Today we’d like to introduce you to Mary Jo Schmith.
Hi Mary Jo, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
ESTABLISHED IN 2001…
Front Avenue Pottery and Tile designs and creates finely crafted, high quality, playfully decorative dinner & serving ware, and clay tile.
A BFA graduate from the University of Minnesota, artist & potter Mary Jo Schmith was undoubtedly influenced by professors Warren MacKenzie & Mark Pharis & their commitment to functional pottery. Now with more than 20 years of clay production experience, she works daily to produce inspired functional fine crafts for your table, kitchen, and home.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Front Avenue Pottery is the 3rd clay business started by myself, ceramic artist Mary Jo Schmith. Running a small business is always a challenge. Running a clay design studio also requires creative inspiration, (your work needs to sell!), technical skill to produce quality work and to keep the equipment running! I’ve often said, both my parents were successful entrepreneurs but neither had to create & produce the things they sold or design & build the equipment! Looking back on almost 30 years of self employment, yes, there has been struggles a many!! It’s never been boring & time has flown!
Learning the details of small business, taxes, payroll, incorporation, is constantly pressing. Funny to say now, moving into the world of computers was very time consuming back in the day! I was lucky, my mother was an accountant & she taught me a lot! I also owe a load of gratitude to my accountant, I’d be overloaded with administrative work without her!
Many patrons have remarked, “what a great job, being in the studio everyday, being creative, working for yourself”. My answer is always, “small business is not for everyone!” Income, sales, work loads, deadlines & employees are always in flux, & not always fluxing the way you want!
Just like any manufacturing business there are constant problems needing solutions with raw materials that change, equipment that fails, glazes that all of a sudden don’t work like they did in the past! Thankfully I have fantastic suppliers like Continental Clay in Minneapolis who are there to help!
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Last summer 4 different bird species pairs made my yard their home. Very unusual!
It was a noisy summer as they continuously sang their warnings about each other!
CLAY gives me a medium to celebrate these never-ending life cycles that surround & move with us thru our days! A glimpse fired into permanence, the pottery’s surface becomes a sketch book capturing the nuance of a blossoming birch flower or a stem of Rudbeckia bending in the hot summer’s breeze.
I LOVE that I can make functional art!
Stoneware crafted by Front Avenue Pottery is wheel thrown & often altered to produce interesting yet functional forms. Many pieces are hand built from rolled clay.
Front Avenue carries on the tradition of working raw clay into quality, functional, durable, fine crafted stoneware. Housing two 40 cubic foot natural gas kilns, the studio’s dinner & serving ware is reduction fired to 2300 degrees Fahrenheit, vitrifying the clay & giving the studio’s glazes it’s warm coloring.
Studio formulated & prepared food safe glazes are dipped, hand brushed, slip trailed or airbrushed in playful decorative motifs often repeated in series or sets, making each piece unique!
Inspirations for the studio’s decorative motifs can come from something as insignificant as a daily walk in St. Paul’s Como Park…the budding of the Chinese Chestnut tree…to something more purposeful like a study of the Blue Heron…many hours of paper drawings happen prior to any ceramic decoration.
The pottery’s decorative imagery expresses an ongoing fascination with the cycles of life that surround us every day. References from nature…the animals, fish, the sun… illustrate some very basic elements of our lives, such as water, air, soil, animal and plant; images of nature that move with us through our lives. Cycles that continuing year after year regardless of our current destination.
What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
Every day I marvel at the support Front Avenue Pottery receives from it’s patrons & art supporters!! Just when you think you’ll never see another customer again someone calls to place an order! People are always interested in locally made & designed fine crafts & art. This will never change & we must make sure people have the opportunity to learn about & appreciate the arts.
The last 20 years I’ve spent much time meeting patrons & marketing the studio’s work at Fine Art Fairs. Over the last 15 years this marketing venue has changed; patrons can go to the web, cities and communities find hosting shows more & more difficult with safety issues. Even the current administration in Washington DC has publicly declared the arts unworthy of support & wasteful. It’s important to keep the arts alive!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://frontavenuepotteryandtile.com/
- Instagram: frontavenuepottery
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/frontavenuepotteryandtile/
