Soon visitors to CASA of Maryland’s Baltimore office will be welcomed by a new figure: one of rising ceramist George Rodriguez’s oversized ceramic personalities. Baltimore Clayworks received a Gutierrez Memorial Legacy Grant for the public art project, which will also include smaller works by members of the community. “Clayworks has a lot to offer everyone in Baltimore,” says community art manager Nicole Fall. “It’s really neat whenever people can get together from different cultures and make stuff.” The final installation will be unveiled in September.

When curators revitalized a Walters Art Museum wing, unveiled in June as 1 West Mount Vernon Place, they were intentional about making a space that merges past with present—a contemporary palette on the walls of a historic mansion, a digitized collection of illuminated manuscripts on tablets in the decadent library, and ancient art displayed alongside pieces made specifically for the museum’s opening.

Featuring work by Philadelphia-based ceramic artist Roberto Lugo was a no-brainer. His vases (some several feet tall), dinnerware, and sculptures are exhibited throughout the building, depicting such cultural figures as Frederick Douglass, Freddie Gray, Colin Kaepernick, John Brown, and, most site-specific of them all, Sybby Grant, a slave who once worked in the kitchen at 1 West, under its original owners, the Thomas family.

“Here was someone making powerful work that spoke to the past and present at the same time,” says Alexander Jarman, who co-curated the work in 1 West with Eleanor Hughes.

Lugo borrows motifs and techniques from ancient Greece and Rome, as well as 17th-century French pottery—and really anything that strikes his fancy—but viewers don’t have to have a knowledge of art history to appreciate the beauty of his pieces. He sees that familiarity as a way into his work. “People will get a sense of seeing it before,” he says, adding that some—certainly art scholars—understand the context but often don’t relate to the cultural experiences in the work, and for others, the opposite is true.

Lugo grew up in a dangerous area of Philadelphia and first expressed himself artistically through graffiti. He had 57 first cousins, and all the males did graffiti, he says, so it was a way for him to connect with his family.

Wanting to escape a destructive life of drugs and gangs, he went to Orlando, Florida, when he was 20 to start anew—try to hold down a job for more than a few months, take some community college classes, stay out of trouble. He enrolled in art classes rather than something like English literature because he didn’t want to expose that he was poor and from the ghetto, he says.He took to ceramics quickly.

“The ceramics studio was always poppin’—music playing, people working,” he says. “I actually met my wife there.”

One of the first pieces he made was a fire hydrant, which hearkened back to his days growing up, when he and his father would shower in the water from a hydrant outside when their water got shut off.

He went on to earn a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from Penn State University, and has since exhibited his work and given lectures throughout the country.

Lugo’s introduction to Baltimore came when he worked as an artist in residence at Baltimore Clayworks, where he taught art throughout the city at places like Jubilee Arts Center. He saw numerous connections between Baltimore and Philadelphia, he says, especially during the Freddie Gray protests.

A three-year timeline for the 1 West project allowed Lugo the luxury of talking with curators, seeing the space, and doing independent research to create pieces that engage with the history of the mansion as well as Baltimore.

“There’s a transparency there,” Lugo says. “We’re not hiding the fact that there were servants in the house.”

On one of his jars is the likeness of Freddie Gray. “People assume it’s political, but really what this is about is a person worthy of having an urn in their name,” Lugo says. “When a human being’s life is taken, it becomes really difficult to disagree with that.”

On Thursday, August 9, Lugo will be back at 1 West with artist Ezenwa “Shane” Wosu for an interactive performance event that explores the question, “Who gets a seat at the table?” It will take place in the dining room at a table with place settings made by Lugo—one of several installations within 1 West, which is considered by its creators to be one massive art installation.

“This is an opportunity for local audiences to connect with, and start a conversation about, our own local history,” Jarman says.

After nearly 40 years, Baltimore Clayworks is forced to close its doors. The Mt. Washington ceramic arts studio and gallery released a statement on Monday announcing the closure citing “the loss of sale” and lack of funding created a “delicate situation” for the nonprofit despite the fundraising efforts of the arts community to save it.

The organization was forced to file Chapter 7 bankruptcy due to unpaid debts. According to board of directors president Kathy Holt, $200,000 would have prevented them from filing and allowed the doors to remain open. The initial plan was to sell the properties and relocate, but opposition from people who believed that Clayworks should remain in Mt. Washington caused delays and uncertainty forcing the buyer to withdraw and shattering any hopes for the nonprofit to continue.

“The ‘Community Campaign’s’ accrued funds came with a variety of restrictions in order to be disbursed,” Holt said in a statement. “While the administration of that group worked hard to release some of that now, and potentially later, it was not enough, nor in enough time, to stave off bankruptcy.”   

Baltimore Clayworks is the only nonprofit in the state solely dedicated to ceramic arts, providing career opportunities and community programming. Since its inception in 1980 and its expansion in 1999, its mission has remained the same: create a place for ceramic artists to develop and sustain their craft, and provide educational programs for the public.

“The problem with clay is that it tends to be addictive,” co-founder Deborah Bedwell told Baltimore in 2010 when she also admitted there was “financial fragility” within the organization. “You have both an emotional and a sensory experience . . . You touch it and you’ve made your mark on it immediately.”

For more than 20 years, the Community Arts program of Baltimore Clayworks has been collaborating with cultural grassroots organizations and schools to provide access to arts programming for underserved communities in the city. The program is committed to providing everyone—children, adults, and seniors—with a positive experience in ceramics. But with the doors of the main campus closing, the future of the programming is unclear.

“The board deeply regrets the outcome for artists, students, and kids who were to attend summer camps,” said Holt. “We are also hopeful we can find a new ‘home’ for the Community Arts program, and are actively engaging with possible organizations that could administrate it.”

Although Mt. Washington is not quite an official Maryland Arts & Entertainment District, Baltimore Clayworks provided a space in the historic neighborhood for artists to create and explore. The Studio building—formally an Enoch Pratt Free Library branch—offered hands-on classes in pottery and sculpting for patrons of all ages as well as exhibitions that showcased national, international, and local artists.  

“We understand the impact this will have on the larger arts community,” Holt said. “It is exceedingly painful to those that Clayworks has served. We are all grief-stricken with the result.”

Who are some local artists you love?
CH: I really like the work of [MICA graduate] Jessica Hans. From a technical standpoint, all of her glazes and use of raw materials is really on point. I have to give my studio-mates a shout out: Audrey Gair is a painter. Tony Auth also makes ceramics. Maggie Fitz, Lucy Maher-Tatar, Colin Foster, and Max Anderson. We all make extremely different work so it’s really exciting for all of us to come together. It’s really nice having other people around and bouncing ideas back off of them.