Vol 43 No 1 Winter 2015

About The Studio Potter Founded in 1972, The Studio Potter is an independent journal of ceramics, published twice a year in January and July. Each issue is organized around a theme, broadly stated so as to accommodate a range of perspectives, and featuring original and striking design.

Recent themes have included: Clay and Words, Money,

Sustenance, and with this issue, Community, Kinfolk, Lineage, Legacy.

Originally launched by a group of New Hampshire potters, early issues of the journal were dedicated to the experiences and concerns of working potters, an alternative to gallery-centered and how-to publications. SP has long since expanded its editorial reach to encompass aesthetics, ceramic history, and philosophical arguments, but it remains grounded 0

in the studio and in what is on the minds of all who choose clay as their primary medium. We encourage lively, thoughtful writing from across the spectrum of contemporary ceramics, and are committed to the elegant integration of visual and written content.

The following pages offer a digital sample of the current issue, with additional out-take images and color images not included in the print version. The digital sample is a complement to the complete 96-page issue which is available in print only. For more information about the Studio Potter organization, or to become a member and subscribe to the journal, please visit studiopotter.org.

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CONTENTS VOLUME 43 NUMBER 1

W I N T E R / S P R I N G 2 01 5 2 In This Issue 3 Editorial COMMUNITY 4 Mud, Glorious Mud

by Elizabeth Eidlitz 7 Time and Place

by Doug Jeppesen 12 The Expanding Community of Wood-Fired Ceramics

by Lindsay Oesterritter 18 Community Revisited

by Jill Foote-Hutton KINFOLK 23 Discovering (Family) Value

by Amanda Barr 28 Plum Tree Pottery

by Rosti Eismont, Paul Young, Kristine Poole, Kristen Kieffer, Mark Cole, Melissa Vaughn, Julia Walther 36 A Collector’s Dilemma

by Ronnie Watt LINEAGE 39 Lineage: The Art of Mentorship Essay by Gail Kendall; contributions by Michael Strand, Mark Pharis, Sam Chung, Richard Notkin, Tip Toland, Linda Sikora, Sanam Emami 45 Guiding the Spirit through Clay: The Lineage of Robbie Lobell

by Kathryn Hall 52 An Apprenticeship with Peter Bruce Dick

by Steve Driver 58 Underwriters 63 Coming Up

Henry Crissman's Mobile Anagama, 2014.

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Images from "The Expanding Community of Wood-fried Ceramics" by Lindsay Oesterritter TOP : The couches in front of the brand new kiln at WKU during the first firing.

BELOW: The mobile anagama on the road.

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IN THIS ISSUE

Volume

43, Number 1, is the STUDIO POTTER’s 84th issue. It’s a milestone. Not because the number 84 is anything special (besides being a tetrahedral number, for the geeks out there), but because it marks the first issue published beyond the lifetime of SP’s founder, Gerry Williams and thus shows the stamina of his legacy.

The ceramics community mourns Gerry’s death; among its members especially affected are those with fond memories of Dunbarton, New Hampshire, and those who met Gerry and his wife, Julie, on one of their epic journeys across the country to document the lives of American potters. In this issue, SP shares the story of its founder through six truly passionate voices, which together relay a full and rich account of his extraordinary life.

These six voices can be found in the “Legacy” section of this issue, along with remembrances of John Chalke and two other important figures that the field lost this year, Kirk Mangus and Ken Shores, written by Megan Tuttle and Namita Gupta Wiggers, respectively. SP offers condolences to those who were touched by the life and work of Tony Hepburn, a contributor to STUDIO POTTER, who passed away just before this issue went to press.

The three other sections of this issue, “Community,” “Kinfolk,” and “Lineage,” are collections of writings on the dynamic and vibrant lives of ceramists and their kin. Jill Foote-Hutton reexamines the definition of “community” and the field’s sometimes staid notions of it. Doug Jeppeson and Lindsay Oesterritter each discuss ways in which wood-firing fosters communal participation and shared experience.

As potters, our “kin” could be our blood relatives, our surrogate progeny, or our pots. Amanda Barr, seven former assistants of John Glick, and SP’s former intern Ronnie Watt discuss these ideas in the “Kinfolk” section of this issue.

Mentorship has been a running motif throughout SP’s eighty-three issues. Fittingly, the “Lineage” section of this issue highlights several potters whose relationships with their tutor or pupil has supremely influenced their careers. Writings reveal the relationships between Michael Strand and Gail Kendall, Robbie Lobell and Karen Karnes, Steve Driver, and Peter Bruce Dick, and more.

In honor of editor emerita Mary Barringer and her predecessor, Gerry Williams, SP has established two funding initiatives: one that will help facilitate ceramists’ direct exposure to the process, practice, and craft of writing and editing; and another that will develop our digital archive of back issues. SP thanks those who have already supported these goals and invites you to learn more at studiopotter.org/donate. We also thank The Seth Sprague Educational and Charitable Foundation for their support of SP’s new staff and digital development.

Elenor Wilson Rostislav Eismont EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Donna McGee PRODUCTION Jeani Eismont CIRCULATION Ximena Kilroe COPYEDITOR Faye Wolfe PROOFREADERS Karin Rothwell, Melissa G. Post FOUNDING EDITOR Gerry Williams EDITOR EMERITA Mary Barringer EDITOR

EDITORIAL AND MEMBERSHIP

DESIGN AND PRODUCTION

INDEXING

ART DIRECTOR

PO Box 1365 Northampton, MA 01061-1365 Phone: 413-585-5998 editor@studiopotter.org membership@studiopotter.org studiopotter.org

Eismont Design 50 Monadnock Highway North Swanzey, NH 03431 603 -283 - 0027 eismont.com

THE STUDIO POTTER is indexed by Ebsco Art and Architecture Index (ebscohost.com).

For a listing of past issues and articles, see www.studiopotter.org.

PRINTING WEBMASTER

Rostislav Eismont

Penmor Lithographers PO Box 2003 Lewiston, ME 04241-2003

Centered in studio practice, THE STUDIO POTTER promotes discussion of technology, criticism, aesthetics, and history within the ceramics community. We are a non-profit organization celebrating over 40 years of commitment to the publication of THE STUDIO POTTER journal. We Welcome hearing from potters, artists, scholars, and educators with special interests in writing and reporting on topics and events in ceramics. Contact the editor for submission guidlines. THE STUDIO POTTER BOARD OF DIRECTORS: Neil Castaldo, Elizabeth Cohen, Hollis Engley, Jonathan Kaplan, Nancy Magnusson, David McBeth, Maureen Mills. CONTRIBUTING ADVISORS: Linda Arbuckle, Constance Baugh, Michael Boylen, Cynthia Bringle, Louise Allison Cort, John Glick, Gary Hatcher, Diane Weldon Housken, Robbie Lobell, Paula Sibrack Marian, Mark Shapiro. Vol.43 No.1 (ISSN 0091-6641). Copyright 2015 by THE STUDIO POTTER. Contents may not be reproduced without permission of THE STUDIO POTTER. THE STUDIO POTTER is published in January as the Winter/Spring issue and in July as the Summer/Fall issue. Membership: One year US: $70.00 Canada: $85.00 (US) International: $90.00 (US) Student: $35.00 with proof of enrollment. Back issues are available. Postage paid at Manchester, NH. Please send address changes to PO Box 1365, Northampton, MA 01061-1365.

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EDITORIAL

Over

hundreds of years, cultural integration in the United States has worked its magic not only on some kind of American je ne sais quoi in the character of its people, but also in the character of its pots. Some show their heritage outright, some have more subtle signifiers, and some mark a completely new form or function. Am I talking about pots or potters? Both. And in examining their histories, we start to see connection upon connection, back and forth through generations, over and back across cultures.

Eric Smith, a folk-potter living and working in western Massachusetts, apprenticed with Cary Hulin and Mark Hewitt, who are each descendants (in pottery terms) of both Todd Piker and Michael Cardew. Smith’s classically harmonious forms with simple slip-decoration and his finishing method of once-firing in his wood-fueled salt kiln are a robust expression of his ceramics heritage. Another distinct example of a ceramics lineage is that of Nathan Lynch, whose work ranges from piled, globular ceramic vessels to neat arrangements of wooden vices and vinyl pillows to prop-based performance; however, all of his work holds that humorous complexity and seductive union of form and surface we see in the work of his teachers: Ken Price and Ron Nagle.

In between the two extremes of Smith and Lynch is a spectrum of potters and pots like me and mine: a mash-up of influences. In undergraduate school, my pots were like some weird residue of the Mingei-sotian force that raged through the Midwest in the latter half of the twentieth century. Now, they are engineered out of an ever-expanding cache of people, places, knowledge, and even things like the heirloom hex quilt my grandmother hand-stitched using scraps of printed fabric dating from the thirties to the sixties.

