Spring Bonsai Festival!

I'm thrilled to be participating in the Spring Bonsai Festival at the National Arboretum this weekend! I find this an especially beautiful time of year there, because the Azaleas are in full bloom. AND, if you're curious about learning the art of Bonsai, this is your opportunity. There are lots of demonstrations and workshops (some free!) all weekend.

Friday, May 6th, 12 - 4 Saturday, May 7th, 9 - 4

Sunday, May 8th, 9 - 3

Outside the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum: Find everything you need to begin growing bonsai. Vendors from the region will be selling everything from refined bonsai to pre-bonsai material, tools, soil, and planters.

Bonsai Styling Demonstration by Mark Fields Saturday, May 7th, 9 am - 12 pm National Arboretum Auditorium See bonsai artist and nursery owner Mark Fields style a regular juniper tree into a bonsai. This demonstration is free to the public.

Beginner Bonsai Classes Saturday and Sunday, May 7th - 8th Morning Sessions: 9 am - 12 pm Afternoon Sessions: 1 pm - 4 pm Outside the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum Come to the Potomac Bonsai Association’s beginner bonsai learning tent outside the Museum to receive one-on-one instruction from experienced club members. Students will learn how to prune, wire, and repot a bonsai they can take home after class. 3-hour class. $50 fee per session; all materials provided.

No registration required!

I'm very proud of these pots, and I'm excited for you to see them! If you can't make it to the Festival, please don't hesitate to get in touch, and we can set up a time for you to come visit my studio :).

Please email me at kate@hollowwork.com

Hope to see you!

Reidy Creative - Hollow Work Planters!

These beautiful planters are my latest collaboration with Tiffanni Reidy, and the pre-sale is going live on Friday, June 25th!

For our planter release we've partnered with The Greenhouse at Good Neighbor in Baltimore. They're a local business with an amazing design eye whose plants we absolutely adore.

During the pre-sale, pots will be sold with plants of a proper size that you can have potted at pickup. If you're from out of town and you've got to have a pot, please send us an email. We currently don't have the ability to ship plants.

The pre-sale goes live at ghatgn.com on June 25th and you can pick up your pots (and plants) between Friday July 2nd July 4th at The Greenhouse at Good Neighbor.

Follow @reidycreative @hollowworkceramics and @thegreenhousebaltimore on Instagram for reminders throughout the week.

A little about the planters: The stunning designs, by Tiffanni Reidy are inspired by mud cloth patterns. Each piece is handmade / hand carved from terracotta clay and includes a drainage hole and dish. Because they're hand thrown, pieces will have slight variations in shape, color, and texture. They are suitable for indoor and outdoor use but not recommended for freezing temperatures; and because terracotta is porous, if planted directly in the pot, the pieces will develop a natural patina over time due to water and soil salts. For cleaning, use a vinegar and water solution. Baltimore native Tiffanni Reidy is a multihyphenate creative whose work ranges in and between interior architecture, creative direction, graphic design, photography, and publication design. Her interior architecture work takes an emphasis on renovation design in both the commercial and residential realms, while her collaborative projects include creative direction and a focus on local craftsmanship.

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When we released our mug collection, we had no idea it would be so popular. THANK YOU! We were blown away that the mugs sold out in three days, and we're still getting messages asking when they'll be back.(Don't worry, they will!). Our planters were already in the kiln lineup, and it was important to us that we got them released during the summer when gardening was in full swing, so they came out before the mugs, but we'll have them available by the time cool weather rolls in again. Tiffanni and I love working on custom ceramic wares, and we're currently developing other collections together. Stay tuned and happy summer!

Alley Sale / Open Studio 5/23/21

Hello Friends! Please join us next Sunday, May 23rd from 11-2, for a special outdoor pottery event. I will be selling a nice collection of seconds, a bunch of planters, and I'll be having sale on vases. I can't wait to show you what I've been working on!

BUT what I'm most excited to share with you is an art cup collaboration with Steven Cummings. Steven will also be opening his space up for you to check out. Read more about this below.

Sunday May 23rd

11am - 2pm

803 7th street

(REAR ALLEY) NE

Washington DC 20002

(please remember that we're down the alley behind this address)

As always, kids are welcome.

We'll reschedule for the following weekend if it rains.

Thanks!

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GENTRIFIRED - 'My Cup Runneth Over'

A collaboration between Steven Cummings and Hollow Work Ceramics

This series consists of 11 limited edition cups made with local clay. These cups are mementos. They are collector’s items. They are Chocolate City Memorabilia. They are Steven Cummings Souvenirs.

They are a chance for you to hold, to enjoy, to contemplate, and to drink from a vessel that will bring a small piece of Steven's conceptually rich and aesthetically beautiful art into your home. It is my hope that these cups take something temporal - a paper photograph, a wheat paste poster, or even an instagram post - and make something materially permanent, because fired clay lasts a long time. Fragments of pots have been found from 20000 years ago, and who knows, these cups might become the future shards discovered in a DC construction site. Thanks for reading and we hope to see you on the 23rd! Read on to learn more about the clay I used for this collaborations and 3 facets of Steven's Art.

