Greenwich House Pottery Archive Transferred to the Smithsonian Archives of American Art
Caption: Ruth Duckworth at Greenwich House Pottery in the studio, (1975).
Greenwich House Pottery is proud to announce that its archive has been accepted for inclusion in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, the foremost research center dedicated to visual arts in the United States of America. Spanning 115+ years of rich history, the records will be preserved, digitized, and made available at the Archives’ Washington, DC headquarters.
The archive is a treasure trove of artist files, class schedules, letters, exhibition records, workshop flyers, artist interviews and photographs from the Pottery’s last hundred years. It documents a broad swath of the American ceramics world, featuring prolific and influential artists such as such as Kathy Butterly, Simone Leigh, Toshiko Takaezu, Kitaoji Rosanjin, Peter Voulkos, and Betty Woodman.
“Since our founding days, we have been attuned to the unparalleled contributions of American arts organizations to advancing the medium of ceramics,” explained Anne Helmreich, Director of the Archives of American Art, “and we are thrilled to continue to share these vital stories of creativity with the world.”
“We are proud to have Greenwich House Pottery’s place in American art recognized,” said Fabio Fernández, Director of Greenwich House Pottery, a historic ceramics center founded in Greenwich Village in 1909. “For well over a century, Greenwich House Pottery has served as a one-of-a-kind cultural center not only for New York City’s ceramics community, but the international art world. With this archive, we are memorializing our legacy while fostering a greater understanding of the institution’s prominent role in American art history.”
The collection is available for viewing online at: https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/greenwich-house-pottery-records-22339.
About Greenwich House Pottery
Home to the largest faculty and student body of any ceramic arts institution in New York City, Greenwich House Pottery serves as a hub for working and emerging artists of all skill levels, offering a wide range of handbuilding, wheelthrowing, and slipcasting classes, a gallery space, artist residency program, and at two locations in Manhattan. Greenwich House Pottery is a part of Greenwich House, a non-profit settlement house that responds to the needs of Greenwich Village and lower Manhattan communities through arts and education programs, and health and human services fostering wellness, creativity, and connection. For more information, visit greenwichhousepottery.org.
About the Archives of American Art
Founded in 1954, the Archives of American Art fosters advanced research through the accumulation and preservation of primary sources, unequaled in historical depth and breadth, that document more than two hundred years of our nation’s artists and art communities. The Archives provides access to these materials through its reading room in Washington, D.C., exhibitions, and publications, including the Archives of American Art Journal, the longest-running scholarly journal in the field of American art. An international leader in the digitizing of archival collections, the Archives makes more than three million digital images freely available online. The Archives’ oral history collection includes more than 2,600 audio interviews, the largest accumulation of in-depth, first-person accounts of the American art world. For more information, visit the Archives website at www.aaa.si.edu.