The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
It’s early Saturday morning in July in Manhattan. Activities abound: people are walking dogs in Central Park, locavores are headed to the farmers’ market in Union Square, and the annual Crafts Festival at Lincoln Center is getting underway. En route from New Jersey are a father, mother, teenage boy, minivan full of ceramics, and a folding table and chair. The vehicle is unpacked at Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park, and Mom and Dad help set up the table on which mugs, vases, and bowls are arranged in an arty display. The parents leave their son and he sits, hopeful of, at least, recouping the cost of gas. Then comes the rain, for the entire weekend, and the fledgling potter observes his future as a washout.
This was Jonathan Adler’s initial experience in retailing ceramics. A lesser man might have thrown in the (soggy) towel, but young Jonathan was addicted to clay. He returned to the basement studio in his home to make and fire pots, and waited by the family mailbox each month for the arrival of Ceramics Monthly and American Craft magazines. This was abnormal in the 1980s when kids’ leisure was dominated by video games and hanging out at the mall.
It could be said that the idiosyncrasy of Adler’s youth did not disappear alongside his growing pains. Almost forty years later, he continues to be an iconoclast, particularly in terms of the definition of “potter.” His eponymous exhibition, “The Mad MAD World of Jonathan Adler” (May 31, 2025–April 19, 2026), is an indication that although Adler is an entrepreneur, he is still accorded respect as a craftsman by the exhibition’s host, the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York.
The MAD exhibition purports to tell Adler’s “own story as a ceramicist-cum-designer.” This assertion is true with regard to the influences that objects and designers, within the MAD collection and outside it, have had on Adler-esque objects. Yet, Jonathan’s flying-by-the-seat-of-one’s-pants story is not contained therein and reveals a more relatable and potter-instilled saga. It starts with an epiphany when he was eleven years old.
Kid’s Stuff
Jonathan Adler grew up in rural New Jersey where his mother was a maker and a doer: “She would make quilts and incredible costumes for the school plays.” His father, apart from employment as a small-town lawyer, “spent every second of his life painting and sculpting in the basement of our house.” Adler describes this work as mostly figurative and wildly experimental. He credits his father’s willingness to try different things with his own imaginative wanderings.
When Jonathan was eleven, he was sent to Appel Farm Arts Camp, where he expected to play music, dabble with art media, and roast marshmallows with other kids. In fact, he was introduced to ceramics and “spent the rest of the summer making pots.
I was just immediately in love.” His parents were supportive of this burgeoning obsession, and for his bar mitzvah the following year they installed a pottery wheel and kiln alongside his father’s easel. However, the support had limits: “The soundtrack of my adolescence was my mother shrieking at me for tromping clay dust onto her white carpet.”
What was he making? “The output was quite impressive, to be honest. I was experimental and would do things that were almost gravity defying. I tried to make things that had the smallest possible bottom and still stand up. Or these incredibly strange soaring baskets that were reminiscent of Erté’s concoctions.” Adler accumulated a body of work, which prompted the aforementioned trip to Lincoln Center around the age of seventeen. Despite the showers, his spirit was undampened.
In 1984, Adler went to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, to study semiotics and art history. In his first year he also practiced ceramics at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) but, feeling a bit jaundiced, he quit. “Then, in my last semester of college, I took a class at RISD and fell madly back in love with clay after three years off.” He spent an additional year after college taking classes at RISD, during which he made his Chanel teapot. “At the time I was very interested in fashion, contemporary culture, and rap music, and I made a teapot inspired by Chanel handbags. It was quilted, had fringe and gilded fleur-de-lis, and the Chanel logo. It wasn’t quite as good as it should have been.” RISD faculty agreed. When Adler asked if he could stay on for graduate school, he was told, ‘no’. Maybe the kiln fire he authored had something to do with the ‘no’.
The ceramics instruction and atmosphere at RISD was formal, with strict adherence to orthodox form, glaze chemistry, firing techniques, etc. (a Chanel teapot was a no-no). In Adler’s next clay adventure, at Mud, Sweat and Tears, the ceramics studio in Hell’s Kitchen where he began teaching night classes, the rules were different. He felt unconstrained. For instance, whereas RISD eschewed the use of underglazes, the amateur studio did not. “I didn’t know what underglazes were. I thought somehow it was cheating to paint something and put a clear glaze on top. But, at this studio everyone did it because they were hobbyists.” He was able to execute the vision that existed in his head—flat, graphic, and design-driven motifs—and finish his vessels with a crackle glaze.
