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October 2011 Newsletter

Indigo Street Pottery Newsletter

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!

August 13, 2011: 2011 Annual Art Auction, Anderson Ranch Art Center, Snowmass, Colorado www.andersonranch.org

May of 2012: Jeff Reich and Farraday Newsome, 2-person exhibition, Plinth Gallery, Denver, Colorado http://plinthgallery.com/

1 Indigo Street Pottery Calendar

email: indigostreetpottery@me.com

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email: indigostreetpottery@me.com

October 2018 Newsletter

Indigo Street Studio Newsletter

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, and garden.

Indigo Street Studio Calendar

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In this Issue

1. Indigo Street Studio Calendar

2. Ceramics + at MCC Art Gallery, Mesa Community College, Mesa, Arizona

3. Switzerland!

4. Indigo Street Studio a Site for Desert River Audubon’s “Tour de Bird”

5. Indigo Street Studio Kitchen Garden

November 3, 2018: Tour de Bird, a Backyard Bird Habitat event sponsored by the Desert Rivers Audubon Chapter of the National Audubon Society. Indigo Street Studio’s native landscaped yard will be a site. Tickets can be purchased at our site the day of the event, through http://www.desertriversaudubon.org, or at Wild Birds Unlimited in Gilbert, AZ

November 26, 2018 - January 25, 2019: Ceramic + at MCC Art Gallery, Mesa Community College, Dobson Campus, Mesa, Arizona. Gallery closed during holiday break December 24 - January 1

December 1-2 & 8-9, 2018: Indigo Street Studio 2018 Holiday Sale, both Saturdays 10am- 4pm, both Sundays 12pm - 4pm, at our home studio Indigo Street Studio

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Indigo Street Studio Kitchen Garden

We’ve just returned from a trip to Switzerland and Italy! This is a view of the Swiss Alps from our hosts’ balcony in Saas-Fe, Switzerland. We’ll share photos from the Swiss leg of our trip in this newsletter and move on to Italy in later issues!

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Ceramic + at MCC Art Gallery Mesa Community College

Mesa, Arizona

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Switzerland!

Jeff Reich, Allthorn, 16 x 22 x 22”, stoneware

Jeff Reich, Agave Fields, 15 x 20 x 13”, stoneware

Farraday Newsome, Nesting Snake Cloud Fragment, glazed terra cotta, 20 x 20 x 2.5”

Farraday Newsome, Moth and Keys Cloud Fragment, glazed terra cotta, 22 x 17 x 2.5”

Farraday Newsome, My Father’s Flute Cloud Fragment, glazed terra cotta, 21 x 20 x 2.5”

The Art Gallery at Mesa Community College, Dobson Branch, will be presenting a ceramics invitational show this winter titled Ceramics+.

The gallery show statement: Clay. A magic material that allows you to make something out of nothing. A friendly and familiar substrate, clay is a medium that mirrors what artists and designers alike do best: create a new idea or object to help, to inspire, and to communicate. This invitational exhibition will demonstrate concepts in contemporary ceramics with work from professional, local artists using clay alone, or blended with other materials or mediums.

Where: The Gallery at MCC, Mesa Community College, Dobson Campus, Mesa, Arizona

When: November 26, 2018 - January 25, 2019. The gallery will be closed during holiday break December 24, 2018 - January 1, 2019

Below: Now, a month later, we’re back and see that although we lost a few seedlings to late summer heat, things look pretty good! A couple of recent, heavy rains definitely helped.

Indigo Street Studio a Site for Desert Rivers Audubon Tour de Bird Event

Photos below, clockwise from top left: A few of the birds we commonly see at Indigo Street Pottery (AKA Reich/Newsome Habitat for the Audubon event) include the Gilded Flicker, Verdin, Gambel’s Quail and Lesser Goldfinch.

Left: We will be selling our popular birds-on-a-wire during this event with 10% of proceeds going to Desert Rivers Audubon. These glazed terra cotta birds are epoxied to solid copper wire & perfect in the yard or a planter. $35 each.

From a Desert Rivers Audubon press release for the event:

Desert Rivers Audubon is a local chapter of the National Audubon Society and is, therefore, first and foremost a group of people who love birds. Studying birds, however, should lead to a more acute realization of birds as just one aspect of the natural world and foster an appreciation of the whole system, the habitat in which those birds, and we humans, survive.

