American Pottery Festival
September 5 – 7, 2025
Main & Galusha Galleries
Opening Night Party: Friday, September 5
Work Live Online: Saturday, September 6, 10 am CT
Join us for the 27th Annual American Pottery Festival (APF), September 5 – 7, 2025! Our annual fundraiser brings together ceramic artists from across the United States, showcasing the best in the field. Experience a stunning variety of creative processes, techniques, forms, and surfaces. The event kicks off with our Opening Night Party on Friday, September 5, 2025!
Your contributions to APF directly support NCC’s mission to advance the ceramic arts through education, exhibitions, scholarships, and grant programs. This festival serves as a thoughtfully curated platform for makers, clay enthusiasts, learners, collectors, and the curious to connect, create, and be inspired.
Each year, NCC prioritizes diversity when inviting artists, ensuring a wide representation of lived experiences and perspectives. The 2025 festival will feature an extraordinary lineup of artists whose work highlights a vast range of techniques, aesthetics, and materials. Their unique journeys to a career in ceramics will inspire participants of all backgrounds.
The weekend will offer engaging opportunities to connect with artists through artist talks, workshops, demonstrations, and casual gallery chats. Whether you’re a student, a collector, or a fellow maker, you’ll find valuable learning experiences throughout the event. Scholarships are available for all demonstrations and workshops, making them accessible to everyone.
About the Artists
Clarice Allgood, Milo Berezin, Birdie Boone, Sam Briegel, Wesley Brown, Marissa Childers, Mike Cinelli, Adrienne Eliades, Maddie Fowler, Yoshi Fujii, Delvin M. Goode, Ariana Heinzman, Stephen Heywood, Heesoo Lee, Forrest Lesch-Middelton, Ernest Miller, Kristy Moreno, Sang Joon Park, Colleen Riley, Josh Scott, Mark Shapiro, Sam Taylor, Lars Voltz, and Kate Waltman.
Clarice Allgood
Allgood’s pots are meant to enrich what she calls “quiet acts of self-reliance”: They are watering cans for gardening, bowls for knitting, utensils for cooking, bookends to organize reading.
Milo Berezin
Berezin illustrates his pots inside and out with translucent layers of painted and carved images of plants and animals, juxtaposed with text that may be playful, vulnerable, philosophical, or encouraging.
Birdie Boone
Birdie Boone is a studio potter and independent ceramics educator. Her work is subtle, sensory, and expressive–made for daily use and contemplation.
Sam Briegel
Briegel makes functional porcelain pieces inspired by clothing and the garment-making process. Each piece is infused with multiple textures and patterns from their personal wardrobe and items that hold meaning, whether because of their comfort, beauty, or the memories they evoke.
Wesley Brown
Brown is a ceramic artist who creates both monumental sculptures and utilitarian vessels to convey both struggle and triumph through cracked surfaces, striking silhouettes, and bold compositions.
Marissa Childers
Childers’ work explores moments of connection and intimacy while celebrating femininity and craft found within domestic spaces. She is often inspired by things society deems a craft or feminine such as, quilting, sewing, and decoration.
Mike Cinelli
Cinelli seeks to create relics from a fictional future that has yet to occur. He looks to combine the Greek tradition of hero tales on pottery with modern forms of narrative, using comic books and pulp science fiction as the contemporary frame work for his imagery.
Adrienne Eliades
Highly patterned yet abstract surfaces combine negative and positive space, transparency and color to form new meanings left open to viewer interpretation. Inspired by confetti, candy and games, Eliades’ pattern designs note marks of celebration that invoke an attitude of enjoyment for the present moment.
Maddie Fowler
Fowler seeks to make direct forms that allow for layers of decoration. The surfaces of the vessels they make represent a visual intersection of urban and rural built environments.
Yoshi Fujii
“I am interested in the eclectic inclusions of East/West onto utilitarian objects in celebration of nourishing containment by showing the appreciation of production practice with thoughtful designs and keen craftsmanship.”
Delvin M. Goode
Goode combines his 20 years of mixed media experience with functional pottery to create whimsical, funny, and unique works of art.
Ariana Heinzman
Heinzman’s work represents the dueling desires of succumbing to nature and controlling it. However distressing these conflicting desires can be, the work honors the beauty of this life with joyful patterns and forms that celebrate nature and human ingenuity.
Stephen Heywood
Heywood’s work is influenced by architectural structures including factories, silos, barns, and water towers. His vessels are often composed of many wheel-thrown and handbuilt parts and take their shape as small functional sculpture.
Heesoo Lee
Heesoo Lee’s sculptural vessels are created from porcelain and, after construction, are painted with layer upon layer of underglaze. Her painting medium of pigmented clay is so light, that it often requires thirty or more layers to achieve the magnificent depth and realism for which she has become renowned.
