The Clay Studio — with new 'craft weirdo' curator Garth Johnson — celebrates 40 years
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
Everyone involved is very self-aware when it comes to Ghost jokes. Oh, and there will be free events all weekend.
Garth Johnson knows what you think about people who work in clay and ceramics, and he totally owns it.
Come on: You know the first thing that springs to mind is the definitive cheese-ball romance scene — Patrick Swayze sweatily caressing Demi Moore at the potter’s wheel, as she runs her hands up and down that phallic lump of wet, goopy clay.
“Think of how many Ghost parodies we’ve seen,” Johnson says from inside The Clay Studio, on Second Street in Old City. “There’s a great episode of Community that revolved around ceramics which, again, made this reference to Ghost. There’s a Wonder Years episode where the mother takes a ceramics course and brings home these lumpy pots, and her family is like, ‘Why?’”
Johnson’s done his pop culture research.
“There is a tradition of using ceramics as a punch line,” he says. “It’s always used for shorthand for someone who is out of step, who cares just a bit too much about this thing that no one else cares about. And that’s me.”
As the newly appointed curator of artistic programs at The Clay Studio, the 41-year-old Johnson is being sly — people do care about ceramics here. The studio sees thousands of participants in its five- and 10-week classes, and its monthly Date Nights (drink wine, throw clay, play Moore and Swayze if you want) routinely sell out.
If longevity alone is any indication of ceramics interest here, The Clay Studio is exhibit A, celebrating its 40th anniversary on Friday and Saturday with a 40-hour marathon of free events dubbed “Fired Up at 40.”
“The Clay Studio’s always been about transcending its own boundaries, and speaking to people outside of the clay community,” Johnson says.
And this weekend’s events — a cocktail hour, ice cream social, clay-instrument making and jam session, Claymation viewing and sunrise yoga, to name a few — exemplify that mission, one Johnson says he plans to expand upon in his own eccentric way. In a nutshell, he says: Clay and art can be for everyone.
Johnson, who began work at The Clay Studio in January, gives off a vibe that’s less free-spirit artisan and more offbeat musician. He grew up on a farm in Nebraska, eventually owning a record store there and befriending Nebraska musicians from groups like Bright Eyes, Cursive and The Faint. His eyeglasses are made of repurposed vinyl records. He bears a subtle resemblance to Rivers Cuomo, the lead singer of Weezer.
He moved to Philadelphia from Eureka, Calif., a place he says is “the center of marijuana cultivation,” where he had a tenure-track professor position teaching art at College of the Redwoods.
Back at art school at the University of Nebraska, he got his hands on clay during an elective ceramics class. He was immediately hooked because of clay’s — get this — “danger.”
“The potter’s wheel, this rotating thing in front of you that could turn into something great or could totally fall apart — that immediacy and danger were the things that I think attracted me, and brought me back for more,” he says.
That edge, that riskiness, would continue to play into how Johnson viewed craft, and how he says he’s going to approach his work with The Clay Studio.
The Clay Studio was founded in 1974 by five artists who needed a place to work. Its mission, Johnson explains, was to keep workspace for artists affordable, and to foster a collaborative environment where creators shared space and equipment. It became a nonprofit in 1979, with the broader goal always being to promote ceramics education to everyone, regardless of skill, background or level of experience. It’s always been, Johnson says, a rather open, accessible institution.
“All the founders … [are] so comfortable with what they’ve built that they can make a space for some craft weirdo like me to step in and bring my perspective,” Johnson says.
Johnson, who lives in Fishtown with his wife, Claire Joyce, and 2-year-old daughter, Ramona, says he likes to think of the evolution of craft generationally. First came post-World War II higher-education craft instruction, then mid- to late-’60s “crunchy hippie granola” craft, and then what Johnson calls the D.I.Y.-punk scene of the ’90s, showcased in the early 2000s with craft fairs like Renegade and Art Star Craft Bazaar. Around that same time, Johnson started his own blog, extremecraft.com, where he featured artists who were employing crafts to make a point.
“They were using craft in subversive ways, they were taking traditional crafts and sneaking all sorts of great messages into it, or doing really crazy audacious things,” Johnson says.
Johnson, along with others who dabbled in the D.I.Y.-punk scene, were children of people who participated in craft in the ’70s. They were the “craft brats,” he said, who had been raised in craft-friendly families.
He says that on the flip side of that, there were a lot of people raised in noncrafty but otherwise positive environments. For people like that, he says, “Craft can be a way to rebel.”
The subversion, the rebellion, the “craft to make a point” will be on grand display in two significant ways during the Fired Up at 40 celebration: through the Guerilla Mug Assault and the war-veteran exhibitions “Occupation” and “War Crocks.”
On Friday, May 9, from 8 a.m. to noon, coffee drinkers in Old City and elsewhere around the city should be on the lookout for the “Guerrilla Mug Assault” team — Clay Studio volunteers will offer anyone drinking from paper to-go cups a free handmade mug.
The Clay Studio won the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s Knight Arts Challenge Grant in 2012 for the mug-assault idea. That year, they gave away 500 mugs.
