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October 2011 Newsletter

Indigo Street Pottery Newsletter

Welcome to our monthly newsletter! It is part of our website indigostreetpottery.com , which you can browse from this page if you click on the subjects in the header. We write here about our studio, arts events, projects, studios of our friends, garden musings, and whatever else strikes our fancy. Hope you enjoy it!

August 13, 2011: 2011 Annual Art Auction, Anderson Ranch Art Center, Snowmass, Colorado www.andersonranch.org

May of 2012: Jeff Reich and Farraday Newsome, 2-person exhibition, Plinth Gallery, Denver, Colorado http://plinthgallery.com/

1 Indigo Street Pottery Calendar

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November 2018 Newsletter

Indigo Street Studio Newsletter

Welcome to our monthly newsletter! It’s part of our website indigostreetpottery.com, which you can browse from this page if you click on the subjects in the header. We write here about our studio, arts events, projects, and garden.

Indigo Street Studio Calendar

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In this Issue

1. Indigo Street Studio Calendar

2. Indigo Street Studio Annual Holiday Event

3. Ceramics + at MCC Art Gallery, Mesa Community College, Mesa, Arizona

4. Indigo Street Studio a Site for Desert River Audubon’s “Tour de Bird”

5. Our Recent Trip to Italy: Venice and Florence!

6. Indigo Street Studio Native Landscaping

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Ceramic + at MCC Art Gallery Mesa Community College

Mesa, Arizona

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Jeff Reich, Allthorn, 16 x 22 x 22”, stoneware

Jeff Reich, Agave Fields, 15 x 20 x 13”, stoneware

Farraday Newsome, Nesting Snake Cloud Fragment, glazed terra cotta, 20 x 20 x 2.5”

Farraday Newsome, Moth and Keys Cloud Fragment, glazed terra cotta, 22 x 17 x 2.5”

Farraday Newsome, My Father’s Flute Cloud Fragment, glazed terra cotta, 21 x 20 x 2.5”

The Art Gallery at Mesa Community College, Dobson Branch, will be presenting a ceramics invitational show this winter titled Ceramics+.

The gallery show statement: Clay. A magic material that allows you to make something out of nothing. A friendly and familiar substrate, clay is a medium that mirrors what artists and designers alike do best: create a new idea or object to help, to inspire, and to communicate. This invitational exhibition will demonstrate concepts in contemporary ceramics with work from professional, local artists using clay alone, or blended with other materials or mediums.

Where: The Gallery at MCC, Mesa Community College, Dobson Campus, Mesa, Arizona

When: November 26, 2018 - January 25, 2019. The gallery will be closed during holiday break December 24, 2018 - January 1, 2019

From a Desert Rivers Audubon press release for the event:

Desert Rivers Audubon is a local chapter of the National Audubon Society and is, therefore, first and foremost a group of people who love birds. Studying birds, however, should lead to a more acute realization of birds as just one aspect of the natural world and foster an appreciation of the whole system, the habitat in which those birds, and we humans, survive.

The Desert Rivers Habitat Recognition Program grew out of our wish to acknowledge those people who were willing to help our native wildlife prosper by making a commitment to turn some part of our landscape into a natural habitat. The criteria are simple, do you plant native plants? Do you provide water and shelter for insects, birds and animals? Do you keep your watering requirements to a minimum? Simple to say, but not always simple to implement.

Our website, www.desertriversaudubon.org , has an “Audubon at Home” page where you can read more about the requirements that lead to a habitat being recognized as wildlife friendly. There you can also find sources of help if you want to turn your own backyard space into a wildlife friendly area.

Balancing the needs of the wildlife and the aesthetic feelings of gardeners can be challenging so we are therefore tremendously pleased to recognize the Indigo Pottery habitat and include them in our November 9th Tour de Bird. This is an event designed to educate people on making their landscapes wildlife friendly by sending them on a self guided tour of several backyards and public habitats to show them different styles and approaches.

We look forward to the tour and hope your habitat will prove an inspiration so that others will learn how to share our desert home with our native flora and fauna.

Above: Photos from our site during a previous Tour de Bird at our site. Desert Rivers Audubon described our yard: “Over the last 15 years this 1.3 acre wildscape has been transformed from barren landscape to a lush desert wildlife oasis with native trees and shrubs.”

Desert Rivers Audubon is a chapter of the National Audubon Society.

Indigo Street Studio is once again one of the backyard habitat sites selected for the upcoming Desert Rivers Audubon Tour de Bird event. Our site is called The Reich-Newsome Habitat. We are located at 6931 E. Indigo St, Mesa Az 85207. Click here for advance ticket purchases, description of sites, and map.

This fundraiser helps support the Desert Rivers Audubon conservation efforts and their Backyard Bird Habitat program. The tour is self-guided, with two Audubon volunteers at each site all day to assist visitors. Bring your binoculars!

Tickets are $15 prior to the event and $20 the day of. They are available at our site the day of the event, or ahead of time through the website http://www.desertriversaudubon.org, at Wild Birds Unlimited, 2110 E Baseline Rd., Mesa, or at the monthly Desert Rivers Audubon meetings (second Tuesday of each month, 7pm at SE Regional Library, Gilbert, southeast corner of Guadalupe and Greenfield).

Desert Rivers Audubon is a chapter of the National Audubon Society

When: Saturday, November 3, 2018, from 9am to 4pm

Where: Selected sites in the East Valley: Habitat descriptions and locations

A peek into one of Murano’s glass studios.

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Venice and Florence, Italy

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2018 Indigo Street Studio

Annual Holiday Event

This year’s 2018 Indigo Street Studio Holiday Event will be the first two weekends of December:

Saturday, December 1 10am - 4pm

Sunday, December 2 12pm-4pm

Saturday, December 8 10am - 4pm

Sunday, December 9 12pm - 4pm

Where: 6931 E. Indigo St., Mesa AZ 85207 For driving directions, click here!

