With its start as a pop-up, Ceramics School has expanded to host students, resident artists, and nearly 50 member artists in a unique multi-purpose space.
Ceramics School is a community ceramics studio and artist residency located in a 102-year-old storefront and row house in Hamtramck, Michigan, an independent city within Detroit. Hamtramck is the most densely populated city in Michigan, known as “the world in two square miles,” and has been home to immigrant communities since its incorporation in 1922. Our studio is located on Carpenter Avenue, the northern boundary of Hamtramck, tucked between a tire shop, a Bengali pizza spot, and a dive bar. It is also near so many incredible visual artists, musicians, thespians, puppeteers, writers, gardeners, activists, educators, and so on who are doing amazing things on both sides of the Hamtramck-Detroit border. We sometimes refer to our extended neighborhood as the Carpenter Creative Corridor, though it should be noted that the whole of Detroit is infused with deeply passionate, resourceful, and creative people.
Our storefront was originally built as a billiards hall and ran for many years as a radiator repair shop before it was boarded up in the 90s and sat as a dirty garage until we became its stewards in 2017. The storefront now hosts the studio where members, students, and residents work and play. Our yard holds gardens, picnic tables, and our once-mobile anagama wood kiln. The storefront is attached to a row house, the basement of which is our glaze lab, clay storage, and wood shop, as well as the underground connection to the first-floor apartment. This is our artist residency housing, complete with a mosaic shower and an eclectic ceramics collection on the kitchen shelves. The second and third floor of the house is where we, Henry Crissman and Virginia Torrence, live.
How We Work
We are the co-founders and directors of Ceramics School, and though we are collaborators in all aspects of it, Virginia manages communications and bookkeeping, while Henry is the primary builder and fixer of stuff. We support ourselves with the school, ceramics sales, and adjunct teaching. The smallness and simplicity of the studio make it possible for us to manage it all without employees, as well as to maintain our personal art practices. Its low overhead has allowed us freedom in our programming, economic resilience, and a sense that we’ll be able to joyfully maintain this moving forward, should luck allow.
We co-teach all of our classes, which we take applications for, offer scholarships for, and advertise with silly commercials on Instagram. We have roughly 50 members, the majority of whom were students who decided to stay on after taking a class. Our members and students are welcome to work in the studio from 8am to midnight every day, our resident artists have 24-hour access, and at any given moment there is typically one or more people in there seeing what happens when hands, hearts, and minds commune with and through clay. Our residents bring incredible energy and fresh perspectives that elevate and challenge the studio. Our membership is a diverse, queer, and progressive bunch composed of folks making ceramics for any number of reasons: as part of their professional work as artists, as a personal exploration, as therapy, for friendship, as a side hustle, etc. We work to maintain a safe, supportive, critical, and creative space that celebrates and empowers our community.
In our classes, we offer as much information as we can muster about materials and processes so that our students can make informed decisions for themselves about what they want to make and how they’d like to make it. Our classes have ranged from wheel throwing and wood firing, to seasonal feasts on handmade wares and topical sculpture classes, such as a fountain class that ended in an open-call exhibition of more than twenty working fountains in our garden.
Backstory
We met in the high school lunch line in Midland, Michigan, where we both grew up. We started dating and making ceramics in art class and moved to Detroit in 2008 to attend the College for Creative Studies (CCS). Coming of age and finding ourselves as young artists in Detroit was an incredible gift. Artists like Tyree Guyton and Scott Hocking reimagined the city’s detritus as material charged with its complicated history, and dynamic arts organizations like Popps Packing and Power House Productions exemplified how art can extend beyond the studio, and into your life, home, and community. Our friend and mentor Ken Shenstone with his giant wood kiln in Albion, taught us about the potential of the studio as a temple whose beauty honors the activities it facilitates. Summers at Oxbow School of Art and Artists’ Residency as fellowship students (Henry in 2010 and Virginia in 2012) kindled our desire for alternative art worlds.
In the fall of 2010, we moved into Fortress Studios in Detroit’s North End Neighborhood, built our first wood kiln, and started imagining how ceramics could be relevant and radical in this place. In 2013, we moved to Alfred, New York, to do our MFAs with the intention of learning everything we could and bringing it back to Detroit. Alfred was fabulous and we moved back and into an apartment in Hamtramck in 2016. Henry was adjunct teaching at local colleges, Virginia was working at a gallery, and we were scraping by. In 2017, we were getting married and our parents offered to help us make a down payment and co-sign on a mortgage, and we purchased the building that August for $128,000. If not for our privilege, their incredible generosity, and the renovation assistance of Henry’s brother-in-law Drew, there would be no Ceramics School.
