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The 32nd annual Chatham Artists Guild Studio Tour is coming up on the first two weekends of December, 10AM to 5PM on Saturday, December 7 & 14, and noon to 5PM on Sunday, December 8 & 15.  This will be my sixth year doing the Tour, and I’ll have signs up on the main roads directing people to my studio.  Click here or on the image to access the interactive PDF Tour brochure, which includes a map of the studio locations, and click here to access the stand-alone map.  The latter is especially useful for downloading to your phone or tablet. Click on any of the little red triangles on either map and it will bring up a Google map, allowing you to navigate to that studio.  The Tour happens on those two weekends, but I will keep my display up until Christmas, and you are welcome to visit outside of Tour hours.  It would be a good idea to call or text ahead of time at (931) 260-3323 to make sure I’m here.

I’ve been a studio potter for over a half-century and an educator for almost 40 years.  From 1994 until my retirement in 2018 I ran the clay program in Tennessee Tech University’s School of Art, Craft & Design at their satellite campus, the Appalachian Center for Craft.  I kept teaching workshops for a few years after retirement, but backed off from them with the Covid lockdown, and have fully retired from teaching at this point.  My wife Linda was a professor of American History at Maryville University in St. Louis, and upon retirement we moved to the Chapel Hill area, where our son Morgan teaches in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at University of North Carolina.

In 2016, the American Ceramic Society published the rewritten, full-color second edition of my book Clay: A Studio Handbook.  For more information, click the title or the image above.  There are links to PDFs of the table of contents, introduction, and a list of the potters and ceramic sculptors featured in full-color illustrations.  The book is available in hardcopy or digital PDF format from the Ceramic Arts Daily Bookstore and in hardcopy from Amazon.

As of 2019, I have my own studio away from academia for the first time since 1985.  My studio is equipped with an L&L electric kiln and a 30-cubic-foot LPG soda kiln.  To see pots from my soda firings, go to Current and Recent Work in the Gallery.  To see the studio, recent soda firings, and the kiln construction, go to Studio and Soda Kiln in the Gallery.  To see a short video tour of my studio and another showing me making an elaborate slab-built teapot, click on Tour of My Studio or Creating a Slab-Built Teapot.

I joined the Chatham Artists Guild in 2019 and have participated in the Guild’s Chatham Artists Studio Tour every year on the first two weekends in December.  Images of my display are on the Current and Recent Work page of the Gallery.  Please visit the Chatham Artists Guild website for additional information about the Guild and member artists.  Throughout the year my studio is open by appointment.  Please contact me if you’d like to visit.

The Out West webpage and its sub-pages feature images from annual summer road trips out west, plus a few from other locations. There’s also a gallery of slides shot by my father Dr. Frank A. Pitelka during his summers doing research in the Alaskan Arctic.

From 1975-85, I was a full-time studio potter at Railroad Stoneware, my studio in Blue Lake, California, making wheel-thrown functional stoneware.  In grad school at UMass-Amherst I switched to handbuilding and did elaborately-patterned laminated colored clay vessels and architectural sculpture, and continued that work for 15 years.  For the past 25 years I’ve focused on functional and sculptural vessels using slab and coil methods. To see examples of work through the stages of my career, go to the Gallery and click on the various pages.  To read about the technical processes, scroll down below the images, and go to Cone-7 Glazes I Use in Soda Firing.  To find out more about influences and direction in my work, see my Artist’s Statement and Biography.

I no longer teach workshops, but they were always my favorite teaching venue, so I am maintaining the information about workshops to serve as a resource for other people.  You can find information about the different subjects I taught at the Workshops page.  To see a listing of workshops I have taught in the past, see my CV.

Professional information, such as CV, short biography, and publications can be found on the Contact/Information page. The Publications page includes information about the new edition of my book, Clay: A Studio Handbook (American Ceramic Society, 2016).

To see work by my clay students at Tennessee Tech University, go to the Gallery and click on Student Work.  To see what my clay graduates are doing, scroll to the bottom of the Links page and click on the names.  To access a large collection of PDF handouts about ceramics and other subjects, go to the Documents and Handouts page.  Go to that page or click Super-Refined Terra Sigillata to access the PDF of that article.

The Appalachian Center for Craft is a satellite campus of Tennessee Technological University’s School of Art, Craft & Design, and is one of North America’s premier fine craft studio education facilities.  The portion of the SAC&D BFA program centered at the Craft Center is unique in its mission to offer the highest quality professional fine craft education in Clay, Glass, Metals, Fibers, and Wood, with emphasis on traditional process in the context of contemporary art and craft.  The grounds, sales gallery, and exhibition galleries are open to the public seven days a week.  Click on Sales Gallery or Exhibition Galleries for information about what is currently showing.  To find out more about the Craft Center including the BFA Program in Clay, the Craft Certificate Program, and the Artist in Residence Program, go to the Appalachian Center for Craft webpage.

For more information, email me or go to the Contact/Information page.