Strange Shapes
at the Clay Studio

By Tom Waring
Times Staff Writer

Four years ago, a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts enabled St. Albert the Great Elementary School to team with the Clay Studio for some advanced art studies.
While the Arts in Education Partnership money isn’t there for St. Albert anymore, the school’s parents association has become the sponsor.
That way, the experts from the Clay Studio continue to visit the school every year.
"It’s become a fourth-grade tradition," said St. Albert art teacher Nora McCloskey. "The kids love it. They love clay. They love playing with it and getting their hands dirty."
As the students are having fun and getting their hands dirty, they’re also making some pretty good artwork.
At St. Albert, located in Huntingdon Valley but including a large percentage of students from the Northeast, the 60 fourth-graders are divided into two classrooms. A teaching artist and assistant from the Clay Studio, located at 139 N. Second St. in Old City, typically visit the school a half-dozen times in the fall.
McCloskey joins them, along with the fourth-grade teachers and Lorraine Benish, who retired as art teacher two years ago but returns for the annual clay project.
This school year, the students focused on making portrait mugs and coil pots and bowls. The finished products are displayed in a case at school. The 10 best were chosen to appear at the annual Claymobile Creations exhibition, which ran from Feb. 2 to 25.
The highlight of the professionally produced exhibition was a reception that attracted parents and art teachers and students from Philadelphia-area schools. The exhibition featured the best from each school.
"It’s a great program," said Harriet Hoover, outreach coordinator for the Clay Studio, as she held a particularly well-done portrait pot by St. Albert’s Andrew Wheeler.
The Clay Studio, founded in 1974, is a non-profit educational arts organization. Funded by foundations, corporations, government and individuals, it is the region’s only organization dedicated solely to the ceramic arts.
The four-floor property it leases includes galleries, a retail shop, a school and a resident artist program.
The Claymobile is a community outreach ceramic art program that brings hands-on art education to more than 1,500 students — mostly in third to 10th grades — in Philadelphia. It visits up to 19 sites per week.
Hoover said the program teaches the students patience, teamwork and the artistic process. They work with a product — clay — that is easily manipulated.
"It helps develop children’s creative spirits," she said. "It’s very emotionally cathartic for the children. Anybody can make their own individual mark and texture. There is no right and no wrong."
Besides St. Albert, the Claymobile’s other local stop is the Beacon program for sixth- to eighth-graders that is held at George Washington High School. The students there focused on figurative pots and ugly-face jugs inspired by 19th-century Southern pottery.
In the spring, the Claymobile will travel to Robert B. Pollock School on Welsh Road.
In addition to schools, the Claymobile travels year round to community and cultural centers, after-school programs, homeless shelters, programs for the aged and disabled, juvenile detention centers and summer camps.
The students range in age from a 4-year-old preschooler to a 103-year-old woman at a nursing home. There are students who are deaf, mentally retarded and handicapped, with plans to reach out to others who are visually impaired.
Hoover said the students, many of whom are working with clay for the first time, are proud of their work.
"It’s a real object they’ve made," she said.
Clay Studio staff drive the supplies in two vans to teaching sites as well as a firing studio on North American Street in Kensington.
Recently, one of the vans, a 1994 model, was broad-sided in a crash. Nobody was hurt, but the vehicle was totaled. A Claymobile Van Fund has been established.
"We’ve just expanded our program because of overwhelming community demand," said Amy Sarner Williams, executive director of the Clay Studio. "Without that second van, that really curtails us from fully implementing the program. It’s going just gangbusters in the city, and we can’t go backward."
McCloskey, the St. Albert the Great art teacher, said her students like working with clay because they get to grab a hunk of Earth and add their own character, texture and paint. Their creations are preserved forever.
The yearly clay project and exhibition are over, but the buzz remains at St. Albert.
"The third-graders are already talking about it for next year," McCloskey said. ••
The Clay Studio is located on Second Street, just south of Race Street. For more information, call 215-925-3453 or visit www.theclaystudio.org
Reporter Tom Waring can be reached at 215-354-3034 or twaring@phillynews.com