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N.C. Artist Puts New Spin on Family's Legacy of Pottery

Historically, the Catawba River Valley in North Carolina is pottery country. The Reinhardt family worked here for generations, making utilitarian pots for farmers. Now, Michael Gates is building on his ancestors’ work. Gates has always been creative, but it took him a while to find his calling as an artist.

Gates spent time in Australia, lived in California, and then, about five years ago, inspiration struck much closer to home.

In the 19th century, North Carolina’s Catawba River Valley region was a hotbed of pottery production. Dozens of artisans, many of them German, made ceramic jugs, the kind that people needed to store food, water, and essentials.

Gates’ ancestors were among those artisans. As late as the 1950s, members of his family were still making pots in the old, utilitarian style.

In an old farmhouse that’s been in the family for generations, Gates’ great-grandfather built his kiln, what they call a groundhog kiln, dug into the earth and enclosed by an arched brick roof.

For Gates, this place has always been a family monument. But now, it’s also a source of artistic vision.

In recent years, he’s been making regular visits to the Catawba Valley, and they’ve led him to completely rethink his own art.

“In my education and early on I enjoyed surrealism, and kind of went through phases and never really found a focus until I started looking closely at my own history and the region,” Gates said.

That’s when something clicked. When he got a bit of distance, Gates saw that the creative foundation he was looking for was already in place, back where he’d started.

“I guess you realize how unique it is,” he said. “All the things that you grow up seeing, you take for granted.”

The story of Catawba Valley pottery has become the jumping off point for Gates’ own pottery. Of course, his pots aren’t quite the same utilitarian objects his ancestors made. They’re art. And sometimes, he even pushes the limits of what counts as pottery. Such as the time he made a more modern version of the face jug, one of the valley’s most iconic forms.

“I was taking pictures of my friends’ faces and putting them on jugs [and] just having fun with it,” he said.

Years later, Gates still loves turning a historical style on its ear.

In 2017, he entered a juried exhibit at the North Carolina Pottery Center called “The Last Drop: Intoxicating Pottery, Past and Present.” For source material, Gates looked back all the way to a 17th century English piece–a slipware vessel in the form of an owl.

If drinking out of an owl sounds wild, drinking out of his reinterpretation would surely be even wilder. The owl’s face has what looks like a scornful, disapproving expression. Its ceramic body is densely adorned with underglaze decorations of hop vines and written phrases lifted from the American prohibition movement. It’s a clever, and masterfully-made piece.

Not surprisingly, it sold immediately.

“He does some things that just blow my mind,” said Gates’ father, Jim. “He’ll make face jugs and he’ll put decorations on them that look like henna tattoos, [and] sells them in Asheville. It would have blown my grandfather’s mind. I wished he could have lived to have seen some of Michael’s work.”

Enoch Reinhardt, Jim’s grandfather, left pottery behind before collectors really began to crave work from the Catawba Valley in the 1970s and 80s. Jim Gates appreciates that his son is making the leap into art pottery that his grandfather never could.

Gates wants his pottery to be a viable business, but the thing he lacks is a sizeable wood-fired kiln of his own, so he can boost his production.

That’s part of the reason why he and his father are turning their attention to their family’s old kiln. It’s going to take a lot of work and some help from neighbors to rebuild it, but if things go well, they’ll be able to fire it later this summer.

This story is part of an episode of Inside Appalachia about people who are working to preserve a part of American culture and traditions. Click here to listen to the full episode.

Should Every Artist Be in a Critique Group?

Creating art can be lonely work, so a small group of artists in the Eastern Panhandle gets together every two weeks to critique each other’s work. These are people who work with paint, pencils, cameras, and clay. But why do they need each other?

This Artist Critique Group, or Crit Group for short, was started in 2007 by Doug Kinnett.

It consists of seven members, and they meet twice a month at Kinnett’s home in Shepherdstown in a large sun room with high ceilings and big windows. The room gives off an air of art – hardwood floors, lights, and modern furniture. Some of Kinnett’s colorful paintings line the walls.

Craig Winkel shows his zebra painting to the crit group.

Each person gets a chance to stand before the group and show a piece of art on an easel. One artist has brought a painting of a zebra. He shows his work, talks a bit about his process, and then opens the floor to comments.

