Featured Articles

  • 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.

  • 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.