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December 2010 Newsletter
Indigo Street Pottery Newsletter
In this Issue
1. Indigo Street Pottery Calendar
2. Indigo Street Pottery 2010 Studio Holiday Sale
3. Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art’s Visions Teen Program workshop at Indigo Street Pottery
4. Kino Heritage Fruit Trees Project
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5.Indigo Street Pottery Garden Notes
Welcome to our monthly newsletter! It is part of our website indigostreetpottery.com , which you can browse from this page if you click on the subjects in the header. We write here about our studio, arts events, projects, studios of our friends, garden musings, and whatever else strikes our fancy. Hope you enjoy it!
October 7, 2010 - January 9, 2011: Night Moves - After Dark Images, Tohono Chul Park Gallery, Tucson, Arizona http://www.tohonochulpark.org/wordpress/art-exhibits/in-exhibit-hall/
November 12 - December 31, 2010: The Artisan Gallery Cup and Mug Invitational: Consider the Cup 2010, The Artisan Gallery, Northhampton, Massachusetts http://www.theartisangallery.com/
November 5 - December 23, 2010: Winter Show: Gifts from the Hand, Lux Center for the Arts, Lincoln, Nebraska www.luxcenter.org
December 10, 2010 - January 15, 2011: La Mesa in Santa Fe, Santa Fe Clay Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico www.santafeclay.com
November 12 - December 31, 2010: The Artisan Gallery Cup and Mug Invitational: Consider the Cup 2010, The Artisan Gallery, Northhampton, Massachusetts http://www.theartisangallery.com/
December 10, 2010 - January 15, 2011: La Mesa in Santa Fe, Santa Fe Clay Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico www.santafeclay.com
February 19, 2011: Contemporary Forum Dinner Art Auction, Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona http://www.contemporaryforum.org/dinner_auction.htm
Farraday hosted a one-day workshop at Indigo Street Pottery for a dozen teens participating in SMoCA’s Visions Teen Program. These kids were great, listening carefully, asking good questions and working hard on their clay projects! They learned how to build a slab box with a peaked roof, and with fancy-cut feet and lid line. The best thing was their wonderful enthusiasm for art ideas and for art objects.
SMoCA's Visions program, now in its twelfth year, brings together approximately 40 high-school art students from diverse Phoenix metropolitan-area high schools for a year-long series of activities designed to cultivate artistic skills, collaboration and civic engagement. The program was founded in 1999 and is based on a strong community partnership between the Museum and participating schools, which represent economically, ethnically and culturally diverse communities.
And of course they visited our new kitchen garden as part of the Indigo Street Pottery studio tour!
Jeff and I were inspired this year by the terrific conservation project undertaken in 2003 by the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum called The Kino Heritage Fruit Tree Project. It seeks to discover, document, preserve, and propagate heritage fruit trees of Sonora. Many of the trees’ heritage date from the Father Kino Spanish Mission era, and include figs, apricots, pomegranates, quince and guavas. Some of the trees have been discovered in the original, extant mission orchards in Arizona and south of the border in Baja California and mainland Sonora, Mexico. Others have been discovered in small old orchards in towns of the area. There is a wonderful essay about this project on the Arizona-Sonoran Desert Museum’s website: http://www.desertmuseum.org/center/kinofruittrees.php
So we were thrilled to learn that many of these trees of historic, documented stock have been successfully propagated over the past seven years and are now available to the public at Desert Survivors Nursery, who has partnered with the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum on this project. Desert Survivors Nursery, located in Tucson, Arizona, is a nonprofit organization that combines appreciation and preservation of the Sonoran Desert with innovative services to enhance the lives of people with disabilities. Learn more about DSN at http://www.desertsurvivors.org. Native Seeds Search, also of Tucson, is a third partner in the Kino Heritage Fruit Tree project, providing a secondary germplasm bank for some of the trees. Their website is http://www.nativeseeds.org/Home.
By growing these trees on our land, we are gratified to now be part of this wonderful ethnobotanical Sonoran heritage conservation project. Here are some photos of trees we bought and planted in our new home orchard.
This year’s Annual Indigo Street Holiday Studio Sale will be on two consecutive weekends:
Saturday, December 4 and Sunday, December 5, 10am-4pm both days
Saturday, December 11 and Sunday, December 12, 10am-4pm both days
We will have beautiful work in a wide price range, with plenty under $50 and on up to collector range. We are delighted that you make time to visit and give us a chance to catch up with how you’ve been this past year.
We are also very pleased to once again have author Mary Irish, www.maryirish.com , renowned Southwest gardening expert and author, here for book signing, book and calendar sales, and conversation! She will be here Saturday December 4, 10am-2pm.
Mary Irish, Southwest gardening author and speaker, will be at our Indigo Street Pottery Holiday Studio Sale signing and selling books her books, and answering your questions: Saturday,12/4, 10am-2pm
As always, there will be plenty of our Birds on a Wire that we both make! These are glazed terra cotta and stoneware birds epoxied to solid copper wire & meant for putting in the yard or a planter or whatever you dream up!
Here’s Farraday in our kitchen garden picking a beet! The garden is now chock full of winter vegetables like collards, kale, swiss chard, lettuces, peas, carrots, beets, onions, etc. All our compost-making and soil-building this past summer is paying off!
We had this garden structure built earlier this year by local builder Eddy Basko ebasko@hotmail.com. It has done just what we hoped for - it has kept out the voracious desert ground squirrels, rabbits and birds, yet has been fully visited and pollinated by native and European bees. It has also been accessible and welcoming to beneficial predators like wasps, spiders and lizards. We love it!!
Kino Heritage fruit trees freshly planted in our new orchard!
From left to right:
1. Ruby Pomegranate - This tree was propagated from stock found at a perennial spring near the ghost town of Ruby, Arizona, near the Mexican border.
2. Red Guava - Propagated from 300-year-old stock found at Kino-era Mission Comondu orchard, Baja California, Mexico.
3. Josefina Pomegranate - A white pomegranate from old Tucson.
1 Indigo Street Pottery Calendar
2 Indigo Street Pottery 2010 Holiday Studio Sale
3 Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art’s Visions Teen
Program workshop at Indigo Street Pottery
4 Indigo Street Pottery Garden Notes
4 The Kino Heritage Fruit Trees Project
Jeff Reich, Desert Erratic, 12.5 x 11 x 9”
Farraday Newsome, My Father’s Flute, boxy wall tile, 21 x 20 x 2.5”
Jeff Reich, faceted porcelain vases, celadon and amber celadon glazes, height ranging from 3 to 4.5”