Big Creek Pottery
Script error: No such module "AfC submission catcheck". Big Creek Pottery was a workshop-based craft school focused on ceramics that operated on a ranch outside Davenport, California from 1968-1984. The school was founded and directed by Bruce and Marcia McDougal, and many well-known ceramicists taught there, including such luminaries as Warren MacKenzie, Michael Cardew, John Glick, and Toshiko Takaezu.
History[edit]
Big Creek Pottery was originally conceived by Bruce McDougal, an art professor, when he and his wife and Al Johnson, a Santa Cruz potter, were scouting locations to create a pottery workspace and sales point. The three had met at the San Francisco Art Festival and begun talking about creating an idyllic space for creating and selling pots, and Al mentioned he had seen an old warehouse on the north coast of Highway 1 near the beach at Waddell Creek. Asking about it at Big Creek Lumber, they were directed to a dilapidated ranch on the ridge above, on Swanton Road. The size of the place suggested a larger endeavor, and Bruce McDougal convinced Johnson to join him in starting a crafts school.
The ranch was owned by Frank "Lud" McCrary and Homer "Bud" McCrary, two local men who owned Big Creek Lumber. The lumber company provided workmen and materials to repair and upgrade the houses, and the McDougal and Johnson families moved into the two main houses in spring of 1967. After building a studio building with the help of the McCrary brothers, the first 9-week session, co-taught by McDougal and Johnson, ran in summer 1967.
Johnson taught for two sessions and then in the summer of 1969 did a house exchange to Sweden. During this time, the McDougals realized they could run the school themselves and offered to buy Johnson out. He accepted, and in later years built a house and studio in Swanton valley, and went on to found the ceramics department at UC Santa Cruz[1].
Over the next few years the summer sessions were shortened to 8, and then 6 weeks, and a fall and spring session were added. The curriculum was unusual in that the sessions were at least six weeks and therefore included in-depth learning in throwing, glaze formulation, and even kiln-building. Bruce McDougal's philosophy was that one should throw a pot and then cut it in half to see what you had made, and by this feedback, and much practice, learn to throw well. There were several kinds of kilns that students worked with, and the curriculum included raku, salt, and wood firings. Students lived in cabins built uphill from the studio and ate in the "cookhouse." The studio was open all night, although after dinner there were often presentations from artists and thinkers from around the Bay Area.
During this time, the ranch became a cultural meeting-place due to the visits, readings, and demonstrations by people such as Laurence Ferlinghetti, Santa Cruz Poet Laureate Morton Marcus, printmaker Carol Summers, ceramicist Peter Voulkos, and glassblowers Marvin Lipofsky and John Lewis. It was popular as a stopping-place for artists and others on their way from the Bay Area to points south, as there was always food, talk, and a room to sleep in.
In 1982, realizing that interest in crafts was waning with the shift to commercialism in the Reagan era, and finding that Bruce McDougal was suffering burnout from too much teaching (and production pottery in the interim times), the McDougals decided to try inviting some well-known ceramicists for shorter sessions. The first person they invited was Daniel Rhodes. Rhodes happily accepted, taught a one-week workshop, and was so taken with the countryside that he built a house in Swanton Valley, where he lived until his death.
The school kept its longer summer session and began running short guest sessions with Michael Cardew, John Glick, Warren Mackenzie, Daniel Rhodes, Toshiko Takaezu Cynthia Bringle, Michael Casson, Ruth Duckworth, Jim and Nan McKinnel, Paul Volkening, Harry Davis, Karen Karnes, and Paulus Berensohn. Other non-ceramic workshop teachers included Nader Khalili, architect; Reshad Feild, spiritualist; and Al Huang, Tai Chi master.
In the early 1980s, looking for a different way to support the continuity of ceramics, the McDougals built what they hoped would be a place their students could live and work and sell their pottery in the local town of Davenport. Downstairs was studio and storefront space and upstairs were eight apartments. As they were getting the building ready, the local restaurant burned down, so they began making food for the locals. As a result, it became the New Davenport Cash Store[2], a restaurant and artisans store, which proved so popular that the McDougals were unable to run both it and the school. As a result, 1983 was the last year Big Creek Pottery held workshops.
In 2011, Karen Thuesen Massaro curated a show about the history and culture of pottery-making at Big Creek Pottery. The exhibition, at the Museum of Art and History (MAH) in Santa Cruz, California, was a hybrid show of pottery displays combined with historical documents and stories.
Alumni[edit]
- Deborah Butterfield, sculptor - Arnold Zimmerman, ceramicist - Kathy Erteman, artist - John Reeves, ceramicist - Tim Craighead, printmaker
References[edit]
Big Creek Pottery, Ceramics Monthly, January 2010 Big Creek Pottery: A Social History of a Visual Idea 1967-1983, Museum of Art and History, Santa Cruz, CA 2011 Incandenscent Moments, Good Times, March 26, 2011 Through the Potter's Wheel: Big Creek Pottery Looks Back, Santa Cruz Sentinel, March 26, 2011 Big Creek Pottery Fired Up a Generation, March 2011
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