Letter from the Editor: In the Heart of the Country

Next weekend (May 8, 9, 10), the St. Croix Valley Potters sponsor their 17th pottery tour. This Minnesota event now reaches from coast to coast, with the hosts inviting exhibitor friends from Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia on the east and Oregon on the west. Being in flyover country themselves, they have not ignored the middle: there are also guest potters from Tennessee, Montana and Nebraska, and bunches from next-door Wisconsin. The seven host locations welcome 34 guest artists in all, making the event one of a handful of major assemblies of mostly functional and affordable pottery in the U.S.

Robert Briscoe, Linda Christianson, Connee Mayeron, Jeff Oestreich, Will Swanson and Richard Vincent are longtime hosts, and Guillermo Cuellar offers a new venue this year. The potters live and work both in converted farmhouses and barns amid agricultural fields and in villages near the St. Croix River, all within an hour's drive of the Twin Cities. Part of the pleasure of the tour is experiencing the landscape in bloom after the never-too-short Minnesota winters. Another part is the conviviality of friends old and new. The laid-back atmosphere includes beverages and snacks almost everywhere, and some extra attractions, such as the hammock at Oestreich's and the rabbits that children could pet at Swanson's home when I did the tour a few years ago.

Minnesota is one of the handful of American centers for functional pottery, due to Warren MacKenzie and his several generations of students who have farmed out across the region and developed a substantial audience for this work-with the major assistance, since 1990, of Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis. The tour partakes of the long tradition of craft fairs, with the qualitative advantage of professional selection: no host would invite a fellow maker whose work s/he did not respect. The home-and-studio setting makes it more personal than a fair, though, and the neighborliness of all the visitors-buyers!-bodes well for the ceramic field and for the country.