So, what do American ceramics look like?

I remember visiting the Edison estate in Fort Myers, Florida, with my grandmother when I was a little girl.

A monstrous, 200-year-old banyan tree sprawled out into the estate’s otherwise well-manicured gardens. I couldn’t locate its central trunk; instead I saw hundreds of limbs that had grown out, connected to other limbs, and dropped roots and begun to grow what appeared to be another tree, or trunk. This is what American ceramics looks like.

But maybe more like a banyan tree a few thousand years old. Over the years, each new root anchors itself, strengthens, and unites with cousins to support its ancestral architecture. It is a single yet wildly complex organism reinforcing its heritage and providing a fertile shelter for new growth as it constantly adapts to a changing environment.

If you’re skeptical about the metaphor, I doubt you’ll still be by the time you finish reading this issue. The lineal links between the authors, their subjects, their backgrounds – and quite possibly you – are enough to add another trunk to the tree. For starters, anyone who has ever participated in an Empty Bowls event has a connection to Gandhi. What? Yes, it’s true, but don’t think I’m going to elaborate here and spoil the richness of your discovery of that truth. The enduring power of a legacy (or one’s community, kinfolk, or lineage) is its preservation and propagation by those who work to become a part of it.

– EW

We potters stand on an ancient heritage, enriched by the centuries.

That this heritage has persisted through time and change is no accident.

– Gerry Williams, founder of the STUDIO POTTER 3

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C O M M U N ITY Time and Place by Doug Jeppesen

Some

artists in the region have said that I’m incredibly lucky. I like to think that my educational experiences at the University of Tulsa and at Northern Illinois University prepared me for the challenge of developing a ceramics program at Waubonsee Community College (WCC) in Sugar Grove, Illinois.

When the WCC ceramics program was established in the early 1970s by Professor Joe Hernandez, it occupied a small studio on the second floor of Von Ohlen Hall. Fortunately for me, by the time I arrived on the Sugar Grove campus in 1998 – fresh out of graduate school and eager to start teaching – the program had its own building, thanks to some hard work by Hernandez. During my first semester, I had both a supportive administration and clean palette of 7000 square feet of studio space to begin developing educational opportunities at WCC, and to fully explore what the ceramics field and our college had to offer each other.

But it was what I found at the back of the campus behind a maintenance building that would change the direction of my career. The Dean of Communications, Humanities, and Fine Arts back then told me that there was a kiln yard “out back.” Excited to see this, I ventured “out back” only to find two old sixteen-cubic-foot Alpines with a small tarp covering the blowers. Next to the kilns was an unimpressive twenty-by-twenty-foot wooden shed along with a mossy pile of insulating firebrick with plants growing skyward out of it. This kiln pad was tucked away behind the maintenance facility but I couldn’t have been more excited about its future.

As I stood there on that crisp January day, my first thought was, “This would be a great place to build a wood kiln.” I had never fired with wood, let alone built a kiln, but the wood-firing process had intrigued me since my first undergraduate semester at the University of Tulsa. In my beginning ceramics course, my professor, Tom Manhart, had shown the class images of Peter Voulkos’s wood-fired artwork. In particular, I vividly remember a platter with porcelain spread across its stoneware surface and a tiny orange flash mark where the two materials had joined that made it look as if fire was still emanating from the piece. Voulkos’s work was incredibly intriguing to me, as it was for so many others in our field.

My first step in rehabilitating the Waubonsee kiln pad was to look for donations of building materials. After talking with many refractory companies and navigating their various communication channels, I was finally put in touch with the plant manager of a local company who was eager to discuss how he could help with this project.

A year or so and many e-mails later, he offered me a large amount of hard brick being returned to the plant that was slated to be recycled. We were welcome to it, as long as we paid the shipping cost, a nominal expense for what we were getting. In August 2000, ten pallets of 9 x 6 x 4-inch Clipper firebricks and KX-99 number-one key bricks arrived, and I began to build the college’s first wood kiln.

I enlisted all levels of students to assist with the build; we discussed elements of kiln design and how different approaches might affect the final result. Because we did not have standard nine-inch-series brick, we could not build the kiln using the traditional brick- laying technique of stretcher courses unless we made the walls Doug Jeppesen is an Associate Professor of Art/Ceramics at Waubonsee Community College in Sugar Grove, Illinois.

E: djeppesen@att.net W: dougjeppesen.com

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LEFT:

John Stanicek. Untitled,

2009. Wood Fired Stoneware.

9 x 16 x 6 in.

Photograph by Doug Jeppesen.

BELOW:

Mike Gesiakowski. Plates,

2011. Wood-fired stoneware. 6 in.

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LEFT:

Doug Jeppesen. Teabowl, 2013.

Wood-fired B-Mix with Jeppesen Shino Slip.

3 x 4 x 4 in.

ABOVE:

Waubonsee anagama, “Honey,”

built in the fall of 2006.

Photograph by Doug Jeppesen, 2012.

N E X T PA G E :

Doug Jeppesen. Bourbon

Bottle, 2012. Wood-fired B-Mix, thrown and altered. 10 x 6 x 4 in.

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C O M M U N ITY thirteen inches thick. Instead, we built the kiln almost entirely out of header courses – not ideal, but it got the job done.

Our kiln design, basically a long tube with a sprung arch, was derived from that of the wood kiln at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, which in turn was based on an Ohio University kiln that took its inspiration from John Neely’s early train design. I decided to enlarge the width and the length of our kiln, a decision which affected many design elements. I had to modify, for instance, the firebox, the exit flue, and the chimney.

Making these changes took time and a lot of number-crunching; my primary source was The Kiln Book,

by Fred Olsen. The last thing I wanted to do was make a change that would have a negative impact on the kiln’s ability to reach temperature, one that we wouldn’t discover was a problem until the middle of the first firing. By mid-October we finally had the walls up, but as unpredictable as the weather is in northern Illinois, winter decided to set in a little early, so the arch had to wait until spring.

When spring finally arrived – in April, along with the birth of my first son – my students and I turned the arch. In the summer of 2001, in between woodsplitting and the occasional nap for me (overnight childcare responsibilities left me sleep-deprived) we completed the chimney.

In October, we fired the kiln for fifty-two hours. It was a festive event: students just wanting to be part of the experience fed the firing crews and helped keep the wood supply close at hand. Our first firing was a success. We got the kiln to temperature, and when we unloaded the kiln and looked at the work, we knew there were some wonderful possibilities to be discovered. We immediately decided to fire again. Everyone got back to work making ceramics to fill the kiln and splitting wood for the next firing in December.

Little did I know that this was the beginning of my journey as a wood-fire ceramist. I was curious to learn and explore what this process could reveal over time.

Early on, my wife dubbed that first kiln “the widowmaker,” saying that if she had known then what it would entail, she wouldn’t have been so excited for me.

But, of course, without her support, none of this would have been possible. My students and I owe her a big thank-you every time we stoke, fire, and unload a kiln.

The next year, I invited Brad Schwieger from Ohio

University to give a weeklong firing workshop, and that was the catalyst for the residency program. There have been more than fifteen atmospheric-firing workshops since that initial one, and since 1998, we have hosted more than fifty visiting-artist workshops, given by potters from the United States, Australia and Ireland.

The little kiln yard that I inherited sixteen years ago is now a covered, 5,400-square-foot space that houses four wood kilns, a wood/salt kiln, and a soda kiln, all for my students’ exploration. As they work long hours producing and firing their work, they develop strong bonds, looking out for each other, helping each other with technical issues, and thoughtfully critiquing each other’s projects. They appreciate the ample resources they have right at their fingertips, take great ownership of the studio to ensure its sustainability, and they leave Waubonsee with a resolve to continue their education at baccalaureate institutions and at graduate school.

Recently, one of my former students was awarded a Windgate Foundation Fellowship upon completing his BFA, and another received the “Young Wood Firers Award” to attend Guldagergard International Research Center in Skælskør, Denmark. Other students, after earning BFAs, have been awarded residencies at the Clay Studio in Missoula, Red Lodge Clay Center, the Archie Bray Foundation, and Lill Street Art Center. Still others are teaching in high school art programs and at the University of Illinois in Springfield and Northern Illinois University.

At NCECA in Milwaukee last March, I was encouraged to see twenty-two people with Waubonsee ties gathered around tables in the Hilton Monarch Lounge, enjoying each other’s company and telling stories of their experiences with clay, the material that binds us all together. I look forward to seeing even more in Rhode Island, and then in Kansas City. In 2016, as part of Waubonsee’s fiftieth anniversary, the college will host an International Wood Fire Symposium. In the preconference program, about twenty ceramic artists will come to campus to work in the studio and fire our five wood kilns. The symposium will be held October 6 – 8, 2016; more information can be found at waubonsee.edu/woodfire.

