The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
Chris Alveshere almost went into hospitality management. I, for one, am thrilled he’s not a manager at a hotel or seasonal resort. We met while at a summer workshop in 2024 at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. I was learning the quiet contemplative pinching method of artist Paul S. Briggs, while around the corner, Chris Alveshere was setting off an explosion of color. He taught a high school ceramics workshop and was a summer resident. This color extravaganza expressed itself in a meticulous array of wheel-thrown and slab-built forms, with Alveshere utilizing hand-colored cone-10 porcelain for all his pieces. Mixing Mason and US Pigment stains directly into porcelain changes the clay body into color itself. Alveshere is a dynamo; his energy feels boundless.
During his four-week summer stint at Alfred, he was mixing his own porcelain, making 3D-printed molds in the Fab Lab, teaching teens, and throwing and assembling sculptures and functional ware. In everyday life, he co-owns a colored-grog business and community studio in Missoula, Montana; teaches classes; maintains an independent studio practice; hikes or skis depending on the season; and occasionally gets a weekend away to see electronic dance music while sipping cocktails with friends. The guy also presented on a panel with Lisa Orr and Lindsay Rogers about rocket kilns at the 2025 National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) conference, while his Flecks + Specks (www.flecksandspecks.com) booth gained exposure in the Exhibition Hall (one of his businesses with former undergraduate professor Kelli Sinner), and also participated in a pop-up show one evening, arriving with a hundred pots and leaving with only four. This is Chris Alveshere, color-slinging, grog-making, toy-collecting, entrepreneurial firecracker.
Transforming Traditions—From Brown Town to Candy Land
Alveshere shifted majors after his first year as an undergraduate from hospitality management to fine art and graduated from Minnesota State University at Moorhead with a double major: a BA in ceramics and a BFA in art education in the spring of 2015. He taught in a couple of high schools before heading to Alfred for graduate school in 2018. He arrived with a brown portfolio, cleverly labeled “Brown Town” by faculty John Gill. Coming from the world of atmospheric firing, where pottery is beautifully formed, curves and facets flash from wood, soda, and salt; ash glistens; atmospheric glass melts; and hues of gray, ochre, iron, and umber dance. He tells me about his love of wadding, packing, and stacking, and imagining the flame’s path inside a kiln. This rigorous intensity within the atmospheric process translates into what he’s doing now: mixing his own colored porcelains, creating grog from trimmings that he fires and mills, throwing, and building multiple pieces with meticulous attention to detail. Trimming, sponging, and sanding are staples of his technique. He states, “I consider myself a trimmer, not a thrower, with 30% throwing and probably 70% trimming and assembly.”
True to the tradition of atmospheric firing, he lines the inside of pots with glaze and leaves the outsides as bright, pure, and colorful clay. Alveshere began experimenting at Alfred with mixing Mason stains into porcelain and graduated with his MFA in the spring of 2020. Today, all of Alveshere’s work is cone-10 colored porcelain fired in oxidation. Studying Josef Albers, Mark Rothko, and Sol Lewitt helped him connect color theory to content, while themes emerged around picnics, candy, clothing, toys, and holidays. Witnessing his current pageant of color, it is hard for me to imagine he came from Brown Town.
“The Chris Pot” Emerges in Grad School
Vulnerability, persistence, and an intense work ethic are some of the keys in Alveshere’s pocket. As an undergraduate with an interest in wood and salt that other students didn’t share, he often filled entire kilns by himself. He built a small, cross-draft soda kiln for the Moorhead program, exposing him to even more forms. Technically, Alveshere was a master craftsperson, skilled at throwing, trimming, and functionality. He understood the relationship a lip needed to have with a foot, how a gallery worked to hold a lid, and the angles and curves of pots. His prolific creation is what carried him through his first year of graduate school.
During critiques, he kept being asked, “Where are you in this work?” Linda Sikora, John Gill, and Matt Kelleher pressed him critique after critique to explore the bright and cheerful self whom they saw. Wearing colorful tie-dye t-shirts, he’d go to Rochester to joyfully smash around in a mosh pit. He made tons of pots, but it wasn’t until a red jar emerged that Linda Sikora said, “This is a Chris pot. This is yours, this has a voice, this has an opinion, this has a style. This has intentional decisions.” He kept making and experimenting with different firing temperatures, glazes, and their application. He was self-critical and Linda Sikora told him, “You are never going to get anywhere with your work if you don’t stop being so pejorative.” He looked up the word and immediately set out to understand why he was so hard on himself. “I didn’t have any confidence in the work, and there was no content in wood-fired work for me . . . I thought to myself, ‘Watch this,’ and I made a whole crit full of colored porcelain. I made the faculty use the juicers, and we drank fresh citrus juice during the crit. I hid food, candy, and produce in all the pots, and everyone participated in a scavenger hunt. They had to test every lid type; there were purposeful limits, confidence, and passion, and although it came from a place of spite, it was the best critique of my career, and then Covid hit two weeks later.” He finished graduate school from his apartment in lockdown, traumatized but still playing, as he tells me, “I created a thesis exhibition made with Shrinky Dinks.”
