Studio Potter 2015 Volume 43 Number 2 Summer/Fall 2015 | Page 13

EW: How do you gather the information?

Subsequently, we’ve worked with the Springfield
Museums in Massachusetts. We’ve done some
work at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
Now the goal is to put together a menu of sorts
of remaining nationally known makers, those
who have passed away, mid-career people, and
emerging potters who can list a mark as it is now
and, in theory, update their marks throughout
their careers.
EW: You may have just answered my next
question: Is TMP concerned with only
mid-career and established artists, or is it
interested in encouraging younger artists
as well?
DC: Whatever their stage, everyone is welcome.
We have said you need to be at least a graduate-student level, but other than that, no more
rules. We made connections at NCECA last year
and again this year with Louise Rosenfield; her
collection is a massive collection of functional
pots, and she has photographed the objects and
the marks. She has made just under 1,000 of them
on her collection’s website (therosenfieldcollection.com) available to us.
We’re particularly interested in finding regional
makers, who can be hard to find. The plan is to
have regional TMP people who would work the
northwest, southwest, midwest, northeast, and

The door is wide open, and we do not edit people’s
work. We don’t make judgments. If people send us
written material, we might edit that, not to change
the content but to make it fit the TMP format, and
we might Photoshop an image for clarity. Our role,
though, is not to judge; we collect marks.
EW: You’ve said before that this was somewhat difficult to get potters or artists to come
to the website, fill out the questionnaire, and
upload their images.
DC: Yeah. I think that this is an issue that’s bigger
than TMP. Through the years, makers have signed
their work and not signed their work, and for various reasons it was okay to do it, and then it wasn’t
okay to do it, and some cultures felt strongly that
you didn’t do it, and others did. For instance,
Maria Martinez didn’t sign her pots originally. She
made pots for her neighbors, and her neighbors
made cloth for her. Everybody knew who made
the pot, so there didn’t need to be a signature on
it. Up until probably the eighteenth century, a
community supported the artisans who produced
the things they needed, and the objects stayed
within the community. Everyone knew who made
what. Today, there are various approaches to
marking or signing.
I have a very deep feeling that if you make something and are proud of it, you put your name on
it. If you make something and you’re not proud of
it, maybe you should destroy it. Maybe that rubs
people the wrong way, but you know, Michael McCarthy made this cup [gestures to cup he’s holding],
and I think after much,[checks underside of the cup]
yeah, after much urging from me, it’s signed. It’s
a beautiful cup. Why shouldn’t people know who
made this? So anyway, my take on it is that artists

working right now should feel good about what
they make, and put their names on it.
For the future, it could benefit the community to
be able to identify something as having been made
by a particular artist. It might take an hour of your
time to get it listed with TMP. Then, it’s always
there for the museum curators, for the collectors,
for your fellow makers.
EW: To put a listing on TMP only takes about
an hour?
DC: We have really streamlined the process. No
one’s done this before, so we had to figure it out,
every step of the way. We worked with a really
good Web designer in California to put together this questionnaire of things we thought we
needed to ask. It took a long time to fill out and
was very complicated. Then I said, “You know
what, kids? We have to fix this.” We went back to
Ruben, our designer, and to another person, Ali
Baldenebro, a recent Bard g Ʌ