The success in realizing his vision encouraged Adler to get in touch with the buyer for the gift shop at the American Craft Museum (renamed MAD in 2002). She agreed to take his work on consignment. Shortly thereafter, in 1993, he approached a buyer at Barneys department store. “I showed them my pots and they said, ‘These are great, but they can’t have a crackle glaze.’” Mud, Sweat and Tears only used crackle glaze, so Adler found a pottery co-op in Soho called Downtown Potter’s Hall. “There were five or six potters and they had all the facilities. A couple of the potters used a non-crackle clear glaze. So, I rented a space for $250/month and made the pots Barneys wanted and fired them with clear glaze.” Six months after shipping the stripey pots, Adler realized he hadn’t been paid. An inquiry to Barneys unearthed a new word and concept: invoice. Clearly the professional practice class had been missed.
Mugs, plates, teapots, decanters, vases, and bowls were the focus. They were graphic and hand painted using patterns that were masked off with tape. “I was a very good potter and I had a great sense of proportion, so I was making very clean forms with interesting silhouettes that were weightless and a little bit Scandinavian or Italian glass looking.” Adler aimed for a precise industrial look and the handmade: “A weird tension between perfection and human imperfection.”
What followed was five years of nose-to-the-grindstone. “I was in a fugue state, some liminal space between real life and not real life because my entire brain was occupied with: Have I filled this order? Is the handle on that mug cracked? I got to the studio at 7am and stayed until 11pm, and by the time I’d heard All Things Considered on NPR for the third time, I would think, I gotta get outta here!” In addition to production pottery for Barneys, Adler had an exhibition at Bill Sofield’s Aero Studios in Soho and Todd Oldham’s first retail store. It was intimidating to be afforded space by members of New York’s design in-crowd, but Adler felt he didn’t have a choice. “I worked madly because I had this opportunity and, having failed at things, I didn’t want to fail at this.”
The stress of being at the wheel sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, despite the assistance of a roster of college students, was mounting. He recognized the need to grow but was unable to find sufficiently adept local throwers to make the volume of goods he wanted. By some fluke—these were pre-internet days—Adler heard of Aid to Artisans (rebranded as Handmade to Market in 2025), and in 1997 he went to Peru with his studio assistant, Belle, who spoke Spanish. They were introduced to “a magical studio with this fantastic woman named Marilyn. It was her passion. They had great potters and great techniques and wanted to sell in America. And it was a perfect, perfect fit.” Belle and Jonathan lived in Peru for several months and taught the Peruvians Adler’s style of making, painting, and glazing. “I stayed at the factory owner’s house at the beach and discovered Shakira before anyone else did. I went from not even knowing where Peru was to Peru.” He transitioned his workshop to the southern hemisphere and shipments of product began to be dispatched to New York.
Adler recalled the arrival of the first shipping container from Peru: “I got a large order from Pottery Barn: thousands of pots. Pottery Barn knew of Aid to Artisans and it was a huge break because it was suddenly volume. When it got to US Customs, they said, ‘This doesn’t have Made in Peru stickers on it.’” Adler rented a warehouse, hired ten guys for a weekend and opened hundreds of boxes to stick Made in Peru labels on thousands of pots so they could be distributed to Pottery Barn. “That’s emblematic of my entire career. The crazy hiccups and glitches, the things that seem like nightmares that become anecdotes in the rear-view mirror.”
Hot Stuff
By 1998, when Jonathan Adler opened his first store in New York, it could be said that the business no longer required its owner to be a potter. He made prototypes in clay but also ventured into the quality design and manufacture of upholstered furniture, brass lighting, wool rugs, needlework pillows, and other tchotchkes. The latter, which might be construed as pejorative, is a descriptor that Adler has adopted for himself. As a tchotchke-ist and interior designer, he now fronts a décor enterprise that has required cyclical thinking: “As I entered the world of commerce and thought about the world of fashion, I pivoted from a typical potter’s paradigm in which you develop your style and continue to make and evolve, and refine. In fashion, the business or creative model is different. This season I am inspired by Capri and next season I’m inspired by [Inuit People], or whatever it is. And so I think that my work evolved in a way that was dictated by commerce and inspired by fashion.”
