The Bray: “A Fine Place to Work”
By Sam Curtis • Photos courtesy of Archie Bray Archives
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Bray grounds, Arch by Chip Clawson
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Archie Bray had a vision when he owned the Western Clay Manufacturing Company in Helena in 1950. His job was making bricks and tiles, but he dreamed of establishing a center for ceramic artists. He even thought up a statement to express its purpose: “To make available for all seriously interested in any branch of the ceramic arts, a fine place to work.”
Now, fifty-five years after the humble beginnings of the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts, the Western Clay Manufacturing Company has long ago stopped making bricks. But the foundation that bears Archie’s name has developed an international reputation for excellence in creating ceramic art. And the recently completed David and Ann Shaner Resident Studio, which nestles among the old buildings of the defunct brickyard, gives new meaning to Archie’s dream of “a fine place to work.”
Early on, lawyer Peter Meloy and businessman Branson Stevenson nurtured that dream. Encouraged by these friends, Archie laid the foundations for the Archie Bray Foundation in the summer of 1951, when he hired Rudy Autio and Peter Voulkos. Autio had grown up in Butte, Voulkos in Bozeman. Both had studied ceramics with Frances Senska at Montana State College, and they were back from their first year at graduate school looking for a place to make pots. When Frances’s friend Pete Meloy heard this, he sent them to Archie.
“Well, Archie immediately gave Pete and Rudy jobs working in his brickyard,” Frances recalls. “And he gave them clay and the space to use it. Nobody knew what was going to develop. It just seemed as though something could develop.”
What developed was Archie Bray’s dream. What developed were the talents of two artists who now stand at the top of what art historians call “the new clay movement,” the use of clay as a medium for personal vision, a movement that Rudy
Autio and the late Peter Voulkos helped create and propagate amid the clang and clatter of Archie’s brick-making machinery.
Autio and Voulkos became the first resident directors of the Archie Bray Foundation. And those first years spun with energy that still whirls in the bricks today.
“We started to make pots for sale in quality gift shops, nut dishes, fruit dishes, planters,” Rudy says. “There wasn’t a hell of a lot of stoneware being done at that time, and it was quite popular, especially Pete’s casseroles and bottles. That was generally Pete’s end of the business and mine started more and more to be architectural sculpture.”
Pete and Rudy taught classes, too. And a strong local group began to nourish the Bray’s growing reputation as a place for artistic interaction and the exchange of ideas.
Within the first year, ceramics from the Bray was included in an exhibit prepared by the American Craftsmen’s Council for a tour of Europe and the Far East. Bray pottery was being shown at New York City’s American House and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Workshop at the Archie Bray Foundation, 1952
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And shrewd Archie was making sure community concert artists and every legislator’s spouse who showed up in Helena also showed up at the Bray. Under a headline celebrating the foundation’s first birthday, the October 19, 1952 edition of Helena’s Independent Record pictured a barefoot Marina Svetlova, prima ballerina of the Metropolitan Opera, giggling over a lopsided pot she has thrown on a potter’s wheel. Pete Voulkos, spattered with clay, shows her how to hold her hands. And Archie stands by looking officious and uncomfortable in a suit.
Perhaps most significant during those early years of the foundation was the visit, in December 1952, of Bernard Leach of England and Shoji Hamada of Japan, at the time two of the world’s foremost potters. Responding to the invitation of Bray trustee Branson Stevenson, Leach, Hamada and Soetsu Yanagi, Director of the Japanese Folk Museum, rerouted their U.S. lecture tour between St. Paul and Santa Fe to come to Montana and give workshops at the Bray.
“It was a very inspiring connection,” Autio recalls. “To see this wonderful Japanese artist, Hamada, whose movements were so fluid and beautiful that clay became an art form in his hands. Up until that point, pottery was just something we made for the trade to sell in gift stores. But this guy opened my eyes to a vision of ceramics as art.”
Three months after the historic visit of Leach, Hamada and Yanagi, Archie Bray fell in the pottery’s kiln room. A month later he was dead. The foundation that bore his name was just a sixteen month-old toddler, but at least it was up and walking on its own.
Pete Voulkos was soon lured off to start the ceramics department for the Otis Art Institute in California. Rudy left to teach at the University of Montana. And so began a pattern of comings and goings by talented young resident directors who have helped sustain the Bray with a commitment bordering on “priesthood,” as Rudy Autio sees it.
