Current Exhibition

Gerry Williams: Craft and Conscience

June 15, 2021 – Sept. 15, 2021
M-F, 10 am – 5 pm

This special summer retrospective exhibition features the art and craft of master potter and New Hampshire artist laureate, Gerry Williams. Williams was the founder of The Studio Potter, a nonprofit, membership organization and editor of The Studio Potter Magazine, a journal about the aesthetics, technology, and history of pottery and about the personal lives of ceramic artists.

Gerry Williams was born in India in 1926, the son of American missionaries. He attended Cornell College in Iowa during the war. Influenced by Gandhi, Williams states, “There is a lot of the spirit of India in my work, though not necessarily in the form of pottery. The political effigies that I do certainly come from my India experience because I look after them not as sculpture, but as folk art. The ambiance, the dignity of crafts, the importance of manual labor, the spiritual necessity of the humanistic core of crafts all come from my background in India.”

Williams began his career in ceramics by taking classes at the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen in the early 1950s when studio pottery was gaining recognition in the United States. New Hampshire was home to several significant artists in the studio ceramics movement such as Vivika and Otto Heino, Mary and Edwin Scheier, Karl Drerup, the Baileys, Ed Keen, George and Maija Salo, Lily Hoffman and Joseph Tripetti. Gerry Williams was inspired by these master potters when he built his own studio and home in rural Dunbarton, New Hampshire.

Gerry Williams was an internationally recognized master craftsman, teacher, lecturer and author. He was not only a leader and an inspiration as a ceramic artist, but also a technical master in developing a photo resist process to lay images directly onto vessels. Also, he is noted as a master of the copper red glaze, an elusive and challenging technique to attain.

Williams’ works are a part of many public and private collections including; the Smithsonian Institution, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, The Currier Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, Fleming Museum and George Walters Smith Museum in Springfield, MA.