NOVEMBER 14 – DECEMBER 30
Main Gallery
Virtual Tour available November 18
The community helped us launch the giving spirit of the season, nurture creativity, and celebrate the opening of the Holiday Exhibition and MN NICE Graduates.
It was a season to share your curiosity and clay appreciation with those you love! We had over 1000 pots to use during everyday—or special—moments; from a single mug for quiet morning coffee to a home-office vase for winter greens.
Member Holiday Benefits
Member Preview Hour: November 14, 11 am – 12 pm
We invited our Members to enjoy their perks! NCC Members enjoyed special early access to the galleries an hour before the public and were encouraged to use their discount. They were also invited to share their discount with a friend!
Gift Ideas
Mystery Gifts
Not sure what to choose in our gallery? Want to give a little surprise gift to yourself? Each gift-wrapped box contained a mug or cup from one of our gallery artists. This may have included work from our year-round gallery artists, visiting artists, or American Pottery Festival artists. Your mug fate or cup destiny awaited you!
Holiday Mugs
This year’s holiday mugs were created by two highly-respected and well-loved artists from our local art community: Andrew Rivera and Audra Smith.
Each mug was just $29, gift wrapped, and included the artist’s favorite mug-worthy recipe! It was the perfect gift for corporate clients, friends, teachers, family, or your very own mug collection!
Holiday Guest Artists
Clarice Allgood, Minneapolis, MN
From a free spirited, traveling childhood and her academic education in philosophy come a perspective rooted in thoughtfulness and curiosity. Though Allgood’s ceramics are often grounded in practicality, they maintain a particular whimsy and environmental aesthetic.
Ian Bassett, Concord, CA
Born in Seoul, South Korea, Ian Bassett grew up in Connecticut on Long Island Sound. Bassett’s work is often atmospherically fired and focuses on fusing craft and traditional folk pottery practices with more contemporary aesthetics and ideas.
Casey Beck, Lincoln, NE
Beck creates utilitarian vessels and has a profound interest in researching the interaction between ceramic materials and the process of soda-firing. His vessels capture moments of the making process which are recognized through daily use, creating a dialogue between maker and user.
Laura Casas, Raleigh, NC
Casas’ ceramic work is hand built from earthenware and decorated with vibrant slips, washes and underglazes. Through form, material, color, and illustration, her work expresses and explores her identity as a contemporary Latine individual while engaging with inherited cultural memories and indigenous history/influences.
Kate Fisher, St. Louis Park, MN
Fisher is inspired by the evolving domestic landscape, mundanity, rituals of home life, intimacy and finding beauty in the work of personal housekeeping. Her artistic objective is primarily preoccupied with creating and observing connections, implicit and explicit, between objects and humans.
Delores Fortuna, Galena, IL
Fortuna enjoys the scientific nature of ceramics and formulates her own porcelain clay body and glazes. Her work continues to involve the gestural movement she initially fell in love with. Through layering historical context, natural colors, and her experiences, Fortuna reimagines the staples of everyday use.
Lauren Karle, White Bear Township, MN
Karle’s work is involved with cultivating compassion and understanding between different peoples, cultures, foods, and places. Both Karle’s surfaces and forms are influenced and inspired by the people she has met and places she has interacted with around the world.
Rita Panton, Minneapolis, MN
Inspired by her drawings, Panton’s ceramic sculptures playfully explore balance and hyperbole, hanging off walls or resting on overly large heads with tiny feet dangling in the air. Developing a hybrid sculpting method that merges flat and three-dimensional work, she captures figures in her unique illustrative style to tell stories about her generation’s experiences of the world.
Randy Schutt, St. Paul, MN
Schutt’s ceramic work resists the fast pace of society by encouraging space for exploration of symbolic inner mysteries and development. His work is playful and invites others to pause, wonder, and find peace.
Related Events
Shop in Person at the Holiday Open House
Sunday, November 14
Member Preview Hour, 11 am – 12 pm
ART@HAND Holiday Open House Workshop
Sunday, November 14, 2 – 4 pm
Friends joined us in the VIRTUAL studio for some good old-fashioned holiday fun during our 31st annual Holiday Open House! We created decorative clay creatures during this free, hands-on workshop for this year’s celebration. Students picked up a free clay kit at NCC and joined us for the live VIRTUAL workshop at 2 pm CT on November 14. Then, they returned their completed projects to be fired in NCC’s kilns. All projects were fired and ready to give as gifts by December 12! The workshop was open to all ages and skill levels.