Pottery tour brings the best of American pottery to St. Croix Valley

BY JACKIE BUSSJAEGER REGIONAL STAFF WRITER

Pottery studios will once again open up their doors for the 31st annual St. Croix Valley Pottery Tour. The pottery tour will take place the weekend of May 12-14 at eight studios on the Minnesota bank of the St. Croix River. Hosts will invite guests to view their work, meet with the artists and find the right piece of pottery to take home with them.

This year, 71 of the most renowned ceramic artists in the U.S., as well as a few international artists, will participate in the tour. It’s a chance to see the work of some of the premiere potters in the U.S. and get a look inside the idyllic setting of a few select rural pottery studios.

The tour has expanded significantly from the days when influential potter Warren Mackenzie began opening his home studio in Stillwater to the public.

Mackenzie was a professor at the University of Minnesota, and many of his students moved into the area and became teachers themselves, populating the St. Croix Valley with some of the finest ceramic artists in the Midwest and beyond. Mackenzie passed away in 2018, but the tour has carried on his mission and his memory.

“Warren was very well known nationally and internationally as a defining functional pottery teacher,” said Will Swanson, a longtime host potter on the tour. “He taught simplicity and humble pots, and a lot of us picked up on his idea that you could make pots for a living, and you can share them with the people who could buy them at a reasonable price.”

Mackenzie was a proponent of functional pottery— he believed there was a certain joy people could take from using unique, beautiful ceramics in their everyday lives. Mackenzie encouraged other local potters to begin offering their artwork in their own backyard.

“This tour is an extension of that,” Swanson said. “A number of us here that were somewhat well known nationally and regionally decided in 1993 to go together and have our sale on one weekend. We started calling it a pottery tour.”

Soon the host potters were asked to invite a guest potter from the region, and then it grew to include potters they’d met from across the country. Some of them are extremely well known in their field, and their pieces will likely sell for higher prices. But the tour always strives to include functional and affordably priced pottery in addition to the decorative pieces that might catch a collector’s eye. Many people travel far to see so many accomplished artists in one place, but it also gives residents of Minnesota a chance to meet with some of the country’s finest artists in their own backyard.

“It’s almost more satisfying when one of my neighbors comes over and I can sell him a coffee mug he can keep in his pickup truck,” Swanson said.

The 2023 tour will include two new host potters. After many years as a guest artist, Peter Jadoonath will be opening his Shafer studio as a host this spring.

“I spent my formative pottery years attending the tour, picking up pots, turning them upside down, considering their weight, (and) to be entrusted to carry on the tradition now is surreal,” Jadoonath wrote.

Alana Cuellar will also be joining the group as a cohost at her dad Guillermo’s studio.

“It’s a special weekend,” Cuellar said. “Seeing so many beautiful pots on display and feeling the energy of the visitors is inspiring. I feel lucky to be part of it.”

The host locations include Linda Christianson’s unique studio and log home nestled in a clearing in the woods; Guillermo Cuellar’s hilltop home and studio overlooking the St. Croix River, where he works alongside his daughter Alana Cuellar; Peter Jadoonath’s studio with a view of big sky and rolling farm fields; Ani Kasten’s pottery gallery-in-a-barn; Matt Krousey’s picturesque, woodland home and studio; Jeff Oestreich’s early Minnesota farmstead remade into a home and studio; Will Swanson and Janel Jacobson’s studio close by Wild River State Park; and Richard Vincent’s oak-shaded backyard studio.

For more information, including a map and list of participating artists, visit minnesotapotters.com.