Ceramics School’s Beginning
With encouragement from our friends and mentors, Faina Lerman and Graem Whyte at Popps Packing, Ceramics School started as a pop-up in their storefront down the street in the summer of 2019. We built a website and tables, borrowed wheels, and schlepped ceramics back and forth in our car to the kiln in our garage. It was an incredible summer and it became immediately clear that we needed to find a way to make Ceramics School a permanent fixture.
That fall we managed to rezone our building and raised $35,000 to renovate the storefront thanks to more than 300 donors on Kickstarter. We got that money on January 1, 2020, started the renovation, and you know what happened next. Between bouts of crippling existential dread, we spent the early pandemic building the space where we hoped we’d be able to gather in again someday. In February of 2021, pre-Covid vaccine, we opened our membership and residency with an online sign-up form limiting the studio to three people at a time and slowly emerged into this strange new world. Over the past three years, our studio has blossomed into an incredible ecosystem and community of makers, friends, and visionaries.
What Now
Ceramics School is an exploration of ceramics as a catalyst for more holistic ways of living. It was born from the question of what an affordable contemporary art school centered around ceramics could be—how it might extend access to the medium in our community, and cultivate more expansive and critical notions of value by celebrating creativity and exploration over materialistic consumerism. Its scale and structure are defined by the unique architecture of our building, it’s enabled by our manageable mortgage, and its pedagogy is brought to life by our community. As our business, home, creative practice, and social life, Ceramics School has become our actual alternate reality, and we’re so deeply thankful to be immersed in it. Looking forward, we are going to continue hosting our seasonal classes here, teaching summer and fall wood-firing workshops at Oxbow School of Art, and starting our artist residency back up this spring after a pause for now-finished renovations. You can learn more about us and our residency on our website, www.ceramicsschool.com.
the authors Henry JH Crissman and Virginia Rose Torrence are artists and educators who live in Hamtramck, Michigan, where they founded and co-direct Ceramics School, a community studio and artist residency. Both earned their BFAs at the College for Creative Studies (CCS) in Detroit, Michigan, and their MFAs at Alfred University in Alfred, New York. Henry also teaches ceramics as an adjunct in the studio arts and crafts department at CCS.
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With its start as a pop-up, Ceramics School has expanded to host students, resident artists, and nearly 50 member artists in a unique multi-purpose space.
Ceramics School is a community ceramics studio and artist residency located in a 102-year-old storefront and row house in Hamtramck, Michigan, an independent city within Detroit. Hamtramck is the most densely populated city in Michigan, known as “the world in two square miles,” and has been home to immigrant communities since its incorporation in 1922. Our studio is located on Carpenter Avenue, the northern boundary of Hamtramck, tucked between a tire shop, a Bengali pizza spot, and a dive bar. It is also near so many incredible visual artists, musicians, thespians, puppeteers, writers, gardeners, activists, educators, and so on who are doing amazing things on both sides of the Hamtramck-Detroit border. We sometimes refer to our extended neighborhood as the Carpenter Creative Corridor, though it should be noted that the whole of Detroit is infused with deeply passionate, resourceful, and creative people.
Our storefront was originally built as a billiards hall and ran for many years as a radiator repair shop before it was boarded up in the 90s and sat as a dirty garage until we became its stewards in 2017. The storefront now hosts the studio where members, students, and residents work and play. Our yard holds gardens, picnic tables, and our once-mobile anagama wood kiln. The storefront is attached to a row house, the basement of which is our glaze lab, clay storage, and wood shop, as well as the underground connection to the first-floor apartment. This is our artist residency housing, complete with a mosaic shower and an eclectic ceramics collection on the kitchen shelves. The second and third floor of the house is where we, Henry Crissman and Virginia Torrence, live.
How We Work
We are the co-founders and directors of Ceramics School, and though we are collaborators in all aspects of it, Virginia manages communications and bookkeeping, while Henry is the primary builder and fixer of stuff. We support ourselves with the school, ceramics sales, and adjunct teaching. The smallness and simplicity of the studio make it possible for us to manage it all without employees, as well as to maintain our personal art practices. Its low overhead has allowed us freedom in our programming, economic resilience, and a sense that we’ll be able to joyfully maintain this moving forward, should luck allow.