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KINFOLK

Discovering (Family) Value by Amanda Barr

I

spent most of young adult life running away from what I thought was my past. I rebelled against my family, happily wearing the label of black sheep, along with a nose ring and tattoos, and eagerly moving away from small town life and the family farm at seventeen. What I didn’t know then was that my running would take me right back around to where I started.

My family members do not define themselves as artists. When asked, my father will say he’s a carpenter, a woodworker, often even a modest “I work in construction.” He declines to mention his family’s long history of fine woodworking. My dad built our house when he married my mother. In that house were original Barr rocking chairs, wooden horses, bookshelves, and tables. As a baby, I was rocked to sleep in a beautifully carved, dark wood cradle he made just for me. When I got older, he made miniature duplicates for my dolls, and I played with handmade wooden toys, puzzles, even tools that I used to pretend to build with. I kept all my secret treasures in a cedar box, made of leftover pieces from a cedar linen chest Dad made for my mother.

My grandfather started his carpentry business when my dad was eight or so years old, and Dad has been working for Barr Construction ever since. When my grandfather died in 2002, my father officially took over running the business. Two of my four uncles also work full-time for the firm, and my aunt and other two uncles have been known to pitch in when needed.

My childhood memories are tinged with the smell of sawdust and oil, from hours spent “helping” my dad in the woodshop. I was and still am a lot like my father, always in search of perfection, never satisfied with doing anything halfway. His specialty is custom woodworking, in particular, cabinetry, and he will never do with nails or screws what can be better done with a difficult box joint or dovetail. Everything is polished to a sheen; no corner ever gaps awkwardly, saying “close enough.” Even the most ornamental of my dad’s pieces are made to be durable and functional.

Everyone in the family has a specialty. My grandfather made the most exquisite grandfather clocks and rocking chairs. Uncle Jim, my father’s younger brother, carves rustic statues from catalpa logs; he’s known for his roughhewn hand-chiseled Santas, though my favorite is a nearly life-size carousel horse he created when my cousin was born. That gorgeous horse is always present in my thoughts, and carousel-and-circus imagery is something I often return to in my work. The carousel horse is also strongly linked in my mind to fond memories of both my uncle’s sons. They were born at nearly the same time as I and in keeping with the family tradition, Denver went into architecture, Kyle into construction, but they died young a year apart in separate auto accidents.

The men in my family aren’t the only artisans. My first paying job was working in my grandmother’s antique and craft store. She sold antiques mostly, but her passion was and still is rubber-stamping. I spent an entire summer helping her make wrapping paper and note cards for two dollars an hour. We stamped, embossed, die cut, layered, and painted to our hearts’ content. She encouraged me to create my own works and collages, so I used my new stamp collection to paper all the walls of my bedroom. (It has since been covered; we were remodeling anyAmanda Barr is self-taught and currently lives and works in Iowa. An outgrowth of her background in printmaking, her work is an expression of her interest in all forms of media. E: amandabarr@gmail.com W: amandambarr.com

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KINFOLK

ABOVE:

Amanda Barr. When It Rains, 2013. Porcelain, printed underglaze, luster.

1 x 13 x 17 in.

D E TA I L :

Amanda Barr. You Are My Own Personal Raincloud, 2014. Porcelain,

printed underglaze pencil. 6 x 6 x 2 in.

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KINFOLK LEFT:

Amanda Barr. Que Sera Sera Teacup

and Saucer, 2014. Porcelain, underglaze printing. 5 x 6 x 6 in.

BELOW:

Jim Barr. Solid Cherry Wine Cabinet,

2012. Wood, glass, metal. 36 x 36 x 15 in.

RIGHT:

Amanda Barr in her Stay Puft Marsh-

mallow Man Costume, 1987. Fabric and paper. 36 x 18 x 12 in.

way.) My grandmother has had the most direct influence on my artwork, because it was the memories of that summer that inspired my technique of block printing directly on clay.

Though she always insisted she was terrible at all arts and crafts, even my mother got in on the action.

She never learned to crochet like her mother, but she did sew. I wore many outfits she created based on classic Simplicity patterns. She worked full-time as a pharmacist, but she diligently made all our Halloween costumes. The pinnacle of her creativity was in the Ghostbusters era; thanks to my Stay Puft Marshmallow Man outfit which she created without a pattern, I won a costume contest. My younger brother probably wore his Slimer costume for the next three years. Had he not outgrown it, he’d still be wearing it.

I never thought of what my family did as art; it was simply life. I often resented wearing handmade dresses to church and receiving handmade gifts for holidays.

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KINFOLK

Other children were wearing store-bought clothing and playing with name-brand toys: how could my things compare to theirs? I wasn’t so unusual in that regard; I think most of us take for granted the things we are surrounded by during our childhoods. I pushed them all aside for a long time, in pursuit of finding my own way in the world. Only with time, experience, and maturity did I learn the value of the handmade object over name-brand commerciality.

Growing up, I had an on-again, off-again relationship with arts and crafts; it was just fun. Creating art was not a proper pursuit, although scholarly study of its historical and cultural relevance was acceptable.

Some unfortunate stereotypes of artists, all too common in conservative rural areas with little funding for arts programs, convinced me that being an artist was not an option. Many of the kids in my class who were labeled artistic – used negatively – were lost, angst-ridden, angry children who often ended up in trouble.

But I craved a creative outlet that would produce a something tangible. During my graduate study of Spanish literature, frustrated by years of reading and writing as my only escapes from the daily grind, I decided to take a pottery class at the community arts center. I’d get a little messy, make a few pots, and with luck return to my studies with my frustrations and tensions all out of my system. I found that making pots was a great way to procrastinate: I avoided writing my thesis without the guilt that would come from, say, bingewatching something on Netflix.

After I graduated and started an evening teaching position at a community college, pottery making was a great way to spend the day. Soon life happened, things got complicated (e.g., my marriage’s collapse), and making became my refuge, solace from my pain.

I’d reached a point where I could not imagine my life without pottery.

This career change was difficult for my family. Only now, years later, have we all recognized that far from furthering my “wild child” status, my move into the creative field has truly brought me back in touch with my past and the legacy of my family. I realize it is unique and helps define me as an individual. My family legacy of the handmade has given me many gifts: creativity and a commitment to hard work, determination, perfectionism, an appreciation of quality, and the knowledge that when a day is over, I have left my mark on the world and passed along the value and joy of handmade objects.

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LINEAGE Guiding the Spirit Through Clay: The Lineage of Robbie Lobell by Kathryn Hall

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LINEAGE

OVERLEAF:

Karen Karnes (left) with Mikhail Zakin (right) on Cape Cod.

ABOVE:

Mikhail Zakin. Untitled, 2009. Stoneware, 13 x 5 x 3. A gift to Robbie Lobell from Mikhail Zakin.

BELOW:

Karen Karnes. Casserole, 1968. Glazed stoneware, flameware. 8 x 16 x 16 in. collection of Zeborah Schachtel. Photograph by Anthony Cunha.

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Oval Roaster with food by Robbie Lobell.

Karnes’s class opened Zakin’s mind to the possibilities of working with clay. Before she met Karnes, Zakin had worked in metal, making jewelry and site-specific sculpture; from then on, Zakin spent several years by Karnes’s side working in clay and would eventually help Karnes build her first salt kiln.6 This salt kiln played a great role in the development of Karnes’s and Zakin’s work as they used salt firing to emphasize the formal attributes of their sculptural vessels.

An extrovert, Zakin enjoyed fostering fellowship amongst friends and colleagues. She brought people together to discuss their love of making and to learn about the history of clay from around the world. According to Zakin, “The process of making is, after all, a celebration of life.”7 As a mentor to many flourishing studio potters, she devoted her life to helping others find their voice through clay. Earlier in her career, she taught at Greenwich House Pottery School and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Later, she became chair of the Visual Arts Department at Sarah Lawrence College.

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In 1973, she helped found the Art School at Old Church in Demarest, New Jersey, which continues to serve as a cultural center and art school for her community today.8 Lobell first met Mikhail Zakin at a workshop Zakin taught at the Mendocino Art Center in California in August of 1992. In the workshop, Zakin recognized Lobell’s creative potential and her dedication to working in clay. According to Lobell, Mikhail first recognized Lobell’s talent after Zakin had the group complete a basic exercise. Zakin asked the students to take a clay form, slice it, and position the sliced component in relationship to the solid form. Drawing from her background in sculpture, Zakin emphasized the articulation of form in both her work and her teaching. In this exercise, she challenged her students to move beyond the functionality of clay into the realm of sculptural expression.9 The assignment challenged Lobell, who had only ever focused on making functional wares, to express

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Robbie Lobell, Cook on Clay Casserole, 2012. High-fire flameware, 9.5 x 7.5 x 10 in. Photograph by Michael Stadler.

herself sculpturally. In her composition, Lobell created a triangular form that grew upward in volume. She then scooped a section out of the side of the form and placed the wedge on top of the original solid so that it balanced gracefully. Lobell’s composition suggested a lineal connection between the two components, and the wedge’s placement conveyed a supportive relationship between the forms. Lobell has described feeling an mmediate sense of excitement upon completing her composition. The assignment marked the beginning of a strong progression in Lobell’s work as she began to use form as her primary outlet for expression.

