A Ceramic Continuum: Fifty Years of the Archie Bray Influence (2001)

Edited by Peter Held; foreword by Garth Clark; essays by Rick Newby and Chere Jiusto, Janet Koplos, and Patricia Failing

Published by Holter Museum of Art, Helena, MT, and University of Washington Press, Seattle, WA

248 pp., 156 illus., 120 in color, 8.5" x 11"

Cloth, ISBN 0-295-98107-5, $40.00

To order, click here (bedrockbooks.com)

This fiftieth anniversary publication offers a history of the Archie Bray Foundation, an evaluation of its accomplishments, and a discussion of 85 works selected from more than 800 in the Bray collection. Through interviews with artists, resident directors, workshop presenters, and the late Peter Meloy, and drawing on the resources of the Foundation's archives, Rick Newby and Chere Jiusto present its always lively, occasionally conflicted, and unfailingly interesting history through the voices and letters of those who knew it best.

From “A Beautiful Spirit: Origins of the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts” by Rick Newby and Chere Jiusto

“Despite the battles over aesthetics and work habits, despite the cold and the financial challenges, the first years of the Archie Bray Foundation established, in an astonishingly short time, all the elements that today make the mature Foundation, in Rudy Autio’s words, a ‘very important center.’ First and foremost, the vision that Archie Bray articulated . . . remains as vital at the start of the twenty-first century as it was fifty years ago.

“Still what Archie Bray conceived as ‘A place to work for all who are seriously interested in any of the Ceramic Arts,’ the Bray welcomes, just as it did in the early 1950s, ceramic artists from across the United States. And just as Archie, Branson [Stevenson], and Peter Meloy invited masters from England, Germany, Scotland, and Japan to present workshops and work in the pottery, so does the current Bray maintain an international character, with ceramists visiting from Siberia and Thailand, Korea and Finland, Rumania and Taiwan. . . .

“Idealistic and practical, good fun and a place where much good work is done, the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts today stands as a worthy memorial to the ‘life and interests of the man who [made] this pottery possible.’ It is, indeed, a ‘place of art—of simple things [and] good people.’ And though there will forever be problems, ‘thru it all’ still permeates that beautiful spirit of which Archie Bray dreamed fifty years ago.”