We set up our Holiday Event in our studio workspace and showroom. We hope you can come by to enjoy the art, native landscaping, kitchen garden, hot coffee, and snacks!

We will have beautiful work in a wide price range, with items from under $50 on up to collector level. We are delighted that you make time to visit and give us a chance to catch up with how you’ve been this past year. Garden tours for the asking!

We are working on new items for the holiday event this month. Below are photos of our work and photos of set-ups from our past holiday open studios.

St. Mark, as the lion, symbol of Venice and her strength, reminds us that Peace (PAX) will be with you if you stand with the angels, who are, of course, on the side of Venice! This painting is in the extravagantly decorated and powerfully outfitted Doges Palace.

This compelling painting is by Giorgio de Chirico, the great Italian painter who founded the 20th century Metaphysical art movement that greatly influenced the Surrealists. La Tour Rouge (The Red Tower), oil on canvas, 1913, collection of the Peggy Guggenheim Museum.

This fierce guard dog sculpture and the lovely Dragon Canal are both in the Bardini Gardens, a wonderful Renaissance garden dating back to the 16th C. The private garden expanded over the years and acquired Baroque and Victorian elements. The Bardini’s son died in 1965, and the privately owned garden fell into neglect until 2000, when a foundation was created to restore the site. The gardens, very near the famous Boboli Gardens of the Pitti Palace, has only been open to the public since 2005.

The Pitti Palace in Florence has several museums on its grounds, including a Ceramics Museum that opened in 1973. This museum houses an impressive porcelain collection of over two thousand pieces. It includes Sevres, Meissen, Vincennes, and Capodimonte work and is considered to be one of the most important historical collections of its kind in Europe. It represents the changing tastes and collections of Florentine rulers from the end of Medici rule to the unification of the Italy, a span of approximately two hundred and fifty years.

A view of the Grand Canal from near the Accademia Bridge and the Peggy Guggenheim Museum.

The lovely Peggy Guggenheim Museum is on the Grand Canal. It was the former home of the influential 20thC collector.

Above: While in Venice we were able to see sculptor Allison Newsome’s piece at this year’s Venice Architectural Biennial. http://www.allisonnewsome.com 2018 Venice Architectural Biennial Allison is Farraday Newsome’s sister.

In the photo on the right Allison Newsome is standing by the rain catcher she designed for the event. Her piece, Vera de Pozzo, 2018, is located at the Biennial’s Giardini Marinaressa site. The Venice Architectural Biennial opened May 26, 2018 and runs through November 25, 2018.

photo credit http://www.allisonnewsome.com

While we were in Venice we took a boat over to the island of Murano, famous for its historical and contemporary glassmaking. Like Venice, its main streets are canals. There are many glass galleries, glass-making studios, and a wonderful glass museum on the island.

Murano’s Glass Museum (Il Museo del Vetro), founded in 1861, was once the sumptuous home of bishops. It now houses a spectacular collection of historic glasswork (photo above) as well as a gallery wing of contemporary glass. For more information click here.

Jeff Reich, stoneware, 10”h x 11 x 12”

The ground floor of the Glass Museum has changing exhibitions. The current exhibition is the work of Mario Bellini, glass artist, designer and architect. The show runs September 9, 2018 to March 3, 2019.

From Venice we took the train to Florence, home of the exuberantly lavish Florence Cathedral and Michelangelo’s David. David is in the collection of the Accademia Gallery. It had been exhibited outside until 1873, then moved indoors to its current cupola site.

The emotionally-charged sculpture captures an intense look of of determination and fear in David’s face, and is superbly lit by natural light from an overhead dome. It was fascinating to learn that the large block of marble that Michelangelo used to carve David had been turned down earlier by several sculptors who found the stone to be of poor quality that risked cracking.

We have new birds-on-a-wire. These popular items are glazed terra cotta birds epoxied to solid copper wire & meant for putting in the yard or a planter or wherever you dream up! $35 each.

There will also be plenty of cups to choose from!

In addition to using our showroom for the event, we put cloths over our studio work tables and transform our work area into display space. There will be a large selection of various-sized plates, bowls, cups, tiles, small and large sculptures. We hope you can come by and check it all out!

Farraday Newsome, Footed Black and White Cup with Butterfly and Blackberries, glazed terra cotta, 5”h x 6”d

Farraday Newsome, Dark Blue Bowl with Oranges, Birds, and Shells, glazed terra cotta, 8.5”h x 16” x 16”, 2017

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Indigo Street Studio Native Landscaping

Although the various purple Leucophyllums are lovely, we absolutely love our Leucophyllum frutescens “White Cloud” cultivar. It is so full and fresh-looking after this year’s above normal October rain.

Jeff Reich, rectangular tray, stoneware, 2017

November 3, 9am-4pm, 2018: Tour de Bird, a Backyard Bird Habitat event sponsored by the Desert Rivers Audubon Chapter of the National Audubon Society. Indigo Street Studio’s native landscaped yard will be a site. Tickets can be purchased at our site the day of the event, through http://www.desertriversaudubon.org, or at Wild Birds Unlimited in Gilbert, AZ

November 26, 2018 - January 25, 2019: Ceramic + at MCC Art Gallery, Mesa Community College, Dobson Campus, Mesa, Arizona. (Gallery closed during holiday break December 24, 2018 - January 1, 2019)

December 1-2 & 8-9, 2018: Indigo Street Studio 2018 Holiday Open Studio, both Saturdays 10am- 4pm, both Sundays 12pm - 4pm, at our home studio Indigo Street Studio

Indigo Street Studio a Site for Desert Rivers Audubon Tour de Bird Event