Monthly Method: Colored Porcelain
by Erin Shafkind
I visited Chris Alveshere at his Missoula studio, Workroom Montana, which he operates with Kelli Sinner. They teach classes, host workshops, provide studio space to local ceramic artists, have their own studios, and run their grog business, Flecks + Specks out of the space.
Chris Alveshere mixes his own cone-10 porcelain. For a batch, he adds 4% dry stain to a 5000-gram batch for easy math. While in the slip state, he blunges in stain with a mixing paddle on a drill. He recommends not going above 10% with stain as it’s wasteful, and he shared about stains, “they can become oversaturated, and then will start to change the maturity temperature of your clay.” You can cut a pre-mixed commercial clay body into small cubes, allow them to dry, and rehydrate them into a wet slip before mixing in stain (A). Be sure to work in a well-ventilated area and wear a respirator.
Sieve the blunged colored clay (B) and spread it onto a plaster slab to firm up (C). Wedge the clay as it sets up (D), being careful to prevent the clay on the plaster slab from drying too much.
Alveshere recommends doing line-blend tests with dry clay, so water weight doesn’t interfere with measuring and percentages.
The Whimsical Studio Wizard
“Everything is made from the bottom up,” he says. After throwing, press molding, and cutting slabs into multiple shapes, he begins to assemble. What some may find as a nuisance or disruption, Alveshere embraces details of the everyday and teases them into his art. Train tracks emerged in his work while living next to freight lines in his current abode in Missoula, Montana. His dishes rattling near the railroad became an inspiration. Inspired by a Rebecca Chappell workshop where she discussed giving herself lots of parts to play with, he shares a playful studio mentality and states, “If I have more, I will make more and they will be better. When I don’t have extra clay, they look starved.” Pushing the edge of play, his work brushes the line of humor and possible transgression as he exclaims, “It’s not a sex toy, it’s a dog toy!” We can also see a bouncy house, a pool inflatable, and an ewer sculpturally adrift on train tracks.
A mini playground slide is an herb stripper. A porcelain xylophone is also a set of trays where each note holds an individual serving of fried cheese sticks. The party host jogs around the pool with a silly cookie jar with chocolate drop nubs before lifting the red, clown-nose knob and serving the jar’s solo cookie. These whimsical offerings are all influenced by his vast toy collection, his love of color, and the playground of daily life around him.
Color, Form, and Fun
Imagine candy, Fisher-Price toys, and board game pieces rolled together and combined to make what he defines as ergonomic forms. These works are functional and Alveshere thinks of them as utilitarian sculpture. They are as usable as they are visually striking. He states, “I make pots for the countertop, not the cabinet.” There’s a luscious, excessive abundance and exuberance in each piece, and people collect them in multiples. At the end of my Alfred workshop, I bought three cups captivated by finding the perfect combination of colors and forms.
A foot seems tippy, and yet it’s stable—it appears to be an orangy-red suction cup or a toy wheel on its side. Above it sits a sky-blue, expanded-ring sippy cup with light lemon yellow nubs on the lowest ring. Is it a figurine or a cup? A toy or a cartoon character? In another piece, we see the figure with slightly different forms. Here, the foot is a deep forest green, the marshmallow-pink hourglass with a broader top section has bits of colored grog, another signature of Alveshere, and a distinctive cobalt-blue nub nose with a sharply defined blue line in the lower half of the cup. In a third piece, we see a midnight blue foot, a groggy lime green midsection, and a sassy orange lid with a button on top. The lime green section has two deep orange eyes. These nubs, lines, and colored grog bits are all part of the vocabulary Alveshere developed in his graduate program at Alfred, through plenty of sweat, tears, and literal juicing of the sourness he felt after each critique, as he struggled to find the threads of joy inside his soul. The inset lines are reminiscent of the border in the sole of a Vans shoe. The nubs can be Skittles or protrusions from childhood toys. He’s a sucker for vintage pull toys and Vans, and has amassed a large collection of both.
Chris Alveshere is playing the games of Life, Sorry!, and Candy Land, and like these board games, he’s spinning the plastic wheel, bringing pull toys along, smashing candy into every nook and cranny, connecting content to form. He commits with a hundred-and-ten-percent mixture of humor, pop, and technical prowess, inviting us to play along with him.
