Featured Articles

Seeking Beauty: Scottie Roberts Wiest

January 06, 2023

What is the value of a life in the arts? West Virginia potter Scottie Roberts Wiest has fifty years of experience selling and making functional pottery and plenty to say about a lifestyle embedded in nature and community in her native Appalachia. From her early training at Agnes Scott College, through studies in Japan and residency in Georgia, Wiest lives a quest for beauty that manifests in a lifetime of making and defining Appalachian art and culture.

Wheeling Plans Winter Celebration of Pottery

October 26, 2022

Wheeling is a medium-sized city that sits along the Ohio River in what is known as the “panhandle” of West Virginia, a narrow strip of land between Pennsylvania and Ohio that juts northward from the northwestern corner of the state. Like Pittsburgh, its neighbor to the east, Wheeling grew up and thrived in the industrial age of steel and manufacturing. Taking raw materials from the earth, barons of industry manufactured steel, glass, and textiles, building corporations and wealth that fed the needs of a growing community of workers. The Oglebays and Stifels of Wheeling, like their better-known Pittsburgh neighbor Andrew Carnegie, invested in the community good, establishing cultural institutions that still exist today. Rick Morgan, the director of the visual arts department of the 92-year-old arts organization Oglebay Institute, looks forward to showcasing the region’s 21^st-century making, with the upcoming earth and fire, a national exhibition of ceramic art as part of the city’s Ceramics Take Over Wheeling in February and March of 2023.

Stoke Hole Pottery Downtown: Serving the Small-Town Market

September 30, 2022

In the west central part of Pennsylvania, Indiana County is an enclave for potters. Dotted throughout the rural area are numerous potters’ studios set in renovated barns and cabins and homes, tucked into the rolling foothills of the Allegheny Mountains rising to the east. A traveler in the area on the third weekend of October will meander down winding country roads curtained in the reds, oranges, and golds of autumn and catch a whiff of wood smoke from a kiln. Since 2008, the area potters have joined together to promote the annual Potters Tour, a weekend event in which visitors can observe, browse, and purchase works at over ten member studios. Debra and Birch Frew, of Stoke Hole Pottery, are founding members of the tour and have welcomed thousands of visitors to their studio and gallery on their farm outside of the town of Indiana. Last June, in a move planned for and dreamed about, the couple “came into town”, launching Stoke Hole Pottery Downtown in a storefront in Indiana’s business district.