The Future of Fine Crafts: Part 4

Today is the last of our Future of Fine Crafts guest series from our friends at the Peters Valley Craft Center, which is set to celebrate its 40th anniversary as a national center for fine craft education.

Special thanks to the contributors to this series: Kristin Muller, Kathe Brannon and Susan Kornacki, as well as today’s guest blogger Julia Whitney who shares with us her assistantship experience from the last 10 weeks. All we have to say is: wow, what a list!

My name is Julia Whitney and I have lived and worked for ten weeks in the Delaware River Gap, assisting nine workshops for the Ceramic Department at Peter’s Valley Craft Center. There are student assistants for each department, chosen by applications, from all over the country.

Traveling from Alton, Illinois a small river town and suburb of St. Louis Missouri, my experience at PV has far exceeded my expectations. I work facilitating ceramic workshops, helping instructors and students, and maintaining equipment, and overall studio conditions. This includes eight to twelve hour days, six days a week. After a long days work I enjoy speeding off on my bicycle to meet fellow assistants to pick black raspberries, and swim in the eddies of the Delaware River. Afterwards we head back to our residence for long conversations at the ever-popular picnic table, or bike back to the studio to make art.

Being the final week of my assistantship at PV, I sat down to reflect on what made the experiences so worthwhile to my growth. Following is a list comprised of points that resonated with me from each workshop that I took directly out of my sketchbook. I think that each of these notations captures a little bit of the essence of the center and what it is that instructors, students and staff take back into their everyday lives.

1. Peters Valley is about educating our intuition to create more freely
2. It is about making a safe place to work, and to share
3. To think about words, and what you want to communicate
4. To express gratitude
5. To ask questions
6. PV is about working for discovery rather than product
7. To develop ideas and use fundamental building blocks to complete the work
8. It is a place to try everything, and figure out what you are doing
9. It is a place to understand when art does and does not work
10. It is a place to build around others, and in doing so, build confidence
11. To be aware of our sensitivities
12. To address concepts of form, surface, and idea
13. To balance between the physical and the visual
14. Students are pushed to ask where their sense of beauty and taste originate
15. To find beauty in organization
16. To use simple materials
17. To work hard, and see results
18. To engage in peer review, research, and discussion
19. It is a place to meet new friends, and reconnect with old acquaintances
20. It is a place to foster your love of learning
21. To practice patience with developing technique
22. To test your limits and break through boundaries
23. Peters Valley encourages engagement in the natural world
24. To make mistakes intentional
25. And to master a material
26. To disregard what you are good at and focus on what you may learn
27. It is a place to create themes, initiate and investigate
28. To build your bibliography
29. And to focus on the sweep of a bowl
30. To collect what happens beyond a photograph.
31. To be resourceful
32. To make “do-dads”
33. To be considerate
34. To heal
35. To help others
36. It is about working with the earth to become connected to the community
37. To increase your vocabulary
38. To understand what you are trying to get back to
39. To seek truths
40. To begin with an idea
41. And then stop to think
42. It is a place to understand the meaning of different
43. To be dependable and selfless
44. To take a technique and push it until it becomes your own
45. To understand an object’s story, and our own personal stories
46. To create metaphor
47. Peters Valley allows you a place to make work for you!
48. To appreciate small gestures
49. To gain inspiration
50. To see the stars
51. It is a place to continually try new things
52. It is a place to question levels of information versus wisdom
53. To focus on the details
54. To realize the full potential of a curve
55. PV is a place to create something done before, and something new
56. To capture visual breadth
57. It is about understanding how you relate to art and life
58. To play
59. To find your voice
60. To put your notes away
61. To develop a personal rhythm
62. To let go of insecurities
63. To let your competitive nature out with a healthy dose of badminton, kick ball, or basketball
64. To open your heart and mind to others
65. And to speak confidently.

I want to say thank you to Peters Valley for making this list possible, as well as to all the instructors I gained these insights from; they include: Kristin Muller, Shanna Fliegel, Joyce Michaud, Chris Staley, Jeff Oestreich, Leigh Taylor-Mickelson, John Dix, Arthur Gonzalez, and Takeshi Yasuda. Thank you to my fellow assistants, as well as the students for creating such a rich and fun learning environment! And a very special thanks to the department head of ceramics, Bruce Dehnert and his wife Kulvinder Kaur Dhew for allowing me the opportunity to grow as an artist and as a person. It has truly been a unique and invaluable experience.

Please visit the Peters Valley Craft Center website for complete information about the center, including their workshops, craft fair and store.