Lobell’s contemporary cookware embodies a similar yin and yang in both balance and strength. A thick handle on a lid complements the concave interior of her tall casserole, harmonizing the interior and exterior space. Her square baker sets nest inside one another as do her oval roaster sets; each set captures a direct relationship from one form to another. As a result of Lobell’s unique consideration of form and func-

tion, each baker, roaster, and casserole embodies Lobell’s spirit and the influence of Zakin and Karnes.

From the workshop, Zakin invited Lobell to move to New Jersey to live and study with her. What Lobell expected to be a three-month residency turned into one that lasted a year and a half. Zakin gave Lobell space and time to work while encouraging Lobell to incorporate sculptural elements into her functional wares.10 She taught Lobell to consider the interplay between interior and exterior space, line, and volume.

In an essay written for the STUDIO POTTER journal, Karnes describes this approach to design: “My changes in form often occur through a process that might be described as kinesthetic; that is, through the body feelings rather than through the mind.”11 As a result of this process, Karnes’s vessels demonstrate a tension between internal and external space, giving her vessels breath as they swell outward. In his 2004 catalog on Karnes, Garth Clark describes Karnes’s work as “biomorphic,” a term which may be extended to Zakin and 49

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LINEAGE

Robbie Lobell (left) and Karen Karnes (right), in Karnes’s studio in Morgan, Vermont, marking the completion of Lobell’s six-week apprenticeship with Karnes, 2001.

Lobell.12 Zakin’s ceramics are architectonic; her clay structures resemble the exoskeletons of anthropods, fossils, and earth tectonics, calling attention to clay’s primordial nature and timelessness. Lobell’s vessels exhibit a striking familiarity to Karnes’s casseroles, conveying a tension between interior and exterior space, but with greater curves, rounder edges, and larger features.

Inspiring Lobell’s advocacy for studio-based wares within a culture that values cost-driven factory-based products, Zakin provided Lobell with opportunities to broaden her understanding of studio pottery in other cultures. With Zakin, Lobell gained firsthand knowledge of different pottery traditions and practices. The two women visited New York City once a week, stopping by open markets, galleries, and visiting Zakin’s friends. In 1993, Lobell traveled to China where she visited Shanghai, Yixing, and Beijing, and took a handson workshop in Jingdezhen with Zakin and a group of students.13 When asked about her experience living with Zakin, Lobell recalls Zakin hosting a diverse group of people at her dinner table – Zakin frequently arranged for her friends and students to meet one another. Lobell remembers potters from Scotland, England, and Korea stopping by Demarest while passing through New York City.14 Zakin first introduced Lobell to Karen Karnes at Karnes’s studio in Morgan, Vermont, during Lobell’s residency with Zakin. Zakin warned Lobell not to be offended if Karnes ignored her. Karnes could be very 50

selective in choosing her friends and colleagues. However, Lobell says that she and Karnes quickly bonded over their passion for clay and their similar ancestral roots. After a few days, Karnes asked Lobell to choose a cup from her cupboard for Lobell to take home as a token of their friendship.

Some years after that initial visit, in 2000, Lobell had a six-week intensive residency with Karen Karnes.

Lobell’s residency with Karnes was much more handsoff than her time spent with Zakin. The residency was a privilege afforded to Lobell as Karnes did not often work with others and allow them to share a studio space with her. After just the first week of her residency, Karnes brought out the flameware recipe, gave it to Lobell, and told her to see what she could to do with it.15 It was an act of great generosity, as Lobell is the only person with whom Karnes shared this recipe.

In 1957, this flameware recipe had represented a special career transition for Karnes. With Zakin and another friend and colleague, M.C. Richards, Karnes developed the flameware recipe with the help of a material engineer at a clay mine. M.C. Richards, Ron Probst, Bill Sax, Mikhail Zakin, and Karen Karnes all experimented with this recipe, but Karnes had the most success with it.16 She used it to make cookware, specifically, casseroles that served as her bread-and-butter product: with this recipe, she achieved the financial stability she needed as a single mother to raise her son as well as make her sculptural vessels and perfect the use of her salt glazes.

Karnes’s act of generosity contributed to a pinnacle shift in Lobell’s career, as it had for Karnes forty-three years earlier. Unlike Karnes, Lobell’s focus as a potter is her flameproof pots. For Lobell, designing cooking vessels presents a challenge in working both functionally and sculpturally. Lobell has moved beyond Karnes’s limited use of the flameware, by designing a variety of forms in addition to the casserole that evoke her own signature style. With some modifications to the color, Lobell uses Karnes’s “Y” glaze on the exteriors of her cookware. She altered the glaze chemistry to yield a beautiful golden titanium yellow that in certain instances produces a blue drip.17 For the interiors of her pots Lobell uses the “Kaki” glaze of Karnes’s partner, Ann Stannard, which gives the interior a rich Bordeaux color.18 While Lobell recognizes Karnes for her success with flameware, Lobell refers to Zakin as her “creative

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LINEAGE mother” and credits Zakin for helping Lobell find her identity.19 In her reflection included in Zakin’s retrospective, curated by Karen Karnes, Lobell wrote, “One of the most precious gifts we are given in life is that of a teacher – someone to guide us to the core of ourselves.”20 Zakin taught Lobell how to learn. She taught her how to ask herself the right questions about her own studio practice and her connection with the material, and how to be inspired by the world around her.

Zakin’s enthusiasm for clay was infectious. She taught Lobell and many others the importance of paying it forward and creating an environment in which fledgling potters could grow. In living and working side-byside with Zakin, Lobell adopted Zakin’s philosophy as a maker and educator: learning to learn, learning to see, and learning to teach.21 Through this model, Lobell hopes to inspire others to develop their own passion for clay just as Zakin inspired her.

Rivaling academia as the prominent structure for ceramics education in America, the apprenticeship model that defined Lobell’s educational experience is a testament to the value of that model, and she is committed to keeping it alive. In Zakin’s memory, Lobell and her partner, Maryon Attwood, started the Zakin Apprenticeship Program at Cook on Clay for women in art, business, and manufacturing, offering one- and two-year apprenticeships. Lobell notes, “[The program] is for young women to help find their way on their own time.”22 The program is a contemporary adap-tation of Zakin’s apprenticeship model, as it teaches contemporary business practices. It is designed for dedicated women and relies on a competitive application process.

Lobell and Attwood provide two apprenticeship tracks: one for those who desire to learn more about a start-up manufacturing business – mold-making, hydraulic ceramic pressing, and business relations – and another that caters to those interested in learning how to be successful as a full-time studio potter.23 Lobell wrote in Zakin’s eulogy, “Her voice is in my head, her spirit in my soul every day, as I work and engage with the world.”24 In carrying on the tradition, Lobell intends to keep Zakin’s mission alive by welcoming emerging female potters into her extended family and giving them the tools that they need to find their own spirit through clay. Through Lobell, Karnes’s and Zakin’s legacy will continue.

NOTES

1

Andrew Zoellner, “Flameproof Beauty,” American Craft 74.1

(February/March 2014): 18-19.

2

Robbie Lobell, “A Flameware Journey,” STUDIO POTTER 36.2 (Summer 2008),

84.

3 4

Robbie Lobell, telephone interview with author, 1 July 2014.

Karen Karnes, “Choosing Another Path,” STUDIO POTTER 15.1 (December

1986): 19.

5

Karen Karnes, interview by Mark Shapiro, Archives of American Art,

Smithsonian Institution, 9-10 August 2005; See, Christopher Benfy, “An American Life in Seven Contrasts,” in A Chosen Path: The Ceramic Art of Karen Karnes, ed., Mark Shapiro (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 2010) for a contextualization of Karnes’ biography in American history.

6

Karnes first witnessed salt firing at Penland in 1967. It was after this, that

she and Zakin built Karnes’s first salt kiln. See, Karnes, interview by Mark Shapiro, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 9-10 August 2005.

7

Mikhail Zakin, “Zakin, Mikhail,”AKAR Design, www.akardesign.com/

creators/moreinfo.asp?iCreatorID=260, accessed: 09 August 2014.

8 9

Ibid.

Robbie Lobell, telephone interview with author, 11 August 2014.

10

Lobell, “Robbie Lobell,” in Mikhail Zakin:The Artist as Teacher, 14-15.