Painter Judy Bradshaw speaks up, “I mean you could’ve painted those stripes straight, and it wouldn’t have worked, but look around his neck, how you have that curvature with the dark stripes. I mean that is difficult to do.”

Many of this group’s members are retired and picked up visual art after finishing one or more careers. But some are experienced artists who have been doing it for a long time and do it for a living.

Gary Bergel is one of the newest members. He says critiquing each other’s work isn’t a matter of saying what’s good or what’s bad – it’s about describing what you see.

“We’re looking to build each other up and encourage each other along our visual paths,” Bergel explained, “Not to – even if we feel something is less than successful, there’s a way of talking about it that is still edifying and encouraging, not destructive, not critical in the wrong way, that’s why the word critique is very, very important rather than criticism.”

The founder of the crit group – Doug Kinnett – is an expressionist painter who likes to use a lot of color. He’s also a retired art teacher with a doctorate in Art Education. After retiring, he longed for something to keep his art education background alive.

He says he started the crit group because artists don’t have a lot of support.

“You know, there are lots of people that get art degrees, and then because life hits them because they graduate from school, sort of like diving into an empty swimming pool, and you see the real world, you know,” Kinnett explained, “they just have a hard time fitting it in, making it a discipline, doing the kinds of things they always wanted to do, which is to make art.”

The Crit Group’s first exhibit at the Visitor’s Center in Charles Town.

After being around for eight years, the Crit Group put on its first two exhibits together this summer – one in Martinsburg and one in Charles Town.

“What we’re hoping to do through these two exhibits – to encourage more artists to really wake up and realize they have a need to get together, to hang together, and if we could spark more,” Gary Bergel said.

The Crit Group’s founder, Doug Kinnett says every artist of any age should have the opportunity to be in a crit group. He says anyone can start one, but they should be small – no more than a handful of people to get the best outcome.

Kinnett isn’t sure how many other crit groups are in the Eastern Panhandle – he thinks around five – but he hopes there will be many more in the future – ones for all kinds of art.

Concord Professor Uses Acid Mine Drainage for Pottery

If you see a body of water with an orange hue, it’s likely the result of acid mine drainage. This pollutant is left behind from abandoned mine shafts coming in contact with the water and it can harm aquatic life.

Steam Restoration Incorporated, a non-profit organization based out of Pennsylvania, has found an unexpected use for this pollutant – pottery. It turns out the iron oxide generated by this abandoned mine drainage cleanup effort can be used as a glaze.

Jamey Biggs, an art professor at Concord University, uses the unique substance while glazing pottery. He was first approached about the opportunity while showcasing his work at Tamarack.

“The discussion around ceramics usually seems to come back to materials,” Biggs said. “So as people move through in waves, I will find myself talking about materials and how that plays a part in it.”

That’s when a woman with the company offered him a free ten pound sample. And it was a success. The pottery that came out of the kiln showed the same results as the other glazes.

“So the idea of using this iron that is, you can produce the same results that is actually being generated as a byproduct of a stream recovering is a nice idea and it’s a nice use for the material that would otherwise be treated as waste,” Biggs said.

Biggs uses a wood kiln to fire his pottery. He uses a traditional Japanese method that lasts 44 hours.

“As it burns it produces ash, and the ash lands on the pots and through the high temperatures and the extended time period the ash melts and forms the glass on the outside of the pot as well as melting the glazes on the inside,” Biggs said, explaining the process.

Concord student Remington Radford has taken the current shift and loves the way the pottery looks once finished.

“Just the turn out, the ash that falls on it, there’s so much differentiation, you’re not going to get one piece that’s the same,” Radford said. “It’s all going to be slightly different, if not completely.”

Biggs grew up in Summersville and can remember when he was a child the few remaining strip mines before they were shut down. He doesn’t consider himself an environmentalist, but says the cleanup is necessary.

“You know, these landscapes are the way they are. We’re going to have to deal with this one way or another,” Biggs said. “These systems work and they’re very effective. The next step is maybe finding a purpose for these metals that are recovered.”

Biggs, along with fellow Concord professor Norma Accord, published their recipes in a catalog for making glaze out of acid mine drainage and held a presentation early last month. Biggs says the communication that is inspired by sharing the ingredients is what’s most important.

“If potters have access to these recipes, it’s a little easier to incorporate this new material,” Biggs said.