The San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA) has acquired nine artworks by eight San Antonio-based artists, including “Enter the Dragon”, 2020 by Jennifer Ling Datchuk (American, born 1980). The acquisitions are part of the Museum’s Initiative to Acquire Art by Contemporary San Antonio Artists. Film Produced by Walley Films. Generous support for this project provided by Art Bridges. Learn more at https://www.samuseum.org/learn.
95% of my students are women.
Genuinely, I connect with and gently challenge every single student.
Even out of workshop hours, everyone knows the kettle is on and my ear is always open.
There has been hardly a day in the past eight years that my studio hasn’t had a student working on their pots, dropping off projects to fire, picking up clay or chatting and sharing creative resources.
When working with our hands our periphery opens, allowing us to discuss and share with vulnerability and abandon. It is pure magic to witness the lasting friendships, community-built and problems solved in my studio.
In my first workshops, many conversations exposed me to the many social and financial gaps in our communities for women needing creativity and companionship.
Rarely do we get to step out of our lives and afford ourselves creativity.
Shoving your hands into clay, plunging them into water… such direct and visceral experiences bring you into your body and out of your “head”.
Realizing that my workshops are a form of therapy, the mandate of my studio has always been:
To create equal and purposeful access to the healing and empowerment that clay offers
For twelve years I have successfully achieved this mandate by creating two studio programs:
For lower income clay enthusiasts
Two students a year become my assistants under a work/trade set up.
Working next to me, they help me complete the studio’s student work from my workshops (about 4-8 hours a week on their schedule: set up, clean up, glazing, loading and unloading the kiln)
In exchange, they have free non-stop access to the studio, most supplies, equipment and mentorship.
If they so choose, I help them refine a finished body of work through to being retail ready. This includes skill based training, techniques, design competencies, glaze and kiln technology.
I have had over twenty assistants – All of whom are now extended family. Many of them now successfully sell their own work and have the skills to run their own studio practices.
How I choose: The assistant spots are given organically to students that show a desire to grow their skills, a committed attitude and a strong work ethic.
There has never been a problem finding these deserving people…they also always have a way of finding me. *Please see the “Assistant Program Contribution”
I purposefully and anonymously give ten or more workshops per year to women in need of creative time and its therapy. Each spot is worth min $325.
I quietly choose to support cancer fighters, women in grief, exhausted mothers, and women who have experienced violence from our island community.
This is the best part of my job!
Recently I have developed a student program alongside IWAV (Islanders Working Against Violence). With the new space I can extend free anonymous classes to women staying at the IWAV transition house and secondary housing or accessing IWAV counseling and outreach programs. *Please see the “Women’s Legacy Contribution”
These programs have led to many successful, healing stories.
From my hundreds of students to my beloved assistants, it is these creative experiences and connections that have turned this tiny clay studio into a school.
Please help me maintain, support and serve the beautiful community that has organically formed here.
After leaving prison where she was serving a life sentence, Ilka Perkins co-founded a ceramic studio and named it “People’s Pottery Project.” She employs formerly incarcerated women and trans and non-binary individuals, and aims to empower them through meaningful employment and community.
About this Video Series
In response to Cauleen Smith’s explorations of radical generosity and intentional community-building, LACMA invited a few members of various L.A. communities to share stories that speak to the artist’s interests.
Watch the series intro video here: youtu.be/LHP9BbOlLSc
About Cauleen Smith
Cauleen Smith is a Los Angeles–based interdisciplinary artist whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the imagination. Smith roots her work firmly within the discourse of mid-20th-century experimental film. A traveling solo exhibition of film, video, and installations, Give It or Leave It features a series of experimental portraits of different sites related to spirituality, creativity, and utopianism. Much of the research conducted for Smith’s film projects has taken place in California, on location at Alice Coltrane’s ashram, The Vedantic Center, and in history through a restaging of a photograph of nine dapper black men taken in 1966 at the Watts Towers by Bill Ray. Additional archival research delves into the 19th-century Black spiritualist Rebecca Cox Jackson, who was the Eldress of the first black Shaker community.
Find out more about on the exhibition pages:
Cauleen Smith: Give It or Leave It: lacma.org/art/exhibition/cauleen-smith-give-it-or-leave-it
Cauleen Smith: Stars in My Pocket and the Rent is Due: lacma.org/art/exhibition/cauleen-smith-stars-my-pocket-and-rent-due
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About LACMA
Located on the Pacific Rim, LACMA is the largest art museum in the western United States, with a collection of nearly 140,000 objects that illuminate 6,000 years of artistic expression across the globe. Committed to showcasing a multitude of art histories, LACMA exhibits and interprets works of art from new and unexpected points of view that are informed by the region’s rich cultural heritage and diverse population. LACMA’s spirit of experimentation is reflected in its work with artists, technologists, and thought leaders as well as in its regional, national, and global partnerships to share collections and programs, create pioneering initiatives, and engage new audiences.
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A story about a ceramic artist, Cathy Terepocki, and her journey to find purpose within her work. When most artists are seeking to further put themselves at the forefront of their work Cathy made a conscious decision to actually remove her personal touch.
Director: RJ Bruni – rjbruni.com
Producer: Inmist Media House – inmistmediahouse.com
Line Producer: Nolan Schneider
a collaboration between the RISD Museum and the Center for Complexity
Filmed Wednesday, June 16
3-4:30pm EST
RISD faculty members Alero Akporiaye, Jean Blackburn, Anina Major, Christopher Roberts, and Clement Valla, with Elizabeth Williams of the RISD Museum, will explore a selection of ceramic objects from the RISD Museum collection. Join these scholars and makers from a variety of disciplines as they consider the human creative expression carried via ceramics and discuss aesthetic characteristics as well as their significance as bearers and symbols of history, culture, commerce, and meaning. Both exploratory and investigative, critical and generative, this multidisciplinary dialogue will benefit scholars and art lovers alike. Unscripted and unrehearsed, this dynamic conversation will explore how to look at these objects more closely and broadly, and engage with them in new ways to find both the beauty and truth in earthen materials shaped by human hands, which, as Keats wrote, continue to “tease us out of thought, As doth eternity.” The discussion aims to inspire a deep consideration of how these objects can provide insight into the practices, mindsets and values that we should carry forward—or leave behind.
This collaboration will be introduced by Elizabeth Williams, the Museum’s David and Peggy Rockefeller Curator of Decorative Arts and Design, and is in preparation for the January 2022 exhibition Trading Earth: Ceramics, Commodities, and Commerce. The production of ceramics by global communities—whether as staples or luxuries—is inextricably linked to issues of consumption and commodification. Williams writes:
These commodities and goods are employed and enjoyed gastronomically, aesthetically, socially, artistically, and culturally by many types of markets and consumers. They are also frequently cultivated, harvested, and produced by enslaved, indentured, or exploitative labor of human beings, damaging or endangering the wellbeing of their person, communities, and environments. Drawing from the museum’s nearly 8,900 ceramic objects, this exhibition centers the intersection of global trade and ceramics through the exploration of a dozen commodities.