11

Karen Karnes, “Vermont Potters: Karen Karnes,” STUDIO POTTER 18.1

(December 1989): 54.

12

Garth Clark, “Karen Karnes, Retrospectively,” Karen Karnes (New York:

Garth Clark Gallery, 2004), 29.

13

From Robbie Lobell’s resumé, http://robbielobell.com/artist/resume.html,

accessed: 15 September 2014.

14

Robbie Lobell, telephone interview with author, 27 August 2014.

15

Robbie Lobell, telephone interview with author, 11 August 2014.

16

Lobell states the material engineer lived in Pennsylvania. See, Robbie

Lobell, correspondence with author, 22 September 2014; Clark notes that Karnes received her flameware recipe from a man working in a clay mine in New Jersey. See, Clark, “Karen Karnes, Retrospectively,” 30.

17

Robbie Lobell, “A Flameware Journey,” 84.

18

Lobell credits this glaze to Angela Fina, who worked closely with Karnes

to develop Karnes’s glazes. Robbie Lobell, telephone interview with author, 27 August 2014.

19

Robbie Lobell, telephone interview with author, 11 August 2014.

20

Robbie Lobell, “Robbie Lobell,” in Mikhail Zakin: The Artist as Teacher, ex.

cat. Krikorian Gallery, Worcester Center for Crafts, Worcester, MA, October 12 - December 17, 2001 (Worcester:Worcester Center for Crafts, 2001), 14.

21

Robbie Lobell, telephone interview with author, 1 July 2014.

22

Ibid

23

“Apprenticeship Details and Applications,” Cook on Clay, http://cookon-

clay.com/Details/, accessed: 9 August 2014.

24

Robbie Lobell, quoted from Mikhail Zakin’s eulogy, 2012.

51

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CONTENTS VOLUME 43 NUMBER 1

W I N T E R / S P R I N G 2 01 5

LEGACY 2 B A Memory of Gerry Williams

by Theo Helmstadter 4 B On the Road with Gerry and Julie

by Carol Eddy 7 B Gerry, Julie, and the Corporate Office Tower

by Shelley Westenberg 9 B Memories of Gerry

by Michael Ziomko 10 B Gerry Williams

by Michael Boylen 13 B An Interview with Gerry and Julie Williams

by John Hartom 22B Remembering Kirko: Kirk S. Mangus, 1952 – 2013

by Megan Tuttle 27B GENERATIONS: Ken Shores

by Namita Gupta Wiggers 32 B John Chalke, 1940 – 2014

Gerry Williams on top of Mt. Monadnock, Jaffrey, New Hampshire.

3

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LEGACY A MEMORY OF GERRY WILLIAMS by Theo Helmstadter I was fine, for my first few years, making pots. I had the key to someone’s studio – I went there alone in the evenings. But after a while I started having to admit that I really liked this, making pots, that I wanted to make really good ones – the best that I could – and that I wouldn’t be happy in a borrowed studio space. It was time to build my own.

Building my own meant building a kiln and learning how to mix glazes and how to look for clay that I could dig myself. I know – potters don’t have to do these things anymore, and haven’t had to for a number of decades now. Nevertheless. That’s where I was at. I wondered if maybe there’d be some library books that could help.

That’s when I discovered STUDIO POTTER, a thick, flat, magazine I could buy at the clay supply store, the same place I went to ask about the price of “soft” brick, which was $3.25 per brick unless I bought a box of ten – then they were cheaper. But I needed thousands of bricks to build a kiln. STUDIO POTTER had nonglossy paper and square binding like a book – seemed like the sort of thing that might help me. I bought a copy. It only came out every six months. I never bought the other clay magazines, the monthlies, they had a lot of articles about how to actually make pots, but that’s what I didn’t want to know. I wanted to find that part out myself.

Right away I discovered that STUDIO POTTER, edited by Gerry Williams, had a long catalog of back issues, available for five dollars each and there was a New Hampshire phone number listed where I could call to order. “Why not get a bunch of them?” I thought, “they’re almost as cheap as bricks.”

I dialed the number. A man answered. “Hello?”

“Hi,” I said, “I’m uh, interested in ordering some back issues of STUDIO POTTER?” “Oh," he said. “Okay.” We talked for a few minutes. I told him why I wanted to read the back issues – that I wanted to build a studio, that I really liked making pots, and so . . .

The man listened patiently and perceptively. “You’re just starting out, huh?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“And you want to make stoneware pots. Good for you.” He said this unironically, but with a lot of understanding of what this might entail – far more than I had. There was a silence as we wrapped up the conversation. This was in the late nineties, and I was standing in my kitchen talking on a cordless phone. “Is this . . .” I ventured, “. . . Gerry Williams?”

“Yes.” “Oh! I didn’t, um . . . well . . . whatever! You know, I really like your magazine. STUDIO POTTER is really great.”

“Thank you,” he said quietly. “And good luck.”

A week or so later a whole batch of magazines arrived in the mail. The older ones were sideways – you thumbed the pages the long way. They smelled like a basement. The first issue I picked out, Volume 5, Number 2, had a watercolor picture on the cover of the White House, at night, with the moon overhead and the American flag. All the windows are dark except one little one at the very bottom, lit up yellow, and inside someone is throwing pots on a wheel.

Yes, clay, especially stoneware, especially the wheel, has this counter-culture reference, this ethic of subversion, Theo Helmstadter has been a full-time potter for fifteen years. His studio, Green River Pottery, is in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

E: theo@greenriverpottery.com

2B

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LEGACY that the cover suggested. Let’s find our own way to live.

I mean, it did then. I guess the “field” is outgrowing this now, and maybe even looks back on those opaque high-alumina glazes – the speckled, stony look of Rhodes 32 – with a little embarrassment. Or exasperation. That’s good, right? One’s work evolves, and the field of ceramics evolves too. Times change. I didn’t mind STUDIO POTTER’s ethic of subversion – I liked it.

And Rhodes 32! That was the first glaze I tried mixing up, in my own five-gallon bucket, in the studio that I was halfway done building.

I opened the cover. Inside I saw a black-and-white picture of Karen Karnes sitting in the unbricked door of her big sprung-arch kiln. Around her, the requisite angle iron frame, blackened burner ports, scattered stacks of brick, and leather gloves. The potter’s big hand resting on a knee. A look of strength and equanimity. And could that be just a little . . . defiance? The year was 1976. Photo credit: Gerry Williams.

The next issue I opened: Volume 7, Number 1, 1978.

The first article I really remember digging into was Garth Clark’s “Sam Haile 1909–1948: A Memorial.”

Also in that issue: “Why Make Pots in the Last Quarter of the Twentieth Century” by Michael Cardew. I had never heard of Michael Cardew. Or of Garth Clark, or Karen Karnes, or Sam Haile. I had my work cut out for me and when I wasn’t pouring the slab and starting to stack bricks for the walls of my kiln (Gerry Williams was right, this was an incredible amount of work), I was reading STUDIO POTTER. “Home computers are commonplace now, no longer accessible only by the rich,” Pat Doran noted in Volume 10, Number 2.

Everything changes. And then there’s that cliché about pottery: it endures, the methods one uses to make it endure, little has changed in the potter’s studio since its Paleolithic beginnings. In a way that’s true. I still open those back issues of STUDIO POTTER and can see, of course, a lot has changed in the field of ceramics – you don’t need to use an old washing machine to make a clay mixer anymore, and you might not even call yourself a potter anymore, if you’re working in a studio with clay. You’re a ceramic artist. But still. My prediction is that Gerry Williams’s editions of STUDIO POTTER will remain, and endure. Certainly I will remember my two-minute phone conversation with him forever.

Karen Karnes. STUDIO POTTER, Vol. 5 No. 2, 1977.

S P A R T I C L E S B Y T H E O H E L M S TA D T E R :

“Two First Pots.” Vol. 35, No. 2, Jun. 2007, pp. 86-87.

“Keeping Time.” Vol. 38, No. 2, Summer/Fall 2010, pp. 32-34.

3B

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LEGACY An Interview with Gerry and Julie Williams by John Hartom The following interview was conducted and recorded by John Hartom on October 10, 2006, transcribed by Carolyn Halloran, and is presented here in edited form.

John Hartom: I’m sitting here with Gerry and Julie Williams in Dunbarton, New Hampshire – the site of their home and pottery, the birthplace of STUDIO POTTER magazine, a thirty-year-long summer school program, and much more. I’m a retired high school art teacher, who taught for twenty-nine years and who, along with my wife Lisa Blackburn, founded the Empty Bowls project. Much of what goes into that project was learned at this site.