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The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
Chris Alveshere almost went into hospitality management. I, for one, am thrilled he’s not a manager at a hotel or seasonal resort. We met while at a summer workshop in 2024 at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. I was learning the quiet contemplative pinching method of artist Paul S. Briggs, while around the corner, Chris Alveshere was setting off an explosion of color. He taught a high school ceramics workshop and was a summer resident. This color extravaganza expressed itself in a meticulous array of wheel-thrown and slab-built forms, with Alveshere utilizing hand-colored cone-10 porcelain for all his pieces. Mixing Mason and US Pigment stains directly into porcelain changes the clay body into color itself. Alveshere is a dynamo; his energy feels boundless.
During his four-week summer stint at Alfred, he was mixing his own porcelain, making 3D-printed molds in the Fab Lab, teaching teens, and throwing and assembling sculptures and functional ware. In everyday life, he co-owns a colored-grog business and community studio in Missoula, Montana; teaches classes; maintains an independent studio practice; hikes or skis depending on the season; and occasionally gets a weekend away to see electronic dance music while sipping cocktails with friends. The guy also presented on a panel with Lisa Orr and Lindsay Rogers about rocket kilns at the 2025 National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) conference, while his Flecks + Specks (www.flecksandspecks.com) booth gained exposure in the Exhibition Hall (one of his businesses with former undergraduate professor Kelli Sinner), and also participated in a pop-up show one evening, arriving with a hundred pots and leaving with only four. This is Chris Alveshere, color-slinging, grog-making, toy-collecting, entrepreneurial firecracker.
Transforming Traditions—From Brown Town to Candy Land
Alveshere shifted majors after his first year as an undergraduate from hospitality management to fine art and graduated from Minnesota State University at Moorhead with a double major: a BA in ceramics and a BFA in art education in the spring of 2015. He taught in a couple of high schools before heading to Alfred for graduate school in 2018. He arrived with a brown portfolio, cleverly labeled “Brown Town” by faculty John Gill. Coming from the world of atmospheric firing, where pottery is beautifully formed, curves and facets flash from wood, soda, and salt; ash glistens; atmospheric glass melts; and hues of gray, ochre, iron, and umber dance. He tells me about his love of wadding, packing, and stacking, and imagining the flame’s path inside a kiln. This rigorous intensity within the atmospheric process translates into what he’s doing now: mixing his own colored porcelains, creating grog from trimmings that he fires and mills, throwing, and building multiple pieces with meticulous attention to detail. Trimming, sponging, and sanding are staples of his technique. He states, “I consider myself a trimmer, not a thrower, with 30% throwing and probably 70% trimming and assembly.”
True to the tradition of atmospheric firing, he lines the inside of pots with glaze and leaves the outsides as bright, pure, and colorful clay. Alveshere began experimenting at Alfred with mixing Mason stains into porcelain and graduated with his MFA in the spring of 2020. Today, all of Alveshere’s work is cone-10 colored porcelain fired in oxidation. Studying Josef Albers, Mark Rothko, and Sol Lewitt helped him connect color theory to content, while themes emerged around picnics, candy, clothing, toys, and holidays. Witnessing his current pageant of color, it is hard for me to imagine he came from Brown Town.
“The Chris Pot” Emerges in Grad School
Vulnerability, persistence, and an intense work ethic are some of the keys in Alveshere’s pocket. As an undergraduate with an interest in wood and salt that other students didn’t share, he often filled entire kilns by himself. He built a small, cross-draft soda kiln for the Moorhead program, exposing him to even more forms. Technically, Alveshere was a master craftsperson, skilled at throwing, trimming, and functionality. He understood the relationship a lip needed to have with a foot, how a gallery worked to hold a lid, and the angles and curves of pots. His prolific creation is what carried him through his first year of graduate school.
During critiques, he kept being asked, “Where are you in this work?” Linda Sikora, John Gill, and Matt Kelleher pressed him critique after critique to explore the bright and cheerful self whom they saw. Wearing colorful tie-dye t-shirts, he’d go to Rochester to joyfully smash around in a mosh pit. He made tons of pots, but it wasn’t until a red jar emerged that Linda Sikora said, “This is a Chris pot. This is yours, this has a voice, this has an opinion, this has a style. This has intentional decisions.” He kept making and experimenting with different firing temperatures, glazes, and their application. He was self-critical and Linda Sikora told him, “You are never going to get anywhere with your work if you don’t stop being so pejorative.” He looked up the word and immediately set out to understand why he was so hard on himself. “I didn’t have any confidence in the work, and there was no content in wood-fired work for me . . . I thought to myself, ‘Watch this,’ and I made a whole crit full of colored porcelain. I made the faculty use the juicers, and we drank fresh citrus juice during the crit. I hid food, candy, and produce in all the pots, and everyone participated in a scavenger hunt. They had to test every lid type; there were purposeful limits, confidence, and passion, and although it came from a place of spite, it was the best critique of my career, and then Covid hit two weeks later.” He finished graduate school from his apartment in lockdown, traumatized but still playing, as he tells me, “I created a thesis exhibition made with Shrinky Dinks.”