Dennis Scholl, vice president of the arts for Knight Arts, said Knight provided The Clay Studio a $25,000 grant for the Fired Up at 40 celebration.
“It’s important to find people where they are, not for The Clay Studio to open its doors and say, ‘We’re here, come or don’t come.’ They’ve been very proactive in going and reaching a community where the community is. They’re doing that by bringing a piece of their artistic creation and giving it away,” Scholl says.
Also part of the 40-hour celebration is another piece of art with a profound message — the “Occupation/War Crocks” exhibition will be on view from 10 a.m. on May 9 through 6 p.m. on May 10. It’s a collaborative exhibition between Ehren Tool and Jesse Albrecht, two ceramic artists and war veterans.
Tool, who lives in Berkeley, Calif., has given away more than 14,000 cups since 2001. A member of the Marine Corps from 1989 to 1994, he served in the Gulf War. In “Occupation,” which he has done two previous times, he constructs a “bunker” out of raw, unfired clay, and then tears the clay down, firing the clay into cups. People participate, he says, by bringing insignia or personal items that Tool fires or prints into the cup.
“It gets pretty intense sometimes,” he says.
One woman whose father served in the Korean War gave Tool a boot-camp picture of her dad. When Tool gave her the finished cup incorporating it, she was crying so hard she almost dropped it.
“It’s just a cup to 99 percent of the people. But to that veteran, and that person who cares about that veteran, it becomes something more,” Tool says.
“A cup — I think that’s the right scale to talk about war,” Tool continues. “It’s just a hand-to-hand kind of thing. That’s where the best conversations happen, over a bottle of whiskey or something, not a podium, not on a big loudspeaker. If I make a big giant sculpture, who’s going to have space for it? But a cup? Everyone’s got room in the cupboard for one more cup.”
Albrecht, who lives in Bozeman, Mont., was deployed to Mosul, Iraq, as a medic in the Iowa National Guard in 2003. He has collaborated with the Combat Paper Project and is a member of the group Paintallica. His “War Crocks” exhibition, in which he creates his distinctive pots, has an obvious double meaning.
“War is just a continual crock of shit, and it has been for my family, from the First World War to the Second World War to Vietnam to Iraq,” he says.
Albrecht believes that the number of veterans making art about war has grown.
“The difficult truth about what it’s like being in war and combat, people don’t openly want to say that. You’re accessing some really heinous shit that changes people. It’s rarely discussed in a way that’s believable. It’s important to hear the realities from veterans,” he says.
To do that in art and in clay, Tool and Albrecht agree, is immensely cathartic.
“A lot of people ask me if it’s like ‘art as therapy,’ and I resisted that for a long time,” Tool says of his work. “But [creating and giving away] over 14,000 cups … I’m beginning to be willing to admit that there might be some mental illness involved … that it’s something that I need to do.”
Josh Green, executive director of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA), says that his organization’s 2010 annual conference, held in Philadelphia, was one of its best-attended, with more than 5,000 registrants.
The Clay Studio, he says, is one of the country’s leading ceramics institutions, because of its leadership and vision, and also because it has been committed to establishing an artists’ residence, exhibition platforms and community outreach and education.
“You [an institution] can have one of the three, but it’s not always frequent that all of those things can be done at such a high level. To elevate all three of those platforms equally is really remarkable,” Green says.
The Clay Studio’s year-round educational outreach includes the Claymobile — a vehicle that brings clay-art education to traditional classrooms, children in the juvenile justice system and learning-disabled or formerly homeless adults.
“That’s the kind of grass-roots community initiative that I think exposes the art form to a lot of folks who wouldn’t have access to it,” Green says.
Johnson sits on NCECA’s board and Green has known him for years.
“At the Philadelphia NCECA conference, he gave one of the most brilliant lectures I’ve ever heard,” Green says. “He looks at it as a ‘material culture’ discipline, not ceramics as an isolated art form.”
The Clay Studio, Green said, is in good hands.
Johnson points to a totem from his home life as an example of the importance of handmade things. His parents, he says, have a set of kitchen knives that his father made for his mother.
“It’s not about the function of the damn things. I’ve been after my parents to get a decent chef’s knife for years. But [the knives are] a symbol of the ability to make things for one’s self and inject meaning into different parts of one’s life,” he said.
Right now, in the art world, there’s a great emphasis on “social practice,” Johnson — ever the self-deprecator — says while rolling his eyes and flashing air quotes. Social-practice art invites collaboration with and participation by individuals and communities.
“It’s something ceramics has always been doing, from the village potter on up. Ceramics has a very social role. So as some other artistic media sort of awkwardly try on the mantle of social practice, it’s a fit that’s very natural for ceramics,” Johnson says.
Johnson’s the kind of creator who once shot paintballs at fine china to create the wildest pattern possible. Now, he’s curator of a world-class ceramics institution. But Johnson says his work at The Clay Studio and its outreach into the city is still imbued with his weakness for humor, rebellion and “extreme craft.”
“You have to be subversive and out of step even to be a conservative, ‘traditional’ crafter,” he says. “You’re doing something that is way outside of the norms of what society tells you being a productive citizen is and means — consuming things.”
For information about this weekend’s Fired Up at 40 events, visit theclaystudio.org.
