The hills are alive with pottery: The 31st annual St. Croix River Valley Pottery Tour
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Outside Shafer, Minn., past honey stalls and grazing cows, rolling green hills are dotted with handcrafted pottery. Folks from around the world have descended on the valley for one of the biggest ceramic events in the country: The annual St. Croix Valley Pottery Tour, which runs May 12-14.
Trevor Simon, a pottery enthusiast, has traveled from London.
“This is Rome; this is Hollywood in the ceramics world,” Simon says. He’s standing amid tables filled with wares on the grassy hilltop at the Guillermo Cuellar Pottery studio. “Ceramics is rock'n'roll. It looks like it's quiet, but what it takes to make these things — the autobiography that goes into it — is personal, and helps people get out of mass culture, slow their lives down. I mean, they’re mystics. Imagine sitting in the forest all day, just making stuff, you’re arguing with the clay, trying to get it into the shape that you want. It's a proxy on life. So, people that live in cities are coming here because everything slows down.”
The tour features eight different studios, showcasing the works of local talent, as well as artists from across the globe — 73 potters in total. The event is so well-attended that the studios hire parking attendants to direct traffic.
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An hour before the tour opened on Friday, attendees were already lining up in the studio driveways. Friends Kim Burnham and Emily Grisbeck, of Minneapolis, came early so they could get the work of a certain artist before it sold out: a mug by Montana artist Sue Tirrell.
“We got here at 9:30 a.m. so we could essentially race up here and get one,” says Burnham, who is a herself is an artist, part of the Rogue Potters collective. She proudly holds up a mug painted with a mermaid.
Guillermo Cuellar Pottery has long been one of the studios at the heart of the tour. This year, Guillermo Cuellar is hosting the event with his daughter and fellow potter Alana Cuellar. Their event features the work of 10 artists mixed together across dozens of tables.
“So, what you get is the effect of abundance,” Alana Cuellar says. “You can see the relationships between pots from different potters.”
Guillermo Cuellar says that Minnesota’s strong pottery community is because of Warren McKenzie, a famous craft potter who died in 2018, who taught generations of potters the medium.
“Pottery has an incredible, long, rich tradition in Minnesota,” Guillermo Cuellar says. For Cuellar, it’s all about community.
“All of my pots have to do with having people come together in community and food, family and friends, and having them sit around a pot, a teapot, or a casserole or hot dish and focus on healthy food, community and friendship,” Guillermo Cuellar says. “So, that's what I think this event is.”
About five miles up the St. Croix River, next to Franconia Sculpture Park, is one of the event’s newer hosts, Peter Jadoonath. Here, tables stacked full with vases, bowls, mugs and more nestle up against a plowed cornfield.
“The little overcast day has made it so the colors are just popping, the birds are chirping,” Jadoonath says. “It's a gallery, but it's in your backyard.”
He says the pottery world is tight knit because the craft keeps the artists humble.
“There's no forgiveness in the material. It really humbles you. You can make the best work and it can crack in the firing; it can crack while it’s drying and you could drop it. It’s that humbleness that the material gives you. We all know what we're dealing with here,” he says. “What's being celebrated this weekend is, it's about pots and people are coming to buy pots — but there's also me and my family, and then with the artists that come here, you become a family, the family gets bigger.”
The pottery tour runs through 5 p.m. Sunday, May 14.
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