Monthly Method: Colored Porcelain
by Erin Shafkind
I visited Chris Alveshere at his Missoula studio, Workroom Montana, which he operates with Kelli Sinner. They teach classes, host workshops, provide studio space to local ceramic artists, have their own studios, and run their grog business, Flecks + Specks out of the space.
Chris Alveshere mixes his own cone-10 porcelain. For a batch, he adds 4% dry stain to a 5000-gram batch for easy math. While in the slip state, he blunges in stain with a mixing paddle on a drill. He recommends not going above 10% with stain as it’s wasteful, and he shared about stains, “they can become oversaturated, and then will start to change the maturity temperature of your clay.” You can cut a pre-mixed commercial clay body into small cubes, allow them to dry, and rehydrate them into a wet slip before mixing in stain (A). Be sure to work in a well-ventilated area and wear a respirator.
Sieve the blunged colored clay (B) and spread it onto a plaster slab to firm up (C). Wedge the clay as it sets up (D), being careful to prevent the clay on the plaster slab from drying too much.
Alveshere recommends doing line-blend tests with dry clay, so water weight doesn’t interfere with measuring and percentages.
The Whimsical Studio Wizard
“Everything is made from the bottom up,” he says. After throwing, press molding, and cutting slabs into multiple shapes, he begins to assemble. What some may find as a nuisance or disruption, Alveshere embraces details of the everyday and teases them into his art. Train tracks emerged in his work while living next to freight lines in his current abode in Missoula, Montana. His dishes rattling near the railroad became an inspiration. Inspired by a Rebecca Chappell workshop where she discussed giving herself lots of parts to play with, he shares a playful studio mentality and states, “If I have more, I will make more and they will be better. When I don’t have extra clay, they look starved.” Pushing the edge of play, his work brushes the line of humor and possible transgression as he exclaims, “It’s not a sex toy, it’s a dog toy!” We can also see a bouncy house, a pool inflatable, and an ewer sculpturally adrift on train tracks.
A mini playground slide is an herb stripper. A porcelain xylophone is also a set of trays where each note holds an individual serving of fried cheese sticks. The party host jogs around the pool with a silly cookie jar with chocolate drop nubs before lifting the red, clown-nose knob and serving the jar’s solo cookie. These whimsical offerings are all influenced by his vast toy collection, his love of color, and the playground of daily life around him.
Color, Form, and Fun
Imagine candy, Fisher-Price toys, and board game pieces rolled together and combined to make what he defines as ergonomic forms. These works are functional and Alveshere thinks of them as utilitarian sculpture. They are as usable as they are visually striking. He states, “I make pots for the countertop, not the cabinet.” There’s a luscious, excessive abundance and exuberance in each piece, and people collect them in multiples. At the end of my Alfred workshop, I bought three cups captivated by finding the perfect combination of colors and forms.
A foot seems tippy, and yet it’s stable—it appears to be an orangy-red suction cup or a toy wheel on its side. Above it sits a sky-blue, expanded-ring sippy cup with light lemon yellow nubs on the lowest ring. Is it a figurine or a cup? A toy or a cartoon character? In another piece, we see the figure with slightly different forms. Here, the foot is a deep forest green, the marshmallow-pink hourglass with a broader top section has bits of colored grog, another signature of Alveshere, and a distinctive cobalt-blue nub nose with a sharply defined blue line in the lower half of the cup. In a third piece, we see a midnight blue foot, a groggy lime green midsection, and a sassy orange lid with a button on top. The lime green section has two deep orange eyes. These nubs, lines, and colored grog bits are all part of the vocabulary Alveshere developed in his graduate program at Alfred, through plenty of sweat, tears, and literal juicing of the sourness he felt after each critique, as he struggled to find the threads of joy inside his soul. The inset lines are reminiscent of the border in the sole of a Vans shoe. The nubs can be Skittles or protrusions from childhood toys. He’s a sucker for vintage pull toys and Vans, and has amassed a large collection of both.
Chris Alveshere is playing the games of Life, Sorry!, and Candy Land, and like these board games, he’s spinning the plastic wheel, bringing pull toys along, smashing candy into every nook and cranny, connecting content to form. He commits with a hundred-and-ten-percent mixture of humor, pop, and technical prowess, inviting us to play along with him.
Learn more about Chris Alveshere at www.chrisalveshere.com, and on Instagram @chriscookskilns.
the author Erin Shafkind is an artist and educator living in Seattle, Washington. To learn more, visit www.erinshafkind.com and Instagram @eshaffy.
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