Featured Articles

  • 2023 NCECA COLLECTORS TOUR

    Cincinnati, Ohio will serve as the host city for the 57th annual conference of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA). CURRENT, this year’s annual, promises a wide range of programming and exhibitions for collectors, educators and everyone who wants to learn about and experience the continuing evolution of human-kind’s most enduring art-form. A national organization with global reach, NCECA will draw thousands to the region and site 92 ceramic art exhibitions throughout the community.

  • Seeking Beauty: Scottie Roberts Wiest

    What is the value of a life in the arts?  West Virginia potter Scottie Roberts Wiest has fifty years of experience selling and making functional pottery and plenty to say about a lifestyle embedded in nature and community in her native Appalachia.  From her early training at Agnes Scott College, through studies in Japan and residency in Georgia, Wiest lives a quest for beauty that manifests in a lifetime of making and defining Appalachian art and culture.

  • Potter Celebrates the Here and Now with Gifts of Mugs

    The notion of the artist as a depressed figure, grappling with the meaning of life and creating beauty out of personal pain is not a concept that defines potter Mary Ferris.  This 60-year-old artist from Pequea, Pennsylvania embodies joy.  Her current project, CoffeeTeaSixty, turns the idea of a birthday gift on its head and spreads Ferris’ delight in her life and work in a widening circle of generosity and gratitude.

  • Wheeling Plans Winter Celebration of Pottery

    Wheeling is a medium-sized city that sits along the Ohio River in what is known as the “panhandle” of West Virginia, a narrow strip of land between Pennsylvania and Ohio that juts northward from the northwestern corner of the state.  Like Pittsburgh, its neighbor to the east, Wheeling grew up and thrived in the industrial age of steel and manufacturing.  Taking raw materials from the earth, barons of industry manufactured steel, glass, and textiles, building corporations and wealth that fed the needs of a growing community of workers.  The Oglebays and Stifels of Wheeling, like their better-known Pittsburgh neighbor Andrew Carnegie, invested in the community good, establishing cultural institutions that still exist today.  Rick Morgan, the director of the visual arts department of the 92-year-old arts organization Oglebay Institute, looks forward to showcasing the region’s 21st-century making, with the upcoming earth and fire, a national exhibition of ceramic art as part of the city’s Ceramics Take Over Wheeling in February and March of 2023.

  • Stoke Hole Pottery Downtown: Serving the Small-Town Market

    In the west central part of Pennsylvania, Indiana County is an enclave for potters.  Dotted throughout the rural area are numerous potters’ studios set in renovated barns and cabins and homes, tucked into the rolling foothills of the Allegheny Mountains rising to the east.  A traveler in the area on the third weekend of October will meander down winding country roads curtained in the reds, oranges, and golds of autumn and catch a whiff of wood smoke from a kiln.  Since 2008, the area potters have joined together to promote the annual Potters Tour, a weekend event in which visitors can observe, browse, and purchase works at over ten member studios.  Debra and Birch Frew, of Stoke Hole Pottery, are founding members of the tour and have welcomed thousands of visitors to their studio and gallery on their farm outside of the town of Indiana.  Last June, in a move planned for and dreamed about, the couple “came into town”, launching Stoke Hole Pottery Downtown in a storefront in Indiana’s business district.

  • The I’m fine. Project: Exploring the Self Image

    The artistic process is one that draws on the whole person, rummaging through the depths of emotion and memory, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes painful, emerging in a thing of beauty.  For central Pennsylvania friends Maureen Joyce and Carrie Breschi, the cathartic value of working with clay has become a life mission.  Through heartbreak and the circumstances of life, these women have come together to offer healing workshops to people seeking emotional wholeness amid life’s inevitable challenges.  I’m fine. uses the creation of human masks to explore the self.

  • Connecting in Creativity: ViaClay

    Anyone who has ever sat down at the wheel or the workbench with a block of clay knows the total absorption of the solitary creative experience.  The intense focus of imagination erases time and funnels the senses toward the target of the created object.  The potter can be a lone figure.  These recent years of pandemic-forced isolation brought forth great productivity in many artists but have left many seeking the connections of community.  Potter John Beck, of the Chicago suburb Oak Park, manages ViaClay, a new studio founded by Oak Park potter Gabe Tetrev, where a resurgence of shared gathering is bringing potters and students together.

  • Chicago Art Girls Holiday Pop-Up

    Don't miss the  Chicago Art Girls Holiday Pop-Up December 10 and 11 at Bell School Look for ceramicist Nancy Gardner:  "Live and in ...

  • Standard Ceramic Acquires Sculpture House Ceramics Division

    Florida-based Sculpture House is a business with a long history in the greater New York area that traces a century old history through the tutelage of two families.  By the end of this summer, Standard Ceramic’s Turnbull family will become the third line of craft-oriented businessmen to extend part of that tradition.  Standard will acquire the Ceramics Division of Sculpture House as Bruner Barrie, the company’s CEO, moves closer to a full retirement.

  • Potter Robert Deane: An Intimate Approach

    While all artists have a personal relationship with the materials of their craft, potters share a special bond with clay that spawns a visceral connection to the earth.  Southwestern Pennsylvania Potter Robert Deane brings this intimate dynamic to his work – in the clay he digs and refines, in the collaborative projects he undertakes, and especially in the philosophy of his teaching practices.  This Media, PA artist teaches adults and children at the Wallingford Art Center outside of Philadelphia.

  • The Power of Clay: Abbie Kasoff and Say It With Clay

    When New Jersey ceramicist Abbie Kasoff was tirelessly working to build her human services non-profit organization Say It With Clay in the early 2000s, she was driven by her determination “that clay would do for others what it did for me.”  In love with the medium since her high school years, Kasoff returned again and again to working in clay, seeking the healing and transformative mental state that is called “flow.”  She came to understand the power of clay as a means of communication, a way to express feelings and ideas and to revisit them in a finished product – in a “second-stage give-back.”

  • Fireborn Studios: Paired for Success

    Pittsburgh institution Fireborn Studios is launching a new series of workshops at their Southside studio.  Owners Dan Vito and Donna Hetrick are potters, educators, and business entrepreneurs who have thrived in a partnership and marriage for over three decades, a veritable success story in how to carve out a life as working artists.