ASPEN, Colo.—When Sam Harvey and Alleghany Meadows proposed to open a ceramics-oriented gallery at Aspen Highlands Village, the plan included a working pottery studio.
Harvey and Meadows, both artists as well as entrepreneurs, believed that the base of Highlands had all the components to become something of an artists’ colony. Rents were relatively inexpensive for the Aspen area. There was space to spread out, and natural beauty to inspire them. There was a nice balance between activity, during ski season, and near-silence most other times.
Furthermore, Harvey and Meadows had both spent considerable time at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, in Snowmass Village, and had witnessed there how artists and their studios could be the foundation of a thriving community. And Lord knows how Highlands needed a sense of community, as businesses and overall neighborhood concepts shuttled in and out like RFTA buses on a powder day.
Harvey and Meadows figured the model that had worked in neighborhoods from Brooklyn to Omaha to Los Angeles—bring artists into an underappreciated area, let them create beauty and bustle, and watch the neighborhood’s desirability escalate—had a shot at the bottom of one of the finest ski mountains in the world.
The plan for a studio got smacked down by reality. Harvey and Meadows, who at the time had only a slight acquaintance with running galleries, gave themselves just one month between committing to the space and opening their doors. That period was filled with lining up artists, mostly those working in the clay medium, to exhibit. Their list of contacts was extensive; between the two of them, they had fostered relationships with significant ceramics programs at Alfred University in upstate New York; at Claremont College in Southern California; at the Kansas City Art Institute; and Anderson Ranch, which is a major crossroad on the ceramic map. Moreover, since 1999, the two had run Artstream—a gallery on wheels made from an old Airstream trailer that exhibited pottery across the country.
The call to artists was remarkably successful. “Everyone wanted to be involved,” Meadows said. “They knew our history with Artstream, knew we would put our heart and soul into it, knew we’d do a good job. I think every artist we contacted wanted to be in the gallery.”
Lost in the shuffle of creating the space, gathering art and putting the business in motion was the working studio. Harvey and Meadows were struck by the quantity of work coming in, but what really overwhelmed them, and knocked the original plan off-course, were the people behind the work. Among the artists who signed on was Betty Woodman, who was scheduled six months later to become the first ceramic artist to have a major retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“It just snowballed,” Harvey said of the gallery portion of the proposal. “We had so much art work. We had so much quality, and we felt we had to present it in a certain way. We ran out of space and time to put in a studio.”
“We had ideas of what a gallery should be,” Meadows said. “We knew what places look like where someone like Betty Woodman would show. And a working studio—that just didn’t feel appropriate.”
Fast forward to December 2009: Harvey and Meadows have spent the last few weeks moving walls, ordering equipment, and contemplating the vast possibilities for their reconfigured gallery, which, four years after its opening, will finally have a working studio. The plans are modest for the moment: one electric kiln, a potter’s wheel and a banding wheel, a sink. At most, a third of the square footage will be devoted to working space, and in the summer, when the gallery business is at its busiest, the tools will be put away to maximize exhibition area.
But the prospect of an on-site studio—introduced with a public reception Dec. 12, coinciding with the opening of Aspen Highlands’ ski season—has them thinking big.
“Sam’s going to make big work,” Meadows said, challenging his partner. “We’re looking at minimal equipment for maximum creativity.”
The two ceramists have a handful of reasons why adding a studio now is appropriate. The recession has cut into their sales, meaning that some of their time has been freed up, and that they are looking for ways to keep the business economically feasible. (Sales for the year are down, but they report a sharp uptick in activity this past summer.) After four years as gallery owners, Harvey and Meadows feel they know their artists and clients well enough that they can whittle down their roster of artists: They have represented some 75 artists since opening—about three quarters of whom work in ceramics—and expect to scale it down to 30 or so.
The most urgent item behind the new direction, however, is the creative impulse. Both Harvey and Meadows speak, act and live like artists, and had careers as artists before opening the gallery. Both have studios outside Harvey/Meadows that they plan to keep operational. And while the gallery has been a success and a pleasure, it has taken them away from their pottery work.
“You’re challenged,” said Harvey, whose work is wildly far-flung, covering large-scale sculpture to geometric shapes to functional pottery. “There are so many hours in a day that you can devote to your own practice, and so many hours selling the work. We’ve both invested years in our own art and establishing our careers. I don’t want to give that up. I like making my work.”
“Essentially we’re working artists who have spent the last four years primarily running a gallery,” said Meadows, who infuses elements of beauty and unique design into pots, cups and plates. “It’s like having kids. You don’t know till you’re well into it how many hours there aren’t in a day, how much it will change your life. We’re looking for more balance, personally, in the way we spend our time.”
Experimentation, at this point, seems like a luxury for Meadows. Running the gallery at full speed didn’t necessarily harm the quality of the work he produced. But it did impede his ability to try new ways of creating.
“It’s put a different type of pressure on my studio time,” he said. “As the studio time becomes more precious, the amount of risk I can take in there is less. It’s not that I haven’t grown, but there’s an accountability placed on the work. The work has to succeed, instead of being allowed to fail.”
In four years, the Harvey/Meadows Gallery placed itself in the top ranks of galleries devoted primarily to ceramic arts. Among the artists whose work they have exhibited are Japanese master Takashi Nakazato, one of Meadows’ former mentors, and Peter Voulkos and Aspenite Paul Soldner, the two ceramists who are often credited with elevating clay from a craft to a fine art.
“From the field’s point of view, they’re part of a handful of galleries countrywide that shows high-quality ceramics,” said Doug Casebeer, the artistic director of Anderson Ranch’s ceramics, sculpture and woodworking program. Casebeer has exhibited his work at Harvey/Meadows. “They have very quickly risen to the top five in the country. They have very high standards in what they show.”
Harvey and Meadows acknowledge they may have been overly deep in numbers in the past. “You know, 75 people is a (load) of work,” Meadows said. “You represent an artist well, you have to really know the artist. You have to spend time with them, read their books, know their work.”
With fewer artists to represent, and a four-year history of familiarizing themselves with the tastes of collectors, they believe they can accomplish nearly as much in less time. “We’ve become clearer on what we’re doing,” Meadows said. “We’ll represent the ones we choose better. We’re getting to that point of, this is what we really want to do.”
Casebeer sees the addition of the studio as an invaluable educational tool. “A lot of times you can see art in a gallery and you don’t connect the act of making the art with what you’re seeing,” he said. “They’re going to put in front of you the making of it, so there’s a visceral quality of making the work along with the finished product.”
“We want to demystify it. We want it to be a bridge: Oh, this is how you made it, and this is how it comes out,'” Harvey said. “We’re hoping people will come watch us work, learn about the materials, the processes. So we’ll have a greater knowledge base.”
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