The evolution, thus far, is of thirty-two years’ duration and, of late, includes private equity partners. “So I’m not in the studio every day as I used to be. I’ll go there once or twice a month. A lot of the stuff that I make now, that I finish as opposed to prototypes, is for myself or decorating projects.” The Mad MAD World of Jonathan Adler was a chance to communicate the rigorous craft-based roots of everything in his catalog. “Something that I’m extremely proud of is how my early inspirations, whether it be Howard Kottler or David Gilhooly, or Paul Soldner or Toshiko Takaezu, or the Natzlers [Otto and Gertrud], have insinuated their way into my work. But those inspirations have begat a vast number of things and pots and voices, each of which I know, but I hope I’ve taken all these things to just a different level.”
In upping the ante from studio-based potter to entrepreneur, Jonathan Adler reflects that “my career is littered with false starts and failures and minute problem solving that got me up a rung of the ladder.” Included in the false starts was the boy contemplating his rain-spattered ceramics at Lincoln Center. That boy would not, in his wildest fantasies, have imagined his passion for clay leading to the top of the ladder. Nor could he have guessed, as he unwrapped the latest issue of Ceramics Monthly, that decades in the future his pottery-driven labors would be featured in its pages.
the author D Wood has a PhD in design studies and is an independent craft scholar whose artist profiles and exhibition reviews have appeared in an international roster of art and design publications. She is the editor of and contributor to Craft is Political (Bloomsbury, 2021) and The Politics of Global Craft (Bloomsbury, 2025).
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The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
It’s early Saturday morning in July in Manhattan. Activities abound: people are walking dogs in Central Park, locavores are headed to the farmers’ market in Union Square, and the annual Crafts Festival at Lincoln Center is getting underway. En route from New Jersey are a father, mother, teenage boy, minivan full of ceramics, and a folding table and chair. The vehicle is unpacked at Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park, and Mom and Dad help set up the table on which mugs, vases, and bowls are arranged in an arty display. The parents leave their son and he sits, hopeful of, at least, recouping the cost of gas. Then comes the rain, for the entire weekend, and the fledgling potter observes his future as a washout.
This was Jonathan Adler’s initial experience in retailing ceramics. A lesser man might have thrown in the (soggy) towel, but young Jonathan was addicted to clay. He returned to the basement studio in his home to make and fire pots, and waited by the family mailbox each month for the arrival of Ceramics Monthly and American Craft magazines. This was abnormal in the 1980s when kids’ leisure was dominated by video games and hanging out at the mall.
It could be said that the idiosyncrasy of Adler’s youth did not disappear alongside his growing pains. Almost forty years later, he continues to be an iconoclast, particularly in terms of the definition of “potter.” His eponymous exhibition, “The Mad MAD World of Jonathan Adler” (May 31, 2025–April 19, 2026), is an indication that although Adler is an entrepreneur, he is still accorded respect as a craftsman by the exhibition’s host, the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York.
The MAD exhibition purports to tell Adler’s “own story as a ceramicist-cum-designer.” This assertion is true with regard to the influences that objects and designers, within the MAD collection and outside it, have had on Adler-esque objects. Yet, Jonathan’s flying-by-the-seat-of-one’s-pants story is not contained therein and reveals a more relatable and potter-instilled saga. It starts with an epiphany when he was eleven years old.
Kid’s Stuff
Jonathan Adler grew up in rural New Jersey where his mother was a maker and a doer: “She would make quilts and incredible costumes for the school plays.” His father, apart from employment as a small-town lawyer, “spent every second of his life painting and sculpting in the basement of our house.” Adler describes this work as mostly figurative and wildly experimental. He credits his father’s willingness to try different things with his own imaginative wanderings.
When Jonathan was eleven, he was sent to Appel Farm Arts Camp, where he expected to play music, dabble with art media, and roast marshmallows with other kids. In fact, he was introduced to ceramics and “spent the rest of the summer making pots.
