Help POT Get Through The Next 6 Months!

by | Jan 18, 2021 | Uncategorized

                                                                                       

POT is the first full service community pottery studio that is owned, operated by, and intended for people of color.  Established in 2017, our mission is to create pleasure, community, and new career paths for POC in pottery. We offer classes, memberships, career training, sliding scale pricing, community programming, and even free workshops for our communities.

This pandemic has been really hard on small business brick & mortars, and given that we have two, we are double feeling it. We cannot afford the staffing it takes two run two studios while operating at 20% capacity. We’ve tried our best to stay afloat on our own, but we’ve exhausted all we have and cannot sustain like this through extended closures.  So we’re asking for help to get us through the next 6 months.

During this time we will continue to work hard within the parameters of what is COVID-compliant and safest for our staff and community.  All the money we make will go towards JOBS; both payroll and hiring the hands we need.

Our goal is to keep POT alive so that we can keep our studios and team and continue to serve our communities.

IF YOU WANT YOUR DONATION TO BE TAX DEDUCTIBLE, DONATE THROUGH OUR WEBSITE DIRECTLY FOR A TAX DEDUCTIBLE RECEIPT  (Donations made here through GoFundMe are not tax deductible)

If you have lost employment or are hard up on money, please don’t feel pressure to donate. You are who we are here to serve. Simply sharing and spreading word is help enough and we really appreciate it.

This ask is for those who can afford it, organizations who want to see us survive, and for the larger pottery community.

The money will go directly to covering the following for 6 months:

– Rent (for TWO studios)

– Cleaning Service (COVID-compliant for TWO studios)

– Utilities (Includes water, power, trash, and wifi for TWO studios)

– Completing the build-out of POT Gardens. This includes outdoor workspace, wedging tables, and a clay recycling station.

Thank you so much for being a supporter of the arts and POT’s mission!

Support the GO FUND ME HERE or support them directly through their WEBSITE.

a new website to bookmark/read/check out: ART X HISTORY

by | Jan 10, 2021 | Uncategorized

“Purpose & Functionality: ArtxHistory is an education resource of commonly available images, videos, mini-lectures and scholarship of the decades which influenced or defined modern through contemporary art. Most links are concise in content, of prevalent works of art in the early or mature stage of an artist’s career, sourced from museum, academic, journalistic and for profit institutions. ArtxHistory is offered as an alternative to a textbook, relieving users of cost as content online is increasingly available. The core intent of ArtxHistory is to offer an art history that replaces the dominant white, male, heteronormative, advantaged, celebrity narratives for a more inclusive history balanced with the work of women, artists of color, LGBTQIA+ persons, intersectional makers, and the self-taught. Reflected by the diaspora, America, particularly New York based practices, are an overriding locus of investigation. While pointing toward a decolonized art history, ArtxHistory is not comprehensive nor free of biases. Artists and scholars are welcome to use and facilitate in the development of ArtxHistory for a more open, equitable, engaged classroom. This project is an act of love for the artists’ who pose the necessary questions of our time, and for our students who deserve to see all of those questions.”

www.artxhistory.org

worth a read: How one Canadian School is adapting to covid in the ceramics studio.

by | Jan 4, 2021 | Uncategorized

“By following the health and safety protocols established to allow in-person learning, students in the Ceramics Studio at the Selkirk College Victoria Street Campus are flourishing and appreciating the opportunity to deliver beauty under the shadow of uncertainty.

The wheels of creativity continue to spin at Selkirk College’s downtown Nelson campus where students in School of the Arts craft studio programs have been engaged in hands-on learning since September.

Adhering to the Provincial Health Officer’s COVID-19 pandemic guidelines for safe learning within the post-secondary education system, the Victoria Street Campus is currently offering in-person training for learners in the Blacksmithing Studio, Sculptural Metal Studio, Textiles Studio and Ceramics Studio. With small class sizes and adjusted studio spaces, ten ceramics students are currently putting the final touches on projects as they prepare for the holiday break.

“Creativity at this time is super important,” says student Candace Ferguson, who moved from the Lower Mainland this past summer to attend Selkirk College. “Nobody wants to be in this situation, but allowing creative people to do creative things… it actually gives life to others who enjoy the final outcome and it brings hope. It’s beauty in a place of brokenness.”

Continue reading the full article here: selkirkcollegearts.ca/news/killing-covid-in-the-ceramics-studio/

Jeannie Mah live chat this Thursday!

by | Dec 16, 2020 | Uncategorized

Jeannie Mah will be doing a live chat with Curator Tak Pham during the MacKenzie Art Gallery’s Virtual Opening of HUMAN CAPITAL on Thursday Dec 17 at 7 pm. Join us on the MacKenzie’s Facebook or YouTube accounts!
TRAIN: les ARRIVÉes is an imaginary train journey through history, across Saskatchewan. With family photos of my dad and me at the Willingdon Grocery in Regina, my swimmer pal Lily Tingley’s family at the Broadway Café in Yorkton, and the almost deserted village of Consul, where my father, at age 14, went to school for one year, we traverse Saskatchewan from west to east.
The passenger train, which once connected us from coast to coast, from town to town, from city to beach, has almost vanished, and the labour and lives lost in the construction of the railway seem to have been sacrificed for nothing. From the Last Spike of 1886 to the demise of the passenger train in 1990, we were unable to maintain our national dream for more than 104 years, despite the human cost of the construction of the railway and our nation.
While the video is a delicate present, and the porcelain journey across Saskatchewan is a faded recent “past-present”, the persistent arrival of the train is in contrast to the still images frozen on porcelain, witnesses to the slow disappearance of lives once lived, and the changes to cities and villages, and to lost modes of transportation. Lives remembered, lives sacrificed, lives forgotten.
Travelling towards infinity is at once a moment of departure always in movement towards arrival, just as immigration is a movement between home and away. This continual arrival and departure of presence and memory, of a “coming and going” within the exhibition space, forms the inner cinema of our lives, because of the persistence of memory and vision, of culture and landscape.
Human Capital: MacKenzie Art Gallery. Regina. Dec 17th to April 18th.
TRAIN: les ARRIVÉes was a 2013 solo exhibition at the Godfrey Dean Gallery in Yorkton, initiated by director Don Stein (who I thank for the train video!), reconfigured for this exhibition space.
Find out more HERE.