The Desert Rivers Habitat Recognition Program grew out of our wish to acknowledge those people who were willing to help our native wildlife prosper by making a commitment to turn some part of our landscape into a natural habitat. The criteria are simple, do you plant native plants? Do you provide water and shelter for insects, birds and animals? Do you keep your watering requirements to a minimum? Simple to say, but not always simple to implement.

Our website, www.desertriversaudubon.org , has an “Audubon at Home” page where you can read more about the requirements that lead to a habitat being recognized as wildlife friendly. There you can also find sources of help if you want to turn your own backyard space into a wildlife friendly area.

Balancing the needs of the wildlife and the aesthetic feelings of gardeners can be challenging so we are therefore tremendously pleased to recognize the Indigo Pottery habitat and include them in our November 9th Tour de Bird. This is an event designed to educate people on making their landscapes wildlife friendly by sending them on a self guided tour of several backyards and public habitats to show them different styles and approaches.

We look forward to the tour and hope your habitat will prove an inspiration so that others will learn how to share our desert home with our native flora and fauna.

Above: Photos from our site during a previous Tour de Bird at our site. Desert Rivers Audubon described our yard: “Over the last 15 years this 1.3 acre wildscape has been transformed from barren landscape to a lush desert wildlife oasis with native trees and shrubs.”

Desert Rivers Audubon is a chapter of the National Audubon Society.

Indigo Street Studio will once again be one of a number of backyard bird habitat sites selected for the upcoming Desert Rivers Audubon Tour de Bird event. Our site is called The Reich-Newsome Habitat. We are located at 6931 E. Indigo St, Mesa Az 85207 https://indigostreetpottery.com/Site/contact.html

This fundraiser helps support the Desert Rivers Audubon conservation efforts and their Backyard Bird Habitat program. The tour is self-guided, with two Audubon volunteers at each site all day to assist visitors. Bring your binoculars!

Tickets are $15 prior to the event and $20 the day of. They are available at our site the day of the event, or ahead of time through the website http://www.desertriversaudubon.org, at Wild Birds Unlimited, 2110 E Baseline Rd., Mesa, or at the monthly Desert Rivers Audubon meetings (second Tuesday of each month, 7pm at SE Regional Library, Gilbert, southeast corner of Guadalupe and Greenfield).

Desert Rivers Audubon is a chapter of the National Audubon Society.

http://www.desertriversaudubon.org

http://www.desertriversaudubon.org/programs-events.html#directLink

When: Saturday, November 3, 2018, from 9am to 4pm

Where: Selected sites in the East Valley: Habitat descriptions and locations

We began our visit in Lausanne, Switzerland, a charming city on Lake Geneva. This is a view of the old city and a rooftop garden from a high, pedestrian bridge.

This old wooden staircase in Lausanne’s steep and hilly historic center has served as a pedestrian street for a very long time. An old stone and mortar rain drainage system parallels the staircase.

Part of Lausanne’s historic town center and a beautiful town clock.

The next stop on our trip was in the Swiss alpine village of Saas-Fe. Our amazing hosts, Pierre and Margot Stadelmann, took us on several profoundly beautiful hikes.This is Jeff Reich on one of the alpine trails.

One of our hikes was around Lake Mattmark, an important Swiss hydroelectric-producing reservoir with the largest earthen dam in Europe. It sits at an elevation of 7,200 ft. . The lake had the surrealistically beautiful, chalky color of glacier-fed alpine lakes while we were there, but freezes over in the winter. We came across a herd of high elevation cows grazing and drinking, their large cowbells producing a wonderfully musical sound. Click here for more info

The beautiful Alps of Saas-Fe! We saw multiple glaciers like the one in this photo, but all have receded dramatically over the past several decades of climate change.

The last part of our Swiss trip was in the alpine city of St. Moritz. We loved taking the dramatic funiculars and hanging gondola/cable cars up to amazing vantage points!

We made our way over the Alps and down into Italy on a narrow gauge train that wound its way through the fantastic Bernina Pass. The scenery and views were breathtaking!

While we were in St. Moritz we visited the beautiful Segantini Museum, which featured the works of alpine landscape painter Giovanni Segantini (1858-1899).

Farraday Newsome celebrated her birthday in St. Moritz with a delicious pesto lunch in the high elevation Panorama Restaurant at the top of Piz Nair mountain!

We started seedlings in early September (see “Seed-Starting Time” in last month’s newsletter: September 2018 Newsletter) and got them in the ground before we left for Europe. We left the garden’s drip irrigation on automatic and hoped for the best!