40th Annual Pottery Show & Sale: Daze of Clay

Forty years ago, a Pottery Show and Sale was born in the small town of Demarest, New Jersey, just south of the New York state border and a few miles north of the George Washington Bridge. It came into existence through a long-time friendship between two respected potters, the late Mikhail Zakin, co-founder of the Art School at Old Church, and the eminent Karen Karnes. 

Sometimes called the “grandmother of American ceramics”, Karen Karnes taught at the avant-garde Black Mountain College in North Carolina into the early 1950’s, and later moved to Vermont where she has lived and worked since 1979. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Arts and Design, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among numerous others.

Back then, Karen decided to make a pottery sale to benefit the newly formed community art center, but she also wanted to create an event that served as an annual gathering place for potters to meet and exchange ideas. The grassroots culture of the school and the familial convening of potters helped to quickly establish the Annual Pottery Show & Sale as one of the best invitational shows in the country.

The Annual Pottery Show & Sale is unique because it has remained relatively unchanged in forty years. Karen has continued to curate the sale, bringing together some of the nation’s best potters of one-of-a-kind, functional and sculptural pieces. Pottery is displayed on humble wood benches and adorned with unpretentious flowering branches and sprigs of greenery. The show is held each year on the first weekend of December. This year’s preview reception is on Friday, December 5^th, 6-10PM, and the show continues on Saturday, December 6^th, 10AM-6PM, and Sunday, December 7^th, 12-5PM.

The 40^th annual Pottery Show & Sale marks the first noticeable change in the event’s long history. This year, Bruce Denhert and Chris Gustin join Karen in co-curating the show. Both are well-known figures within the American ceramics community, recognized among their peers as experts in the field.

Bruce Denhert is currently the director of the ceramics program for Peters Valley School of Craft in Layton, NJ, and has taught workshops internationally. He has published in many journals on ceramic technique and processes.

Garth Clark, a chief writer and critic on ceramic art and fine craft, calls Chris Gustin “one of the leading ceramists of his generation”. Chris is cofounder of the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Maine, and retired from academia in 1999 to devote his energies to his studio work and tile production company. Before then, he was associate professor of ceramics at University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.

Their collaboration brings together 30 potters from around the nation for the 40^th annual invitational, including:

Richard Aerni, Dan Anderson, Mary Barringer, Ingrid Bathe, Bruce Denhert, Judith Duff, Heather Mae Erickson, Julia Galloway, Scott Goldberg, Tyler Gulden, Chris Gustin, Kenyon Hansen, Bryan Hopkins, Nick Joerling, Karen Karnes, James Lawton, Robbie Lobell, Matt Long, Matthew Metz, Maureen Mills, Ted Neal, Aysha Peltz, Doug Peltzman, Seth Rainville, Rob Sieminski, Mark Shapiro, Jeff Shapiro, Jack Troy, Adero Willard, and Erica Wurtz.

Each potter will ship and tote hundreds of their best pots to Demarest in early December, arriving on Thursday morning before the show to set up their displays. Then, Friday through Sunday, they will meet and greet both potters and ceramic enthusiasts, sharing in relevant discussions about pottery-making, and having the pleasure of seeing their wares in the hands of those who appreciate artisan pottery just as they do.


For more information about this year's show, check out oldchurchpotteryshow.org

Chris Gustin

Chris Gustin

South Dartmouth, MA

Words on potter Chris Gustin from Art School Blog guest writer and potter Bruce Dehnert:

If you’ve ever visited the Watts Towers tucked-away somewhere in the urban caverns of Los Angeles you’ll recall marveling at the histories that are literally embedded in their concrete skins. One slice of history you might not know is that some of those multi-hued ceramic tiles, broken into thousands of shards, originated from a factory owned by Chris Gustin’s family. Located in Pasadena, the factory produced a range of wares that the family sold through showrooms from San Francisco to Atlanta . When Chris was only 20 years old the job of running the Los Angeles factory was thrust upon him when a long-time floor boss died. So there he was, surrounded by clay, glazes, and kilns and having to organize workers around the challenges of making things work, without a hitch, through a rather sudden transition. It was this factory’s rejected tiles that Simon Rodia used for his fanciful mosaics covering the beloved and controversial ‘towerland.’ Today, the Watts Towers rise above the city streets as a National Historic Landmark.  A reclusive day laborer, Rodia would quietly disappear from southern California in 1955, a victim of complaints and gossip.  Nearly fifteen years later, Chris found his way to the Kansas City Art Institute to pursue his BFA in studio ceramics.

