Featured Articles

2025 High School Exhibition Juror, Jerry Wagner

January 28, 2025

A springtime tradition at Standard Clay is the annual High School Students Exhibition at the ClayPlace@Standard gallery. Area art students and their teachers look forward to selecting their best pieces, showing them to a wider audience, and facing the scrutiny of a professional juror. This year’s juror, Jerry Wagner, is a paradoxical mix of artist and technician who is not only an accomplished potter but a veritable fire wizard. Wagner’s years of experience in the industrial kiln industry lends a unique perspective to his eye for the seemingly mysterious process of combining earth, chemicals, and heat.

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.