I first met Gerry and Julie in the late seventies when I attended one of Gerry’s workshops with six other students. In one week we built a wood-fire kiln and I learned a great deal about Gerry, Julie, their family, their relationship, and about their entire philosophy. Those lessons continue to be very important. And so I’m really pleased to be here with Gerry and Julie, and we’re going to record some information for the STUDIO POTTER archives.

Julie, we’ll start with you. I’m interested in your life up until the time that you met Gerry.

Julie Williams: Okay, I was born on Labor Day – which is quite appropriate – September 1, 1919, and so I’m now 87, which seems too difficult to believe at times, other times perfectly believable. I was born in the small city of Nashua, New Hampshire, to a family which was very much like the family that Gerry and I have created. I had a very close-knit family: an older brother, an older sister, and then a younger sister, who was two years younger than I, whom I have been close to all my life. We had a very happy childhood.

Our house was the type of place where people were always welcome. My father used to say, “Bring your friends home.” They always felt comfortable there, and I think that’s what Gerry and I have always tried to do with our home here – to have a lot of people around whom we love and enjoy the company of. So I had a traditional upbringing.

My father was a Republican and was involved in local politics. He was a legislator for many years, including a period when he was the state senator from our district. But he also owned a floral business, and he was very well liked in Nashua. My mother was a very wonderful woman, who had seven children. She lost three: one at the age of fifteen months; one at the age of three months, then she lost a son by drowning. He was fourteen years old. That was one of the big tragedies of her life, but she never became bitter or sour; she was always very even-keeled, always very loving, warm, a really great mother.

When it was time to go to college after going

through Nashua High School, I ended up going to Wellesley. I majored in musical theory. I can’t say I’ve done much with music except play the church organ for many years, but it was a great background or subject, which brought me in contact with other things.

I had an early marriage, which resulted in three very nice children. At that point I became active in doing radio broadcasting because of my first husband’s work in that field. For seventeen years I continued with broadcasting; the majority of what I did was called “women’s shows.” Since this was about fifty years ago, women were not considered able [laughs] or bright enough – I don’t know what the story was – to do anything like hard news, so they were always relegated to the position of doing soft news or women’s features, but it was fun.

I did many, many interviews, which were always very important to me because I love the experience of exploring people. I was told at one time it would be good to interview people at the Currier Gallery in Manchester, a very fine gallery that had a good teaching program. Everybody kept telling me about this man who was teaching pottery there. So I asked Lillian, [a friend and a student of Gerry’s], to bring him over to my apartment so I could meet him. We would have coffee after their class, and I could get a little acquainted with him.

He came on my program, and I asked him where he had his dinner between his two Friday classes (one in the afternoon and one in the evening), and he said, 13B

sp43_1Hartom8b_sp37_1 1/21/15 10:40 AM Page 3

LEGACY “Oh, I go out to some greasy spoon, or some woman in the class invites me home.” I found out later that he was the darling of the class, so he was always being invited out to other people’s houses. The only thing I remember serving him back then was an apple pie.

That sticks in my mind because it’s still one of his favorite desserts.

After we met, he asked Lillian and me if we would go out and dig clay with him. There was a place in New Hampshire where the famous Shire potters had gone to dig clay, and Gerry knew where it was and wanted to go dig there, so Lillian and I packed a lunch and on a gorgeous fall day, we went and dug clay and then had dinner. The next time he asked me to go out by myself.

That was the beginning of our fifty-one-year relationship. It was a very exciting time.

Gerry and I come from very different backgrounds, but we ended up being very close in our feelings about people and events, and about our responsibilities and so on, even though he was born halfway across the world in another culture, and I was born in Nashua, New Hampshire – a small town. But I think the influences upon us both were those of strong family ties and being completely involved as families with what we were doing.

JH: Gerry, could give us some information now about your background?

Gerry Williams: Okay . . . my formal name is Frederick Gerald Williams. I was named after my father Frederick Gladstone Williams. I hated “Frederick” and insisted that I be called by my second name, which has been a problem all my life because everyone wanted to know what my real name was, and I didn’t want to identify myself with it. Nevertheless, I do like the name Gerry with a “G,” and that makes me different from the “J” Jerrys and all the Fredericks in the world.

I was born on January 5, 1926, in a place in India called Asansol, which was a town established for railway development, in which a lot of Indian and English people live. My parents had a school for Bengali children called “The Village of the New Day,” whose name in Bengali language meant dawn. My parents favored a multifaceted education – not only reading and writing but also growing vegetables, building houses, dancing, folk dancing, and the arts; all things that I became aware of and appreciated, as I grew older.

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I went to school first in Darjeeling, India, just north of Calcutta, at a missionary school called Mt. Herman, and I was there for about a year and a half before my parents had to take a furlough and return to America, where my father continued his formal education at Columbia University.

On our return from America, I then went to a school in North India called Woodstock, which was a school primarily for American missionary kids from all over the country but particularly from North India. There were some Indians in the school as well, but it was mostly children like me who were sent “up to the hills,” as it was called, to this boarding school for nine months of the year and spent the other months “on the plains,” with our parents. It was there that I [gained an appreciation for] a multicultural environment, because not only were there American, English, and European children at the school, there were Indians as well. And it was in the middle of a mountainous region in North India with a view of the beautiful snow-capped peaks of the Himalayan range.

I graduated in 1942, then returned to America for further education. Interestingly enough, just this last year, my school, Woodstock, gave me the honor of being a distinguished alumnus and I returned there this February with my wife, Julie, and my daughter, Leslie, to receive a commendation from the school for the work I was doing and had done.

JH: I understand that your father worked with Gandhi in India. Can you tell us about that, and if you ever met Gandhi?

GW: One of the things that my father did was to help the people who live there become aware of the impor-

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LEGACY When I returned to India in 1959, or something like that, I was an attendant of the World Agricultural Exposition in New Delhi, and on the grounds of the expedition, there was a replica of Gandhi’s house. I went to see what it was like when my parents visited him, and in a back room on the wall there was a little sign saying, “toilet installed by F.G. Williams” – my father. He had a big laugh over that when I told him about it later on.

JH: While you were in perhaps a somewhat isolated situation, being in a school that was predominantly for American students, were you a witness to the caste system in India?

And, if so, did that have any impact upon you? tance of proper sanitation in villages and homes. People used the fields for their needs or they had open trenches for that purpose, but my father decided to build an inexpensive septic tank that could be put into a person’s home or nearby and was covered and protected from exposure.

He began to talk to other people about this, and soon there were people all over India coming to his school for special seminars to learn how to do this. It so happened that Mahatma Gandhi heard about this septic tank and was interested in seeing whether it worked or not. Mr. Gandhi was in favor of an open trench.

At first, Gandhi wanted to come to my father’s school to see for himself what it looked like and was about to board the train when the British parties refused to give him access. He then said, “Fred and Irene (my mother and father), come to my ashram and put a septic tank in my home, and I will use it and tell you whether I believe it’s a good idea or not.” My mother and father went there on two different occasions and spent quite a bit of time talking to Gandhi about the concept and finally installing a septic tank in Gandhi’s home. He said to my father, “I’ll have some of my lady companions sleep in the toilet to see whether they could prove that it was a good idea or not . . .”

My father and mother had some hilarious times with Mahatma Gandhi around the dinner table. One of Gandhi’s companions said to my father, “I wished that you’d come and stay here for a long time because you really raise Gandhi’s spirits by making him laugh.”

But it so happened that Gandhi was taken off to prison by the British, and he never used the toilet, as far as we know.

GW: Yes, indeed. You could not go anywhere without seeing evidence of the caste system. The sweepers of the toilets were low-caste people, for instance. The owners and proprietors of shops and businesses were high-caste people; so there was a difference of work that people did depending on what their caste was.

American children saw no difference in people. Some of the teachers were Brahmins – high caste. The servants for the most part were probably lower- or middle-class caste, but we just thought of them as people, so it was not a big problem with us.

JH: And upon coming to this country, I know that you brought with you some of the teachings of Gandhi, you put some into practice here. Can you tell us about your arrival in the United States, and what you did at first and the path that led you to pottery?

GW: My brother and I were in school in north India at the time that my parents went to Gandhi’s home; so I never did meet him, but I was well aware of the political drama that played out while I was there. Every day, Indians were being hauled off to jail for demonstrating against the British authorities. There was a political technique that the Indians used, in which they would nonviolently but actively demonstrate their opposition to the British presence.

When I came to America in 1943, I began to get ready to go to college. I was interested in political science and I took classes that were within that context that interested me. Soon, I was forced to enroll in the war machine, but I had been impregnated with Gandhi’s nonviolent philosophy. My parents were supportive of [that philosophy].

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Vol 1, No. 1, 1972

When I had to sign up for the Army, I decided to sign up as a conscientious objector. So I went through the ritual of becoming one and was eventually given a 4E status as a CO. I was assigned to a camp in Tennessee where COs were kept. I spent almost a year there cutting trails and doing all those important things that one does in the woods in Tennessee.