We co-teach all of our classes, which we take applications for, offer scholarships for, and advertise with silly commercials on Instagram. We have roughly 50 members, the majority of whom were students who decided to stay on after taking a class. Our members and students are welcome to work in the studio from 8am to midnight every day, our resident artists have 24-hour access, and at any given moment there is typically one or more people in there seeing what happens when hands, hearts, and minds commune with and through clay. Our residents bring incredible energy and fresh perspectives that elevate and challenge the studio. Our membership is a diverse, queer, and progressive bunch composed of folks making ceramics for any number of reasons: as part of their professional work as artists, as a personal exploration, as therapy, for friendship, as a side hustle, etc. We work to maintain a safe, supportive, critical, and creative space that celebrates and empowers our community.
In our classes, we offer as much information as we can muster about materials and processes so that our students can make informed decisions for themselves about what they want to make and how they’d like to make it. Our classes have ranged from wheel throwing and wood firing, to seasonal feasts on handmade wares and topical sculpture classes, such as a fountain class that ended in an open-call exhibition of more than twenty working fountains in our garden.
Backstory
We met in the high school lunch line in Midland, Michigan, where we both grew up. We started dating and making ceramics in art class and moved to Detroit in 2008 to attend the College for Creative Studies (CCS). Coming of age and finding ourselves as young artists in Detroit was an incredible gift. Artists like Tyree Guyton and Scott Hocking reimagined the city’s detritus as material charged with its complicated history, and dynamic arts organizations like Popps Packing and Power House Productions exemplified how art can extend beyond the studio, and into your life, home, and community. Our friend and mentor Ken Shenstone with his giant wood kiln in Albion, taught us about the potential of the studio as a temple whose beauty honors the activities it facilitates. Summers at Oxbow School of Art and Artists’ Residency as fellowship students (Henry in 2010 and Virginia in 2012) kindled our desire for alternative art worlds.
In the fall of 2010, we moved into Fortress Studios in Detroit’s North End Neighborhood, built our first wood kiln, and started imagining how ceramics could be relevant and radical in this place. In 2013, we moved to Alfred, New York, to do our MFAs with the intention of learning everything we could and bringing it back to Detroit. Alfred was fabulous and we moved back and into an apartment in Hamtramck in 2016. Henry was adjunct teaching at local colleges, Virginia was working at a gallery, and we were scraping by. In 2017, we were getting married and our parents offered to help us make a down payment and co-sign on a mortgage, and we purchased the building that August for $128,000. If not for our privilege, their incredible generosity, and the renovation assistance of Henry’s brother-in-law Drew, there would be no Ceramics School.
Ceramics School’s Beginning
With encouragement from our friends and mentors, Faina Lerman and Graem Whyte at Popps Packing, Ceramics School started as a pop-up in their storefront down the street in the summer of 2019. We built a website and tables, borrowed wheels, and schlepped ceramics back and forth in our car to the kiln in our garage. It was an incredible summer and it became immediately clear that we needed to find a way to make Ceramics School a permanent fixture.
That fall we managed to rezone our building and raised $35,000 to renovate the storefront thanks to more than 300 donors on Kickstarter. We got that money on January 1, 2020, started the renovation, and you know what happened next. Between bouts of crippling existential dread, we spent the early pandemic building the space where we hoped we’d be able to gather in again someday. In February of 2021, pre-Covid vaccine, we opened our membership and residency with an online sign-up form limiting the studio to three people at a time and slowly emerged into this strange new world. Over the past three years, our studio has blossomed into an incredible ecosystem and community of makers, friends, and visionaries.
What Now
Ceramics School is an exploration of ceramics as a catalyst for more holistic ways of living. It was born from the question of what an affordable contemporary art school centered around ceramics could be—how it might extend access to the medium in our community, and cultivate more expansive and critical notions of value by celebrating creativity and exploration over materialistic consumerism. Its scale and structure are defined by the unique architecture of our building, it’s enabled by our manageable mortgage, and its pedagogy is brought to life by our community. As our business, home, creative practice, and social life, Ceramics School has become our actual alternate reality, and we’re so deeply thankful to be immersed in it. Looking forward, we are going to continue hosting our seasonal classes here, teaching summer and fall wood-firing workshops at Oxbow School of Art, and starting our artist residency back up this spring after a pause for now-finished renovations. You can learn more about us and our residency on our website, www.ceramicsschool.com.
the authors Henry JH Crissman and Virginia Rose Torrence are artists and educators who live in Hamtramck, Michigan, where they founded and co-direct Ceramics School, a community studio and artist residency. Both earned their BFAs at the College for Creative Studies (CCS) in Detroit, Michigan, and their MFAs at Alfred University in Alfred, New York. Henry also teaches ceramics as an adjunct in the studio arts and crafts department at CCS.
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