For July & August, with everybody including me coming & going let’s try an informal new kind of Saturday class. No ‘official’ teacher, instead a work session in the HQ studio.
10am - 1pm, July 13 - August 31.
Open to anybody who’s been in the Saturday intermediate class recently.
This intermediate workshop will hopefully be an opportunity to keep up with your work through the summer, to keep using the worktime calendar for access to HQ through the week, and a chance to chat about your work with class members as we have been doing on Saturdays.
We’ll have a rotating monitor, someone to do a few chores & make sure things are ready as class begins, maybe also to introduce a discussion topic or demo (optional), and then make sure things are put away & covered up at the end.
When you register for the class, we’ll ask what week you’d like to be the monitor! Unless you’d really rather not.
Time: Saturdays 10am - 1pm July 13 - August 31
Cost: $225 includes clay & cone 10 reduction firing
Location: HQ studio
Prerequisite: You’ve been in Saturday intermediate class this spring or last fall, or last summer.
Limit: 8 participants
We are delighted to welcome Elena Miranda & Josh Schwartz back to the studio again this summer! Avid potters & research geologists at Cal State Northridge, they’ll discuss some basics of New Mexico geology, the chemistry of clay, and how it forms here in our state.
Josh & Elena have extensive field experience in New Mexico & will also lead a field trip to Abiquiu where we’ll survey geological formations, learn a bit about this iconic & impressive landscape, study some clay deposits, & learn how clay gets here.
If you’d like me to let you know when we get the slide talk & field trip scheduled, please send me an email.
Presenters: Elena Miranda & Josh Schwartz
Time: to be determined - probably mid June 2025
Location: Green River Pottery A3 studio & Embudo NM
Limit: unlimited registration
Cost: $12
The wheel is mesmerizing, challenging, takes practice, and is fun. If you have a little experience of this, and maybe a fairly regular studio practice, maybe you’ve found that in pursuit of ‘better’ pots it’s easy, on the wheel, to become repetitive, to adopt a strict routine & stick to certain ‘favorite’ forms.
As the season changes, we are delighted to welcome Molly Altman back to the studio to offer a 3-hour wheel workshop emphasizing creativity & coming up with ideas. How to keep evolving - how to make personal, surprising, new pots?
How about starting with a prompt - a poem or a lemon - and using this to take your wheel-throwing in a new direction? The workshop will begin with time for looking at an array of provided prompts, physical forms and other things, then doing some sketching or note-taking. Lots of worktime & guided practice on the wheel will wrap up with a bit of time for discussion at the end.
Bring a notebook & your enthusiasm for the changing season & the quest for new ideas in the clay studio.
Teacher: Molly Altman
Time: Tuesday April 9, 10am - 1pm
Cost: $145 includes clay
Limit: 8 participants
Location: HQ studio (or A3 studio)
Here is an archive of classes, workshops, & pots that have gone before
Like many New Mexico potters, you may have been digging clay in Abiquiu for decades, where it is abundant, beautiful, and easily accessible. Just why is that - and how did all that beautiful clay get there?
Join Cal State geologists Josh Schwartz & Elena Miranda as they lead a tour of Abiquiu, surveying the geology of the Chama river valley, helping us learn to recognize clay, and to understand a bit about the formation of this iconic landscape we all love & draw inspiration from as we work in the clay studio. Also feel free to register for Elena & Josh’s slide talk the day before - 5pm in the studio.
Note: while we encourage carpooling & may be able to help coordinate, the studio does not provide transportation for this field trip.
Leaders: Elena Miranda & Josh Schwartz
Location: Abiquiu New Mexico (we’ll arrange carpooling once we have a complete registration)
Time: Saturday July 6, 9am - 3pm (our return time is approximate)
Limit: 20 participants
Cost: $35
Note: registration for the April - May run of this class is complete. Please email if you’d like to be on the waitlist for the next round (probably June 2024)
This will be the 3rd round of this intermediate 8-week class. In previous rounds we’ve considered the work of Lucie Rie, Linda Christianson, George Ohr, Josh DeWeese, Marguerite Wildenhain, Betty Woodman, Sara Flynn, Don Reitz, Diego Romero, Christine McHorse, Adelaide Robineau, Mark Hewitt, and Toshiko Takaezu, among others.
Artist of the Week is a great class to enroll in if you have wheel experience, enjoy discussing design & learning about potters who have gone before us & from whom we can learn. You may even have the chance to choose a potter you find inspiring & to present their work, sharing images, a little of their history & a couple of their techniques or design principles for us to work on some Saturday.
Saturdays 10am - 12pm, April 6 - May 25
Teacher: Theo Helmstadter
Cost: $425 includes 8 classes, cone 10 clay & glaze materials, cone 10 reduction firing. There are no makeup sessions for this class
Limit: 8 students
Location: Green River Pottery’s HQ studio
Note: registration for this class is now complete. Please email & we are happy to add your name to the waitlist
In this class we'll learn what is in glazes, what they're good for, and how to make our own. We'll begin by processing local clays & making them melt in the kiln.
Understanding fluxes, oxides, glass-formers; calculating batch recipes, adjusting proportions, treating glaze faults; applying glazes, loading & firing an electric kiln. Bring your notebook & respirator!
We’ll fire lots of tests in the cone 6 electric kiln, though what we learn will apply equally to cone 10 glazes.
Saturdays 10am - 12pm October 7 - December 2 (no class Thanksgiving week)
Teacher: Theo Helmstadter
Cost: $425
Limit: 8 students