilan Marcia Halperin Holly Hanessian Doug Hanson Louise Harter Robbie Heidinger Bonnie Hellman Fred Herbst Linda & John Hillman Tiffany Hilton Barbara Hoffman Lynne Horning Heather Houston Clary Illian Al Jaeger Sarah Jaeger David & Diane Jenkins Melody Jessen Brent Johnson Fitzhugh Karol Kim Keyworth Gretchen Keyworth
Lucy Lacoste Dr. Clayton D. Lanphear III Martina Lantin Ronald Larsen Jo Lauria Mary Law Sylva Leser Robbie Lobell Nancy Magnusson Jeff Manfredi Linda Manning Osamu H Matsutani, MD David McBeth Leanne McClurg Cambric Tim McCosker Jon McMillan Robert McWilliams Sheila Menzies Ron Meyers Marty Morgan Kristin Muller Ellen & Gerard Mulligan Hannah Niswonger Mark Oehler Laura Taft Paulsen Thomas Perry Tim Reece Sue Ricklefs Russ Roeller Deborah Rosenbloom Francine Rudoff Miranda Rutan Paul Sadowitz Charles Salvaterra Patricia Savignac Jan Schachter Judith Schwartz Marcia Selsor Nancy Selvin Nancy Servis Mark Shapiro Bunzy Sherman Alan Willoughby & Linda Shusterman
Linda Sikora & Matthew Metz Sandy Simon Michael Simon & Susan Roberts Peter Sohngen Jenni Sorkin Rebecca Sparks Vipoo Srivilasa Suzanne Staubach Jessica Stoller Motzkin Studios Connie Talbot Maria Tracy Dennis Trombatore Ann Tsubota James Turnbull Ursula Vann Mike Vatalaro Sue Wadoski Joan Walker Julia Walther Warren Frederick & Catherine White Jacqueline Wilder Lois Wilkins Adero Willard Mary Ellen Wilson Nancy Wirth Paul Wisotzky George & Betty Woodman Maureen Mills & Steven Zoldak FOUNDATIONS Haymarket Peoples Fund Mazal Foundation Seth Sprague Educational and Charitable Foundation CORPORATIONS Bailey Pottery Equipment Corp. Highwater Clays Inc. IN KIND CLAYAKAR, and the artists who donated via the annual Yunomi Invitational fundraiser.
Potter Melissa Weiss holding one of her large bowls. Weiss digs her own clay in Northwest Arkansas, and operates a studio in Asheville, North Carolina. Read her "Instaview," page 59.
“Good teaching is more a giving of right questions than a giving of right answers.” —JOSEF ALBERS
COVER: Melissa Weiss, Bucket with Pinstripes, 2017. 18x12 in. Coil-built. Wild clay custom stoneware body, slip, ash glaze, iron wash; fired to Cone 10 in gas-reduction and reduction-cooled.