Featured Articles

Nashville’s Clay Lady: Danielle McDaniel

January 03, 2025

Forty-two years ago, Danielle McDaniel walked out of a Parks and Recreation Department pottery class and embarked on a journey that would touch the lives of countless Nashville school children and residents. With very little formal training, McDaniel combined her can-do attitude with an innate understanding of the human need to create, to develop what is today’s “The Clay Lady’s Campus” at Mid-South Ceramic Supply Company. With the imminent opening of The Clay Lady’s Education Center this January, a build-out of the original structure that housed Mid-South Ceramics, the campus will expand to over 53,000 square feet of studio, education, and gallery space, to accommodate the growth in local interest in ceramics, an upsurge that can be attributed in part to McDaniel’s work.

Tom Turnbull: Just the Beginning

November 19, 2024

Part of what makes Standard Clay an appealing company is the way it mirrors the arts society in its company culture of family and community. Both Ceramic Supply Chicago and Ceramic Supply Inc. in the New York area have dedicated staff members who foster relationships with the artists who purchase their products, building a communal group with a shared purpose. The central Pittsburgh business propagates this spirit, sustained by generations of the Turnbull family. Headed by Jim, who succeeded his father James, Sr., and managed by his son Graham, Standard is synonymous with the Turnbull name. Jim’s vibrant personality makes connections between ceramic artists throughout the world while Graham steadily mans the helm. But the Turnbull story includes another son of James, Sr., a prodigal son of sorts, who completes the triangle as an accomplished and distinguished ceramic artist. A young man who set off to find his own way, Tom built a life that always came back to clay and is now facing a journey that is launching him on a retrospective trip through his life and ideas that is pertinent not only to him but to anyone who has pondered the meaning of a life in the arts.

Brian Grow: Educator and Maker

October 21, 2024

Brian Grow is a DC area potter whose long journey in teaching and creating led him to an organization that fits perfectly with his artistic vision. The Director of Ceramics at The Art League, in Alexandria, VA, Grow says that the vitality and variety of artmaking at this august, long-standing institution matches his own thought processes. “The rotating schedule of classes,” he explains, “not only in pottery, but in all the disciplines, makes for stimulating conversations in the hallways among instructors, artists, and students.”