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September 2011 Newsletter

Archived Newsletters

Indigo Street Pottery Newsletter

In this Issue

1. Indigo Street Pottery Calendar

2. Summer Trip to California

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!

November 11 - Dec 31, 2011: The Artisan Gallery Cup and Mug Invitational: Consider the Cup 2011, The Artisan Gallery, Northampton, Massachusetts  www.theartisangallery.com

November 12 &13, 2011: Gifts from Nature, National Audubon Society Audubon Arizona, Phoenix Arizona   az.audubon.org

December 1-31, 2011: Shemer Art Center and Museum Holiday Art Show and Sale, Phoenix, Arizona

www.shemerartcenterandmuseum.org

December 3,4, & 10,11, 2011: Indigo Street Pottery 2011 Annual Holiday Studio Sale, Indigo Street Pottery, Mesa, Arizona

January 26- January 28, 2012: Arizona State University Art Museum Ceramic Research Center Gala, Art Auction, Tempe, Arizona

February 25 & 26, 2012: Arizona State University Art Museum Ceramic Research Center 11th Annual Ceramic Studio Tour, self-guided free studio tour throughout Phoenix metro area, Arizona

asuartmuseum.asu.edu/ceramicsresearchcenter

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

1                          Indigo Street Pottery Calendar

2                                Summer Trip to California

Adjacent to the arboretum is an area we were very interested in: The Farm, a beautiful, productive, organic farm that is part of UCSC’s Center for Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems. This great endeavor is a research, education, and public service program at the University of California at Santa Cruz. It is dedicated to increasing ecological sustainability and social justice in the food and agriculture system. On the UCSC campus, the Center operates both the 25-acre Farm and a smaller garden, the the 2-acre Alan Chadwick Garden. Both sites are managed using organic production methods and serve as research, teaching, and training facilities for students, staff, and faculty.

We were particularly smitten by the collection of fig trees, stone fruits, and densely fruited rows of kiwi vines. The beauty of the long vegetable rows intermixed with flower rows, with backdrop views of Monterrey Bay and Santa Cruz below, was truly unforgettable. Lastly, we admired the canvas-sided cabins that students enrolled in the 6-month agroecology apprenticeship program live in for the duration of their stay.  http://casfs.ucsc.edu/ 

This August we travelled to San Francisco and to Santa Cruz, California. What a great escape from the heat of our low desert! Along with the lively culture, we thoroughly enjoyed the fog, coastal beaches, and green aromatic pines, redwoods and eucalyptus. The photos above are the redwoods at Nisene Marks State Park in Aptos, California, and the route along the Santa Cruz coast where we jogged each morning!

Our trip began in Santa Cruz, where Jeff and I had the pleasure of visiting my (Farraday’s) mother and her fiancee, as well visiting as my undergraduate alma mater, University of California at Santa Cruz (BA Biology, 1977). This beautiful campus is nestled in the shady, majestic, vibrantly green redwood forest on the rolling hills above the coastal city of Santa Cruz. This time our destination was the acclaimed University of California at Santa Cruz Arboretum.  Developed over the past forty years, the extensive collection is unmatched anywhere else in the world. It has the largest collection of Australian and South African plants outside of their native countries. There is an incredible collection of South African Protea, which are members of the Proteaceae, a plant family found almost exclusively in the Southern Hemisphere. These showiest of all South African shrubs display mammoth inflorescences. The arboretum also includes a diverse collection of eucalyptus and their relatives, an unmatched collection of conifers and other trees, and extensive representatives of New Zealand and native California flora.  

http://arboretum.ucsc.edu/

Entrance to the University of Santa Cruz Arboretum

Protea flowering,  a big part of the Arboretum’s botanical collection

Photos: The Farm at University of California Santa Cruz

From Santa Cruz we travelled north on the coastal highway to San Francisco. One of the highlights of our San Francisco visit was Golden Gate Park, and in particular, the newly remodelled DeYoung Fine Arts Museum. The architecture is stunning, particularly the nine-story tower that gives visitors a wonderful view of the surrounding park and city. http://deyoung.famsf.org/

Photos: The newly remodelled and greatly expanded De Young Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

We were particularly interested in the George and Dorothy Saxe Collection of Contemporary Craft, housed beautifully in the high-ceilinged, airy new south wing of the DeYoung Fine Arts Museum. Over the last two decades, George and Dorothy Saxe of Menlo Park and San Francisco have formed one of the premier collections of contemporary craft in the United States. The Saxe Collection, containing works in glass, ceramic, wood, fiber, and metal, is distinguished by both its high quality and its depth, with many major artists represented by works from different periods in their careers. Prominent Bay Area and West Coast artists represented include Robert Arneson, Dale Chihuly, Viola Frey, Sam Maloof, Manuel Neri, Peter Voulkos, and Beatrice Wood. Also included in the collection are works by artists better known for their work in other media, including Larry Bell, Linda Benglis, Nicolas Africano, Kiki Smith, and Christopher Wilmarth. 

http://deyoung.famsf.org/child/collections/dorothy-and-george-saxe-collection-contemporary-craft

Photos, left to right: Robert Arneson, Minuteman, bronze, 1983; Ken Price, Colours, clay and acrylic paint, 1987; Dale Chihuly, Green Leaf Venetian, blown glass, 1990.

All from the George and Dorothy Saxe Collection of Contemporary Craft, DeYoung Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco, California.

Another stop in San Francisco was Farraday’s  graduate school alma mater, San Francisco State University (MA Art, Ceramics Emphasis, 1987).  It was great catching up with her former major Professor David Kuraoka and the current head of ceramics, Professor Jeff Downing.

Hawaii-born David Kuraoka is a professor of art at San Francisco State University, but returns to his island home, where he has been named a State Living Treasure, for several months each year. Though the artist produces work in both locales, there is an elemental, primordial quality about much of his work that suggests a particularly strong affinity to an environment born of volcanic processes. Kuraoka is best known for his pit-fired forms in which the clay body becomes a three-dimensional canvas for an extraordinary and subtle palette of hues. However, his work includes a broad range of work that offers further testament to his versatility, and his awareness that with different approaches to his work, he can say different things with clay.

Jeff Downing discovered clay while studying music composition at the State University of New York at Purchase. His first ceramics class there changed the course of his career. Drawn by its reputation for experimentation in the arts, he moved to California where he began to explore hand-built clay sculpture under the tutelage of the artists Stephen DeStaebler and Bill Albright. He went on to receive his MFA from SFSU in 1992.

Photos below: left, Professor David Kuraoka in the studio; right, Professor Jeff Downing with finished work