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The Clay

In 2018 I was walking home from Wholefoods, and at the corner of 7th and H st right near the Alley that Steven and I have our studios in, I peered through a fence and into the giant pit of a construction site. The small row houses and stores had been torn down and soon the foundation would be laid for another brand new mixed use space and (now closed) WeWork.

I saw beautiful seams of Red clay running through the uncovered earth and I thought, “How exciting! This is the same seam of clay that runs directly under my home and studio. I should make some pots out of that!” So, I introduce myself to the construction crew and connected with a kind man named Frank. He filled up my buckets and I gave him some pots. It was a lovely interaction.

At first I saw the potential of this clay only in the catchphrase it would allow me to use -- ‘Truly Local!', but as I sat with the buckets and began searching for clay in more and more giant pits popping up around my neighborhood, I knew I couldn’t squander the 'capital C' content that this clay possessed. It couldn’t be wasted on a buzzword, not to mention that making and selling cups ‘with local clay!' when the act of uncovering said clay undeniably speaks to the actual displacement of black people / local families from my neighborhood, would be completely tone deaf. So naturally I began to talk to Steven about it. This is a topic right up his alley (sorry – I do love puns). His images on these cups are particularly poignant, and below I've provided some reading for you to learn why.

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STEVEN CUMMINGS

1. Chocolate City Rest in Peace

Here’s some text from a DCist article by written by Elliot C. Williams in 2019: 'For the last three years, Cummings has been posting his photos from the 1990s and early 2000s to his Instagram profile @chocolatecityrip. He first got the idea to post the photos on Instagram in January 2016 after sifting through thousands of negatives from his early days living in Shaw and seeing something special. (He’s since moved to Bloomingdale).“There was no real value in the work when I first shot it. No one asked to see them or did any shows for it,” Cummings says. “When I looked back on the work, I realized I captured the last part of the Chocolate City.” The Instagrammed depiction of demographic change in Washington isn’t just an artist’s fantasy. A March study revealed that D.C. has had the highest percentage of gentrifying neighborhoods in the U.S., with an estimated 20,000 black residents being displaced from 2000 to 2013. Chocolate City was real, with a black population of 71.1 percent in 1970, compared to 48.4 percent in 2015.' Read the entire article and see the images Here.

2. Graffiti

If you live in DC you’ve likely seen this graffiti. Steven has been illegally pasting up his image since 2010. I like to think of it as an ongoing performance piece - he's been putting up thousands of eyes on the city during its most dramatic time of gentrification. I really love this description by Ryan Reft in a piece about street art in 2012: 'One of the most widely disseminated images appears to be a portrait framing a somber man of indeterminate age, who stares directly ahead through large circular glasses; a bowler hat and high collar complete the vaguely Victorian ensemble. The impressive part is the distribution: The artist has deployed the image all around the city, on telephone booths and boarded-up windows, as well as via small stickers attached to free newspapers.' The article goes on to say that Steven’s prints 'served simultaneously as subliminal adverts for his own art and a means to reshape abandoned D.C. buildings into something more the urban detritus.'

3. Self Portraiture

Rod Terry beautifully wrote the following about Steven's thoughts on self portraits for the exhibit titled 'To Show Me' at Big Bear. 'The aim is to illuminate the relevance of self-portraiture and how it can be used to breakdown cultural, racial and psychological barriers. In many ways, self-portraiture is a privileged encounter that provides insight not only into the physical appearance, but also the mental and emotional state of the artist.

Historically, artists have recreated their own image to study their craft, hone their skills and construct a visual representation through their own medium. Unlike modern-day selfies that inundate social media platforms, the self- portrait is a more cultivated, revelatory medium where souls are laid to bare. It requires a higher level of planning, technique, posing and consideration.

To Show Me includes 12 self-portraits of local photographer Steven M. Cummings that are drawn from his work, travels, home life, leisure and pensive moments of solitude and introspection. It is a photographic diary — a moment of mid-career self-reflection. Each portrait in the exhibition offers the viewer a window to understand the artist in a way that his actual work could never reveal. Fragments of self-revelation, vulnerability, vintage, political commentary, social consciousness and creative identity can be found in each portrait.

To Show Me challenges the viewer to embrace this form of self-representation as a mirrored reflection of a particular moment. It is not solely about the aesthetic value of the image, but more so about revealing who you are. The energy, movement and light in each image reflects everyday life and attempts to break down barriers of —race, gender, place, social status and sexual identity — that can hold us all back and keep us from seeing ourselves as we truly are. To Show Me is a simple reminder that we all want to be seen and accepted at face value. Of course, the way we see ourselves is not always how others see us, but the point is to be seen, to show up on the world’s stage every day and be honest and open about who we are.'