I was just immediately in love.” His parents were supportive of this burgeoning obsession, and for his bar mitzvah the following year they installed a pottery wheel and kiln alongside his father’s easel. However, the support had limits: “The soundtrack of my adolescence was my mother shrieking at me for tromping clay dust onto her white carpet.”
What was he making? “The output was quite impressive, to be honest. I was experimental and would do things that were almost gravity defying. I tried to make things that had the smallest possible bottom and still stand up. Or these incredibly strange soaring baskets that were reminiscent of Erté’s concoctions.” Adler accumulated a body of work, which prompted the aforementioned trip to Lincoln Center around the age of seventeen. Despite the showers, his spirit was undampened.
In 1984, Adler went to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, to study semiotics and art history. In his first year he also practiced ceramics at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) but, feeling a bit jaundiced, he quit. “Then, in my last semester of college, I took a class at RISD and fell madly back in love with clay after three years off.” He spent an additional year after college taking classes at RISD, during which he made his Chanel teapot. “At the time I was very interested in fashion, contemporary culture, and rap music, and I made a teapot inspired by Chanel handbags. It was quilted, had fringe and gilded fleur-de-lis, and the Chanel logo. It wasn’t quite as good as it should have been.” RISD faculty agreed. When Adler asked if he could stay on for graduate school, he was told, ‘no’. Maybe the kiln fire he authored had something to do with the ‘no’.
The devastating suggestion that he get a day job prompted a move to New York followed by several years attempting to make it in talent agencies and movie production. But those didn’t pan out either. “I got fired from all these jobs and I was 27. I was unemployed and unemployable. Then two really fantastic things happened: I moved into a new little apartment in Chelsea, and my grandmother gave me and my brother and sister each $20,000. She said, ‘Don’t put it away, use it to live.’” Dear Grandma’s generosity eased financial worries and, in retrospect, was the catalyst for what would become Jonathan Adler©.
His Stuff
The ceramics instruction and atmosphere at RISD was formal, with strict adherence to orthodox form, glaze chemistry, firing techniques, etc. (a Chanel teapot was a no-no). In Adler’s next clay adventure, at Mud, Sweat and Tears, the ceramics studio in Hell’s Kitchen where he began teaching night classes, the rules were different. He felt unconstrained. For instance, whereas RISD eschewed the use of underglazes, the amateur studio did not. “I didn’t know what underglazes were. I thought somehow it was cheating to paint something and put a clear glaze on top. But, at this studio everyone did it because they were hobbyists.” He was able to execute the vision that existed in his head—flat, graphic, and design-driven motifs—and finish his vessels with a crackle glaze.
The success in realizing his vision encouraged Adler to get in touch with the buyer for the gift shop at the American Craft Museum (renamed MAD in 2002). She agreed to take his work on consignment. Shortly thereafter, in 1993, he approached a buyer at Barneys department store. “I showed them my pots and they said, ‘These are great, but they can’t have a crackle glaze.’” Mud, Sweat and Tears only used crackle glaze, so Adler found a pottery co-op in Soho called Downtown Potter’s Hall. “There were five or six potters and they had all the facilities. A couple of the potters used a non-crackle clear glaze. So, I rented a space for $250/month and made the pots Barneys wanted and fired them with clear glaze.” Six months after shipping the stripey pots, Adler realized he hadn’t been paid. An inquiry to Barneys unearthed a new word and concept: invoice. Clearly the professional practice class had been missed.
Mugs, plates, teapots, decanters, vases, and bowls were the focus. They were graphic and hand painted using patterns that were masked off with tape. “I was a very good potter and I had a great sense of proportion, so I was making very clean forms with interesting silhouettes that were weightless and a little bit Scandinavian or Italian glass looking.” Adler aimed for a precise industrial look and the handmade: “A weird tension between perfection and human imperfection.”
What followed was five years of nose-to-the-grindstone. “I was in a fugue state, some liminal space between real life and not real life because my entire brain was occupied with: Have I filled this order? Is the handle on that mug cracked? I got to the studio at 7am and stayed until 11pm, and by the time I’d heard All Things Considered on NPR for the third time, I would think, I gotta get outta here!” In addition to production pottery for Barneys, Adler had an exhibition at Bill Sofield’s Aero Studios in Soho and Todd Oldham’s first retail store. It was intimidating to be afforded space by members of New York’s design in-crowd, but Adler felt he didn’t have a choice. “I worked madly because I had this opportunity and, having failed at things, I didn’t want to fail at this.”