By the time I got out of there, I had begun to think about what I wanted to do and to look back on my childhood in India. I remember seeing lots of temple figures and artwork around the country; even in the middle of fields there would be an image to some god, so I was very aware of the natural abundance of artistry throughout my childhood in India. I began to be interested in folk art and folk craft of the western world, and I spent quite a long time going to museums and places like that to look at it. At that time I wasn’t interested in clay work but just studied the figures and designs I remember seeing from India.

When the war had moved into another phase, I was conscripted again, but this time I did not apply for conscientious objector status; I just didn’t want to go into any part of the military. I would not cooperate with it.

In a manner of speaking, it was my nonviolent reaction to the war machine. So I was arrested and sent to prison for a three-year sentence of which I spent one year in prison.

JH: Where was that?

GW: It was in Danbury, Connecticut: the Danbury Federal Detention Prison. First I didn’t feel any sense of 16B

guilt; I was doing it for what I thought were the purest of reasons and what they did to me or with me was secondary because I had established in my own mind that what I was doing was for a higher purpose.

I was a librarian, a very interesting experience, which was in a way like finishing college. I had the experience that many people find in four years in college in that single year that I spent in prison. So when I got out, I was not looking for an education; I felt that I had been educated.

JH: Were you doing a lot of reading while you were a librarian?

GW: Yes . . .

JH: Writing as well at that point?

GW: To a certain extent; but mostly it was reading and thinking and remembering. When I got out I needed to be by myself, and I went up to Vinalhaven, Maine, where I built a small cabin and lived for two or three years. I began to read and think about the long-term needs that I had. One of the books I read was by Arthur Morgan and what he [wrote] was not terribly important, but he described how a potter in North Carolina worked.

At the end of that chapter, I had decided to become a potter. I don’t remember why, especially, except that it seemed to embody all the things that I had seen in India – Gandhi’s philosophy of handwork – and to build on my own sense of integrity. It seemed viable. I visited friends and asked them if they thought I should

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LEGACY become a potter. One man ran down the road after me shouting, “Don’t do it! Don’t do it!” He must have known something about me that I didn’t know.

JH: What year was that?

GW: 1949. I left my little shack on the island of Vinalhaven, hitchhiked down to Concord, [New Hampshire] found the League of Arts and Crafts at 205 North Main, opened the door, walked in, knocked on the office door, and met the director, David Campbell, and his secretary, Betty Steele. I asked David right off if I could learn pottery there, and he looked at me for several moments with his mouth open, then started to laugh uproariously. I think he didn’t get many people who’d come in off the street asking to become potters. He put me in a class taught by Vivika Heino, a great teacher and potter, and gave me a job as a stock boy. I’d found a place to work and a place to learn pottery and began what has become my career in ceramics.

JH: Was the state of the ceramics field such that, in addition to making pots, you were building your own equipment and wheels, and digging clay, and doing those things that I’m imagining must have been done by all potters at that time?

GW: Yes, precisely. Most of the people were like myself: interested in building a professional career through making and selling things. And that meant building your own kilns, digging your own clay, and sharing experiences with other people. It seems to me that’s done less now than it used to be because it’s a much more established commercial field and all those things are readily available.

JH: Were you aware of your contemporaries around the country who were in a similar situation?

GW: Not outside the area especially, I had not begun to travel as much as I did later. I began to teach – people invited me to teach for some reason. I don’t know why.

I went to the Currier Gallery and taught there for a number of years.

JH: And that’s in Manchester, New Hampshire.

GW: In Manchester. I went to Haystack and taught.

There were other places where I got involved in a

nonacademic teaching environment. I did teach at Dartmouth, but it was nonacademic. It was the beginning of my career, I worked hard; all the time I worked.

I was single-minded, I think – I like to think of myself that way. I always went to museums on weekends; I always went to exhibitions. I learned as much as I could from other people and probably stole ideas from other people as well. All of this was based, I think, on my childhood in India, the influence of Gandhi, and my experience in prison; all of it was a firm foundation on which to build something that I wanted to do very badly.

JH: You said something to me before we began taping about one of your mentors being thrilled that you were invited to teach at Haystack because it would make you well known, but you dismissed that. Could you talk a little bit more about what it is you were looking for and what you hope to make out of this life?

GW: Well, when Charles Abbott heard that I had been invited to teach at Haystack, he immediately said, “Oh, this’ll make you famous,” meaning that I would be on the road to professional recognition, which it didn’t interest me in the slightest. I was interested in sharing what I knew with other people who perhaps knew less than I did and to learn through that experience about my own interests and needs. I was not very aware of the larger field at that time. I knew some people in Boston and New York but I was not conscious of the California group or the people in between, in Wisconsin and Michigan.

I wanted to make work that was viable and useful, and that people would buy, that would support me.

Nothing that I’ve done so far has been because of my desire to become well known or famous. I didn’t particularly want to have exhibits, which are often the way that people become well known. At first, I didn’t think very much of my own work, unless I was invited to do something, and that’s still the case. It was a time in which I was searching for my own identity and trying to make my work relate to my background and what I’ve learned from those who were an inspiration to me.

JH: Perhaps we could hear more about when the two of you met and what happened from then until the time you got married?

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LEGACY GW: Julie was looking for people to interview, and she came across my name at the bottom of the barrel. I agreed to be interviewed by her, and that’s how I met my wife – my future wife. Go ahead.

JW: . . . And so he came down to the studio and we chatted and he did a very good program with me, and I found out he was an interesting person.

GW: I had heard about an episode in which she was interviewing a doctor on her program, and the doctor was talking about cancer. Julie started out the interview by asking, “Tell me, doctor: Do more men die of women than of cancer?”

JW: Fortunately it was on a tape so we could correct it. [laughs] JH: Like now!

GW: It was clear that Julie had certain intelligences that I did not have. And she was a great speaker. She knew her numbers extremely well. [Julie laughs] She was connected to the entire community – the professional community in Manchester – but most of all, she was fun to be with and one thing led to another, as they say.

JW: At that time Gerry was living in Concord, and I was living in Manchester. He had the idea that he was going to build a studio for himself. So he went out and started to look for land, and being very conventional, I thought if you look for land you went to a land broker or somebody like that. He said, “Oh no, you don’t do that; you drive around until you find something that you like and then you ask who owns it.”

So we drove around and saw this place in the small town of Dunbarton and found out that the land was owned by a farmer who was interested in selling a piece of it and, lo and behold, it was the place that Gerry decided to buy. At that point, it was a lovely piece of land covered with poison ivy, which we later helped clear [laughs]. I got a severe case of poison ivy, so bad that I had to do my radio broadcast from home for about a week because I couldn’t put my clothes on [laughing].

GW: That should have given her an idea that she could back out gracefully from the relationship. The property was exactly halfway between Concord and Manchester, which I wanted because she had to come some distance and I had to come some distance. The property was owned by an old Nova Scotian farmer named Charlie 18B

Meekins. And, yes, he could sell three or four acres beside the road on the corner of his property. I bought it for $1,200.

JW: During that summer Gerry gathered up the material and built his studio, which was fun to work on.

Other craftsmen would come by and lend a hand now.

It was a really wonderful community of friends that Gerry had here in New Hampshire, people who did all sorts of things – woodworking, silver jewelry, weaving – and who often went from house to house helping people as they established themselves. The studio was built that summer. We didn’t have a house, but we decided to marry that fall, and that was a big decision, which has turned out to be very nice. After fifty-one years, we’re still happy to be married to each other.

GW: Then I started to think about a house, of course.

So right next to the studio, we laid out a house. The design was given to me by David Campbell. Before we knew it, the house was raised, the roof was on. We lived in the basement for the first several years.

JW: Several years. I remember he laid the long beam across this whole area here from the long way the day that our daughter was going to be born.

Jerry had started to teach a pottery course in the summer here instead of going out to teach somewhere else; he wanted to stay home. We agreed to buy the land across the road and took in as a partner our dear friend, Armand Szainer, who was a man of many talents – a painter, printmaker, and a potter. He said he would like to go in on teaching with us, so we established the school of the Phoenix Workshops, which continued for thirteen summers.

JH: When was the first year?

JW: I think it was 1974. I remember that we were planning a course before we had the building built, but we called a wonderful man who spearheaded the effort over there . . .

GW: John Booth.

JW: John Booth. He got other people in, and they built that octagon over there in maybe four or five weeks; it went up very fast.

GW:We called the workshop by a special name.

JW: Yup. GW: It was called Phoenix because something happened to our property here: the studio had a gas kiln in the back shed and the ceiling above it caught on fire.

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Phoenix Workshops logo and a Toshiko Takaezu workshop (bottom) in the octagon building. Photograph and brochure courtesy of Shelley Westerberg and Michael Ziomko.