In 1975, Chris entered the MFA program at Alfred University. While there he studied under the storied faculty members Randall, Turner, Cushing, Hepburn and Higby. In those days art festivals were few and far between but were catching on especially along the East Coast. During his second year at Alfred, Chris attended one such show at Spring Valley where he met Karen Karnes and was immediately drawn to her fiery character and the seriousness with which she approached her work and the business around it. The Vermont potter’s approach was inspirational to Gustin as he began to make plans for life after school.

With his MFA in hand, Gustin moved to Guilford, Connecticut and opened his first professional studio.  Shortly afterwards, he remembers the phone call from Karen with an invitation to exhibit in the Old Church Pottery Show as being one of the most important of his career. After all, the Pottery Show was much more than just a few days of harried sales. The event was a chance to get together with other potters and their ilk, to get out of the hovels of studios and have real exchanges with others who shared the struggle or an appreciation for handmade pots. Gustin recently observed, “Mikhail Zakin, Karen’s co-organizer, was very supportive at a time when I was just trying to ‘get my legs’ in the field. Being a part of that group was a big deal. I mean, this was the late seventies and early eighties…there were no Garth Clark type of galleries then and everyone was trying to find some ground. It was transformative.” It was also in that same year of his first appearance at Old Church that Chris’ work was selected for The Young Americans, the monumental exhibition of its time presented by The American Craft Museum in New York City.

Following his early successes, Gustin was invited to join the faculty in The Program In Artisanry at Boston University where he would navigate one of the most tumultuous evolutions of any American university art department. In the subsequent years after beginning his teaching career, Gustin followed The School as it was sold to Swain School of Art and Design and then, in bankruptcy, was gifted to Southeastern Massachusetts University which then years later became UMASS Dartmouth, now one of the top ceramics programs in the nation. Through it all Gustin maintained a studio and in 1999 retired to a full-time studio practice in South Dartmouth where he lives with his wife, the artist Nancy Train-Smith.  

2013 has been an important year for Gustin as he has embarked on several retrospectives of his work. A “road trip” of three large exhibitions, his career’s work has been shown at The Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts, The Shein-Joseph International Museum of Ceramic Art at his alma-mater Alfred University, and will move on to The Daum Museum of Contemporary Art in Missouri later this year.

 

Of the experience of having his work gathered for the retrospectives, Chris noted, “you get to see your life’s body of work in one space and the threads seem more obvious than when viewed through the chaos of making the work. You see yourself at various stages in life. It’s actually a very intimate experience…the relationships, friends, and in some cases the traumas that get associated with each piece. Memory changes practically everything, and my worst fears have disappeared because the individual works seem to be able to live in a different time than the ones in which they were made. This has always been a question in my mind and now I’ve had the opportunity to begin to answer that.”

- Bruce Dehnert

Bruce Dehnert

Bruce Dehnert
Layton, NJ

Bruce Dehnert. "Ingot."  Porcelain, Shino.

Bruce Dehnert celebrates the pottery process from kiln construction to the dining room table.  He is involved with everything from the stages of kiln-building to scholarly reflections published in pottery magazines.  While this blog post series is here to celebrate his pottery, it cannot go without mention that Dehnert’s practice includes the written word.  Before receiving an MFA in ceramics at Alfred University, Dehnert studied English at the undergraduate level.  He continues to cultivate a written life that knits together his creative outlook with the knitty gritty of ceramic art creation.

 

Dehnert has published in journals including Studio Potter, Ceramics Monthly, and Ceramics: Art and Perception.  He recently collaborated on "Simon Leach's Pottery Handbook" praised as "an amazingly detailed, step-by-step text for all major processes in ceramics".  A discussion of Dehnert's writing is included here in support of his stated desire that his pots "visually 'explain' something(s) of the processes that they undergo in order to be finished and used."  This interest is formally present in the finished pot, expressive of his desire that “the person using (his) pottery be provided clues, through subtleties in surface and form, as to the nature of these processes.”  These processes, scientific yet mysterious, are explored in tandem with Bruce Dehnert's vision for the usable work of art.  The form and surface treatment of a Dehnert piece before firing suggests where ash deposits should interact with the surface.  The surface then provides "clues" to the process and how to interact with the piece after  it is fired.

Bruce Dehnert. "Cups."  Porcelain, flashing slip, glazes, wood-fired.

The clay journey is ultimately mysterious, as a gust of air behind the closed doors of the kiln can be responsible for a shift in surface tone.  Having never built a kiln myself, I can only presume that even the placement of the bricks in this process can influence the outcome.  In his teaching positions across the east coast of the United States, New Zealand, and Malaysia, Dehnert has shared expert knowledge in kiln building- from laying the bricks to firing the work.  He currently directs the ceramic program for Peter's Valley Craft Center.