The stress of being at the wheel sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, despite the assistance of a roster of college students, was mounting. He recognized the need to grow but was unable to find sufficiently adept local throwers to make the volume of goods he wanted. By some fluke—these were pre-internet days—Adler heard of Aid to Artisans (rebranded as Handmade to Market in 2025), and in 1997 he went to Peru with his studio assistant, Belle, who spoke Spanish. They were introduced to “a magical studio with this fantastic woman named Marilyn. It was her passion. They had great potters and great techniques and wanted to sell in America. And it was a perfect, perfect fit.” Belle and Jonathan lived in Peru for several months and taught the Peruvians Adler’s style of making, painting, and glazing. “I stayed at the factory owner’s house at the beach and discovered Shakira before anyone else did. I went from not even knowing where Peru was to Peru.” He transitioned his workshop to the southern hemisphere and shipments of product began to be dispatched to New York.
Adler recalled the arrival of the first shipping container from Peru: “I got a large order from Pottery Barn: thousands of pots. Pottery Barn knew of Aid to Artisans and it was a huge break because it was suddenly volume. When it got to US Customs, they said, ‘This doesn’t have Made in Peru stickers on it.’” Adler rented a warehouse, hired ten guys for a weekend and opened hundreds of boxes to stick Made in Peru labels on thousands of pots so they could be distributed to Pottery Barn. “That’s emblematic of my entire career. The crazy hiccups and glitches, the things that seem like nightmares that become anecdotes in the rear-view mirror.”
Hot Stuff
By 1998, when Jonathan Adler opened his first store in New York, it could be said that the business no longer required its owner to be a potter. He made prototypes in clay but also ventured into the quality design and manufacture of upholstered furniture, brass lighting, wool rugs, needlework pillows, and other tchotchkes. The latter, which might be construed as pejorative, is a descriptor that Adler has adopted for himself. As a tchotchke-ist and interior designer, he now fronts a décor enterprise that has required cyclical thinking: “As I entered the world of commerce and thought about the world of fashion, I pivoted from a typical potter’s paradigm in which you develop your style and continue to make and evolve, and refine. In fashion, the business or creative model is different. This season I am inspired by Capri and next season I’m inspired by [Inuit People], or whatever it is. And so I think that my work evolved in a way that was dictated by commerce and inspired by fashion.”
The evolution, thus far, is of thirty-two years’ duration and, of late, includes private equity partners. “So I’m not in the studio every day as I used to be. I’ll go there once or twice a month. A lot of the stuff that I make now, that I finish as opposed to prototypes, is for myself or decorating projects.” The Mad MAD World of Jonathan Adler was a chance to communicate the rigorous craft-based roots of everything in his catalog. “Something that I’m extremely proud of is how my early inspirations, whether it be Howard Kottler or David Gilhooly, or Paul Soldner or Toshiko Takaezu, or the Natzlers [Otto and Gertrud], have insinuated their way into my work. But those inspirations have begat a vast number of things and pots and voices, each of which I know, but I hope I’ve taken all these things to just a different level.”
In upping the ante from studio-based potter to entrepreneur, Jonathan Adler reflects that “my career is littered with false starts and failures and minute problem solving that got me up a rung of the ladder.” Included in the false starts was the boy contemplating his rain-spattered ceramics at Lincoln Center. That boy would not, in his wildest fantasies, have imagined his passion for clay leading to the top of the ladder. Nor could he have guessed, as he unwrapped the latest issue of Ceramics Monthly, that decades in the future his pottery-driven labors would be featured in its pages.
To learn more about Jonathan Adler and his work, visit jonathanadler.com or follow on Instagram @jonathanadler.
the author D Wood has a PhD in design studies and is an independent craft scholar whose artist profiles and exhibition reviews have appeared in an international roster of art and design publications. She is the editor of and contributor to Craft is Political (Bloomsbury, 2021) and The Politics of Global Craft (Bloomsbury, 2025).
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