Forrest Lesch-Middelton
His body of work, inspired by the traditions of Middle Eastern ceramics, is comprised of functional pottery that celebrates and contrasts the history of those ancient civilizations with the contemporary global political climate and its impact in the region.
Ernest Miller
“I’m drawn to the interaction of the built environment subdued by the natural world, for example, weathered paint, an aging barn, or a well-used farm implement. In my process using slips and glazes, I build depth, highlight edges, and create patterns, all allowing for perceptions of depth or foreground and background.”
Kristy Moreno
“By blending elements of SoCal Latinx culture with the sugary aesthetics of late 1990s girl power and a retro-futuristic approach to fashion, I build worlds in which female protagonists express their individuality, explore the world, and thrive together.”
Sang Joon Park
“My intent is to express my thoughts through my vessels, which are mostly thrown on the potter’s wheel. In some of my pieces, I use traditional Korean techniques–the inhwamun stamping/inlay technique to create floral patterns, and the gwiyal slip technique to apply expressive color slips.”
Colleen Riley
Riley’s pots celebrate the historic ceramic tradition of decorative botanical imagery by employing the patterns and textures of the Minnesota landscape—spring wildflowers, a carpet of decaying leaves in the woods, or the contours of a freshly plowed field.
Josh Scott
“I aim to make obvious what the pots intended use is and accent its form with a nuanced surface. I want the function of the piece to be at the forefront. The end goal is to have created something that does its job well.”
Mark Shapiro
“Where will my pots end up? In the landfills with the lawnmowers and TVs and silicon chips—the giant middens of our insatiable desires? No matter. I am glad just to leave a record of my own touch in this most receptive fragile and enduring material.”
Sam Taylor
Sam Taylor is a self-described “slow potter,” making pots on his foot-powered treadle wheel and handbuilding functional forms, using local materials and firing them in his wood kiln. Pottery, art, and collaboration are the main ingredients in his life.
Lars Voltz
“Drawing from experiences in the environment seeing exposed earth and geologic phenomenon, my vessels create relationships between human and nonhuman realms.”
Kate Waltman
Waltman’s pottery forms are based on historical Greek and Minoan pottery and decorated with Art Deco inspired patterns.
Catalog
Related Events
Click on the tiles below to purchase tickets for opening night, workshops, and demonstrations:
Conference Scholarships and Discounts Available
100% scholarship available to BIPOC attendees
50% scholarship available to any who identify as experiencing financial need
50% discount for K-12 through post-secondary students and educators
$10 discount for NCC Members
Pre-festival Workshops
There are a limited number of scholarships and discounts available for pre-festival workshops. Please contact nccinfo@northernclaycenter.org for information.
Artist Talks in the Galleries and Instagram Live:
Saturday, September 6
10:30 am: Sam Briegel
11:00 am: Clarice Allgood
11:30 am: Adrienne Eliades
12:30 pm: Josh Scott
1:00 pm: Sang Joon Park
1:30 pm: Del Goode
2:00 pm: Colleen Riley
2:30 pm: Mark Shapiro & Sam Taylor
3:30 pm: Milo Berezin
Sunday, September 7
10:30 am: Wes Brown
10:45 am: Lars Voltz
11:00 am: Mike Cinelli
11:15 am: Yoshi Fujii
11:30 am: Kate Waltman
12:30 pm: Kristy Moreno
12:45 pm: Marissa Childers
1:00 pm: Ariana Heinzman
1:30 pm: Ernest Miller
2:00 pm: Forrest Lesch-Middelton
Purchase Work
A selection of work from APF will be available to purchase directly from our website at 10 am CT on Saturday, September 6. If you would like to enquire about work not online, please register for our Personal Shopping Service.
The registration deadline is Wednesday, August 27, but we encourage early registration. This service is free, but a $25 ticket fee will accompany work purchased on Friday. There is no ticket fee for artworks purchased on Saturday or Sunday should they still be available at that time.
Support
Donate
Support NCC by choosing one of our Fundraising Support Tiers. Each tier includes special perks during the American Pottery Festival as a thank-you for your generosity.
Volunteer
APF would not be possible without the support of our amazing volunteers! Support APF by donating your time or supplies through the link below. Whether you are a long-time NCC volunteer or a first-timer, we would love to see you there.
Volunteering can earn you some great perks!
- All volunteers are invited to our artist, staff, and volunteer appreciation pizza party the evening of Saturday, September 6;
- 4+ hours of volunteering before the event = Free entry to the APF opening night party;
- 8+ hours of volunteering before the event = All of the above plus a full day of free demonstrations on Saturday or Sunday!
- 16+ hours of volunteering before the event = All of the above plus a very special APF Swag Bag
If you have any questions, please stop by the front desk or contact Iris Van Eeckhout.
Thank you to our 2025 APF Sponsors!
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