When the Small Business Administration foreclosed on the economically floundering brickyard in 1960, resident director Ken Ferguson was there throwing pots and teaching. Following Ken, it was Dave Shaner, David Cornell, Kurt Weiser, Carol Roorbach, and then Josh DeWeese, each energizing the Bray for a number of years before moving on to spread the foundation’s influence and spirit across the country.
Perhaps more than anything, it’s the Bray’s spirit of sharing and developing new ideas that makes its list of former residents read like a Who’s Who in American ceramic art.
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Resident Artist Exhibition. Archie Bray Warehouse Gallery, Summer 2006
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Inspiration from visiting artists continues to spark innovation and change in Bray residents, but the daily driving force for their creative dynamics comes from working next to one another. “The Archie Bray is full of energy that comes from residents, from the artist director, and from visiting artists,” says former resident Benjamin Schulman. “There are people here who have gone to school everywhere, with different educations, some more technical, some more conceptual. There’s always somebody to give you good feedback. And everything you could possibly need in terms of equipment and technology is here. So, it’s a great atmosphere for experimenting, taking risks with your work, and seeing where they lead.”
The Bray is also a place “where residents have to deal with the reality of being a working artist,” says Josh DeWeese. “It costs them money to be here. They have to learn how to balance things.” The ten full-time residents, who may stay as long as two years, pay for costs of materials and firing, and rent a place to live in Helena. They are chosen by the Bray’s director and a rotating jury of two other ceramic artists. Selections are based on the quality of their work and on the diversity of the prospective group in terms of work, background, and stage of career development.
“It’s competitive enough to get into the Bray that motivation isn’t a problem once you’re there,” says former resident Pete Scherzer. And that motivation is continually fed by the Bray’s own sense of place, its hodgepodge of brick buildings and its trail of ceramics donated by resident artists over the past 55 years. As part of the Bray’s 50th birthday celebration, an exhibition of work from its permanent collection, organized by the Holter Museum of Art and titled “A Ceramic Continuum: Fifty Years of Archie Bray Influence,” toured the U.S. for four years. But on the grounds of the Bray itself, pots and sculpture spill out of the resident studio onto spacious grounds. They form a “garden” of ceramics outside the original pottery. They fill the Potter’s Shrine, created by past artist director Robert Harrison. Ceramics rest on fence posts and nestle in nooks and crannies of the old buildings. The objects are playful, artful, thoughtful, and inspirational. They leave no doubt about the business of the Bray.
“What’s great about the Bray is that it’s kind of a big think tank,” says Todd Zack, a former resident artist. “You’re here to work out problems, try new things, share ideas. And the energy is great. You have a history of it just in the people who have been here and the work they have left behind. I’m pretty hard on myself, and I get frustrated, but the history of the place got me back on track. There’s a spirit in the bricks. I believe that.”
When Josh DeWeese and the Bray’s facilities board committed to building a new ceramics studio in 2001, they were determined to preserve the essence of that spirit in the new facility. So they had Ben Tintinger and Jeff Downhour of Mosaic Architecture design an L-shaped studio complex with an industrial ambiance that blends with the historic buildings and beehive kilns of Archie Bray’s Western Clay Manufacturing Company. To further ensure that the artistic spirit of the bricks is sustained in the new Shaner Resident Studio, its new brick and metal siding is interspersed with historic bricks and tiles from the old brickyard, and old pottery shards are incorporated into the flooring.
For DeWeese, who turned over the resident directorship of the Bray to Steven Young Lee, in September, shepherding the new studio from inception to completion was one of the biggest accomplishments of his distinguished 14-year tenure. “Getting the new studio finished and paid for with money in the bank are the things I feel best about,” DeWeese says. “Also, we’ve significantly increased the financial support for the artists working here, offering four $5000 fellowships next year for one-year residencies.”
Speaking of Steven Young Lee, who was a summer resident at the Bray in 1998, DeWeese says, “I knew from the time Steve was here as a resident that we would be seeing him again. His talent, vitality, teaching, and people skills will be a terrific asset to the Bray as we move ahead.”
And so the “ceramic continuum” goes on. Archie Bray would be amazed at what’s become of his dream of “a fine place to work.”
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