The entire studio burned to the ground, a total loss.

Everyone came around to help, and we rebuilt it.

JW: In two weeks.

GW: In two weeks in the middle of winter. The last nail was put in the roof on the day before a terrible snowstorm in January. We liked the name Phoenix because the phoenix rose from the ashes in the Greek story, and our school was rising from the ashes and taking wing again, as it were.

JW: Not only the school started then, but also the STUDIO POTTER. GW: Several things happened. We were talking about Phoenix . . . about STUDIO POTTER . . .

JH: It all happened at once?

GW: It all happened at once. By this time we were becoming aware of a large number of people like ourselves who were living and working in isolation and unconnected to the academic institution, doing wonderful work making and selling pots. So we decided it would be interesting to start a publication that would connect these studio potters.

The idea came before the Potters Guild of New Hampshire. At the guild meeting, a friend of ours said, “I’ve heard you talk about a publication for years; why don’t you either do it or shut up?” I then proposed two options: to have a newsletter, informal and rather personal, or to have a national publication. Well, they

immediately said, “We want a national publication.”

I said, “Who wants to take over the editorship?” And there wasn’t a single hand raised . . .

JW: Except . . .

GW: Except mine. I had a certain investment in the project, and I asked Julie with a high hope if she would do it, and she said, “No way.” Peter Sabin, a fellow potter living nearby, then agreed to be the co-editor. There would be two of us; each responsible for one of two issues a year. And so it started, and we called it the STUDIO POTTER. JW: Once again, we called on the community to help.

The New Hampshire potters were in the first issue. We had a lawyer firm who established an affordable formation of the magazine. We had a friend who agreed to do the photography. We had our friend Armand, who already dealt with us on Phoenix. We had another friend who said she would do circulation. It was all volunteer, nobody could get paid.

GW: So where did the money come from? Six potters at the Guild meeting volunteered to give $200 each to the new magazine. And we got two small grants, one from the state arts agency and the other from the Council on the Arts in New York. We then presold $200 worth of subscriptions.

JW: Yeah, for five dollars a piece.

GW: Of course, they would be happy to subscribe for five dollars. The contributors were local people writing about who they were and how they did things and 19B

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LEGACY people from elsewhere who were talking about philosophy and so forth. We also included another local person who was talking about technology. And it is still an interesting publication because it has continued for . . .

JW: Thirty-four years.

GW: Thirty-four to thirty-five years, starting at the same time that we reinvented the school here at our place. I was the editor for thirty-one or thirty-two years, until I decided that enough was enough and was lucky to find Mary Barringer, who would be willing to take over the editorship.

We were determined that we would go around the country, if necessary, state by state, or area by area, to interview and photograph potters in their studios.

We did not wait for some important ceramic artist t o have a big exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and then cover it in our magazine. We went to a number of potters even if they were not well known, interviewed them, transcribed the interviews, edited them, and put them into the magazine along with photographs of them in their environments.

JH: How did you know how to find them? How did you identify . . .

JW: We did research.

GW: We asked at least three well-known people in an area for a list of people, then we put those lists together.

JW: They really chose each other. We often asked if we could stay with them. We very seldom had to spend nights in hotels or anything because the potters were very generous and warm people, and they would take us in. We slept in some odd places; we slept on couches, on waterbeds, and on the floor, and these potters shared their food with us. In that way, we got to know them a little bit as people as well as potters. They really are a fascinating group.

We even went to Alaska, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii.

We were able to, I think, get a different perspective from other magazines because we were talking with people who were starting out – they were wonderful potters.

GW: Our subscribers had increased from 200 subscribers to . . .

JW: Several thousand.

GW: Several thousand, and the income that was generated in that way allowed us to take these trips and to have a small salary and to pay other costs.

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JW: And of course, many of the well-known potters would write for us, too, and everybody was very generous. Gerry has done excellent interviews with well-known potters and saved their histories, which are valuable for the future. For example, we did a very good article on Robert Turner; we did Don Reitz.

We’ve done one on M.C. Richards.

GW: One day Don Reitz called us from . . .

JW: Arizona.

GW: He said, “I’m coming so you can interview me.”

And he paid his own way, all the way out here. I picked him up at the airport, he spent a couple of nights with us, and I did a long interview with him that we still admire and that other people can enjoy. Those kinds of contacts were wonderful. We still enjoy Paulus Berenson’s brilliance and his deep commitment to nature and to the field.

JW: Clary Illian: I remember spending several days with her in Iowa during the time when they were doing the harvesting. That was fun.

GW: One day there was a knock on our door, we opened it, and it was George and Betty Woodman, who had come to Concord because George had lived there once and they were here for some event. They decided to come over and see us.

We went down to New York recently to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Betty Woodman was having a one-person show. Betty spied us and called us over, and then George talked with us. I heard him say to other people that our magazine is the best one in the field. He said it loudly [Julie laughs], probably so that I could hear it, which I did. But even though Betty Woodman is now a superstar in the heavens, they’re friendly enough with us because we once worked with them.

JH: It seemed that you pursued sort of a social edge in t he magazine upon occasion, when the group of people being interviewed or photographed would be of a certain ethnic background.

GW: Black ceramic artists were seldom seen, and we did several articles on them.

JW: An article – a whole issue – on women.

GW: We did an article on the Japanese.

JW: We did a whole report on Hispanic artists in Los Angeles, and going to Puerto Rico was fun. I think the potters there felt a little bit isolated. There were a lot

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LEGACY of personal relationships that developed between the writers or the potters and the readers.

JH: So it’s sixty-eight, sixty-nine issues now? Seventy?

JW: Let me see now – the sixty-eighth one is coming up.

JH: It began as what – sixteen pages?

JW: Yeah, and it’s now ninety-six, usually.

JH: Nearly a hundred pages twice a year.

GW: And Mary Barringer is the editor now, a very competent wonderful person with contacts that we do not have with the younger group. Rosti Eismont is still the designer – a very brilliant designer.

We have been blessed to have a large number of people that we have known or worked with in one way or another, and it’s been an invaluable asset to us to be able to do all this and continue with it.

JW: We have a very large extended family, and we feel so beautifully taken care of by all our dear friends.

I think of you all as “you young people” and . . . many of you are approaching fifty, sixty [years old] and some even probably [are in their] seventies, but you’re still our young friends.

JH: As we close some four hours [from when we started this conversation], I’m struck by some of the first things that each of you said and the consistency of the lifestyle that you’ve built, individually and together.

Julie, you began by talking about your father being an active member of the community, having people in the house, guests that stayed, and all the family working in the business, and it sounds a lot like here and now. And Gerry, you began by talking about your time at school – the arts, vegetable gardens, writing and reading, and home building; and those are the things that you’ve both become involved with for all of this time.

I’m really moved by that, that you’ve created a lifestyle around the models that you were familiar with from your upbringings. It’s been an important one to so many people.

What’s next? What are you still aiming to do? What acknowledgments have there been for what you’ve done – just some final thoughts, if you would?

JW: I think we’re entering a new period, when life will once again be centered on our property here in Dunbarton because of Gerry’s going back to work primarily on his pots, which is what started the whole thing in the first place. We have a rich and full life, and I don’t think upon it as closing something but just opening something else.

Also, Gerry has been getting some wonderful accolades. First, he was recognized by the STUDIO POTTER board for his work as editor, and he was named a New Hampshire Living Treasure. Gerry was the first artist laureate in New Hampshire. And although he doesn’t look for these rewards, it’s nice when they happen.

I am looking forward to several more years of working with Gerry. I don’t do much in the way of pottery, but I love going out and watching him throw, and I like to go out sometimes and watching him glaze or decorate.

JH: [Addresses Gerry] How do you feel about coming back into the potting world?

GW: I think it’s wonderful; it’s who I am and what I know best how to do, I think, and I’m reaching inside myself for inspiration and values so that the poetry of my life is being articulated in my work. As a matter of fact, we have devoted a good deal of our life to articulating those elements, and I think we still have some time in doing that – I hope we have some time left.

JH: As a representative of the many people who have utilized STUDIO POTTER for years and also of the fortunate people who have attended the Phoenix Workshops, I can say for all of us that we’re greatly indebted to you for your lifelong efforts. We all appreciate that very much, and thanks for this opportunity.

GW: Well, thank you for sharing the time with us to do this – an interesting job. And I hope it’s archived.

SP ARTICLES BY JOHN HARTOM AND LISA BLACKBURN:

Hartom, John. “The Empty Bowls 10th Anniversary National Exhibition.”

Vol. 29, No. 2, June 2001, p. 99.

Blackburn, Lisa and John Hartom. “Empty Bowls at Twenty.” Vol. 39, No. 1, Winter 2010-2011, pp. 18-22.

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