Studio Potter 2015 Volume 43 Number 2 Summer/Fall 2015 | Page 14

14

Studio Potter

If you write a book, you can’t change it. We wanted the ability
to add information as artists grow and their work changes.
page. Tony Marsh never signs. We have a solution
for that: you can search by object.
The best-case scenario would be, using your example, that you submit a piece with each of those
signatures. At the top of your page, everyone’s
page, it says “Typical Mark” and there’s a little
image of each mark or whatever you’ve used, and
ideally dates are listed as well. Some people don’t
have examples. Maybe they needed to sell everything, just didn’t keep track of stuff, or moved and
dispersed the things. In those cases, we go with
what we can get.
Michael Simon apparently kept the best piece
from every firing, something every clay worker
should do. Now he has this incredible collection
of his work. I think that’s a very smart thing, on
more than one level. It gives you a dictionary of
things to refer to as you go along. Plus, in theory
it gives you, an annuity, because these things will
have accrued in value.
EW: The website clearly states that TMP is
not a valuation tool.
DC: We worked with an attorney to put that
language together. TMP’s function is to assist
in attribution. To do this we show the mark or
signature, the foot, and the full view of an object,
we then provide a biography, links to the artist’s
website, bibliography, and links to objects in public collections. If you go to TMP and identify your
object as being made by Beatrice Wood or Karen
Karnes or whomever, we’re not telling you it’s
worth anything. But if you end up with something
and it’s got this mark on it, and you’re curious on
any number of levels, the first step is attribution,
which we can help with. Then you take the next
step somewhere else, which is valuation.

EW: You shared with me some letters of
support from various museum curators who
endorsed TMP. One of them was supportive
of TMP as an independent organization. Can
you talk about that?
DC: One of our commitments has been to working with museums who don’t have the funding to
digitize their collections and to do that with them.
That’s what happened at the Everson. Some of its
collection was photographed for a book published
in the nineties, but the majority of pieces have not
been professionally photographed, and the marks
have never been photographed. So the Everson
Museums gets unrestricted use and TMP gets
noncommercial use of those images. We went to
the Springfield Museums with the same terms.
We’ve been offered the opportunity to go to two
major collections of ceramics. The Ceramics
Research Center [at the Arizona State University
Museum of Art] has recently photographed or
digitized photographs of their collection, and
we’ve had conversations with Garth Johnson,
the curator, about going there to photograph
just the marks of objects that are important to
what we’re doing. Those marks would then go
into their data bank and they would provide the
already-taken images to us.
We had a consultant in L.A. who had worked
on the Elaine Levin archives at the University
of Southern California. So we now have, with
Elaine’s blessing, information from that archive,
which has been important to us because it’s
been a source of some elusive images. When we
get a little older and a little more adept, we’ll
be very eager to make our backlist – the stuff
in the database that’s not online – available to
researchers. So if you were doing a research
project about Rudy Autio and came to TMP and
found what’s there about Rudy Autio, then you

contacted us because somehow the word is out
that we’ve got more, we would say, “Okay, do
this, and you’ll find it.”
We now have all the images that exist from the
Clay Art Center in Port Chester, New York.
They’re all being entered into the database by an
intern. In this case, we can record not only the
artist’s name and the object’s name but also the
show it was in at the Clay Art Center and the date.
Now, all of that may not end up online. But it’s in
the database.
Another place we’re getting a lot of images – I just
worked on this – is from Jayson Lawfer and the
Nevica Project in Chicago. He has given us access
to all his imagery, which is pretty great. This all
happens courtesy of these places; they realize t B