Visiting the Ephraim Faience Pottery Booth

We made our annual visit to the Ephraim Faience Pottery booth yesterday. This is our favorite contemporary pottery studio. They have about 6 crafts people hand throwing, decorating and glazing all the pottery. It is stylized designs that are made in limited editions. They seem to have put a considerable amount of work into recreating the look of the old glazes and derivatives of old forms by Grueby et al.

In the second picture Kevin Hicks (pottery founder and head potter) is answering questions as people make their purchases. What is great is that a majority of the people at the pottery come to the conference and they have lots of variety to choose from along with some limited edition pieces.


This year Stephanie and I went crazy and each purchased a piece of pottery. Mine is the Star Fern with a great molted green glaze. Stephanie's was green with a yellow glaze around the top.

During the morning talk by Martin Eidelberg, a Emeritus Professor of Art History at Rutgers, he talked about the factory type production of pottery in the Arts and Crafts movement of the 1890's to 1920's and how the companies would make it look like they had craftsmen who would pursue their artistic freedom, but instead many firms would set up assembly lines where one person would throw (or even cast) the piece and another would apply details and another would glaze it. The idea was to have items that looked like they were individual pieces of art but with exacting consistency as far as the form and color go.

I think Ephraim Faience Pottery is a production shop but they allow its artists to pursue forms and designs that they like while still keeping a decent consistent quality product. As an example, a few years ago the company stopped producing art tiles when their potter who did the tiles did not want to make tiles anymore. So the company stopped offering tiles even though they were popular and I guess added to the bottom line. They could have easily had one of the other artists do the tiles.