Standard Clay Company

The Ceramics Studio at Pittsburgh Center for Arts and Media

Audra Clayton: Studio Manager

A Coming Together

Morean Workshop Space

2025 High School Exhibition

Juror Jerry Wagner

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A Coming Together: Morean Workshop Space
January 31, 2025

Beth Morean, well-known artist and philanthropist, has taken the next step in her 40-year quest to solidify St. Petersburg as a top destination for ceramic artists and continues to build on the ever-evolving expansion of the city as a worldwide arts destination in all mediums. Originally relocating to the area for family business reasons, Beth quickly fell in love with the clay community in St. Petersburg and decided it was going to be her legacy to create something special for the local art community.
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2025 High School Exhibition Juror, Jerry Wagner
January 28, 2025

A springtime tradition at Standard Clay is the annual High School Students Exhibition at the ClayPlace@Standard gallery. Area art students and their teachers look forward to selecting their best pieces, showing them to a wider audience, and facing the scrutiny of a professional juror. This year’s juror, Jerry Wagner, is a paradoxical mix of artist and technician who is not only an accomplished potter but a veritable fire wizard. Wagner’s years of experience in the industrial kiln industry lends a unique perspective to his eye for the seemingly mysterious process of combining earth, chemicals, and heat.
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Nashville’s Clay Lady: Danielle McDaniel
January 03, 2025
Forty-two years ago, Danielle McDaniel walked out of a Parks and Recreation Department pottery class and embarked on a journey that would touch the lives of countless Nashville school children and residents. With very little formal training, McDaniel combined her can-do attitude with an innate understanding of the human need to create, to develop what is today’s “The Clay Lady’s Campus” at Mid-South Ceramic Supply Company. With the imminent opening of The Clay Lady’s Education Center this January, a build-out of the original structure that housed Mid-South Ceramics, the campus will expand to over 53,000 square feet of studio, education, and gallery space, to accommodate the growth in local interest in ceramics, an upsurge that can be attributed in part to McDaniel’s work.
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Archived Articles

The I’m fine. Project: Exploring the Self Image
The artistic process is one that draws on the whole person, rummaging through the depths of emotion and memory, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes painful, emerging in a thing of beauty. For central Pennsylvania friends Maureen Joyce and Carrie Breschi, the cathartic value of working with clay has become a life mission. Through heartbreak and the circumstances of life, these women have come together to offer healing workshops to people seeking emotional wholeness amid life’s inevitable challenges. I’m fine. uses the creation of human masks to explore the self.
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Potter Robert Deane: An Intimate Approach
While all artists have a personal relationship with the materials of their craft, potters share a special bond with clay that spawns a visceral connection to the earth. Southwestern Pennsylvania Potter Robert Deane brings this intimate dynamic to his work – in the clay he digs and refines, in the collaborative projects he undertakes, and especially in the philosophy of his teaching practices. This Media, PA artist teaches adults and children at the Wallingford Art Center outside of Philadelphia.
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Standard Ceramic Acquires Sculpture House Ceramics Division
Florida-based Sculpture House is a business with a long history in the greater New York area that traces a century old history through the tutelage of two families. By the end of this summer, Standard Ceramic’s Turnbull family will become the third line of craft-oriented businessmen to extend part of that tradition. Standard will acquire the Ceramics Division of Sculpture House as Bruner Barrie, the company’s CEO, moves closer to a full retirement.
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Eberle Studios: Developing Artistic Vision
Pittsburgh artist Ed Eberle is well-known in western Pennsylvania and around the world. With a career spanning over 50 years, Eberle works in a variety of media, including painting, printmaking, sculpture, mixed media, and installations, but most recognizably with ceramics. His porcelain vessels and sculptures often feature abstractions, geometry, and detailed figurative painting with terra sigillata used both as “gesso” and “paint.” To further a legacy in fine art ceramics, Eberle and family are now opening artist studios and open studio workspaces in Homestead, near the Waterfront shopping center.
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Blair Meerfeld and The Art League School of Alexandria: Community of Inspiration
When Blair Meerfeld left a solitary Colorado life as a studio potter in 2009 to accept a position at a thriving East Coast art school, he had no idea how radically his life would change. As the Chair of the Ceramics Department at The Art League in Alexandria, Virginia, Meerfeld oversees over 1,400 students a year in a program that has continued to grow under his stewardship. In a position that he thought he would keep for a year or two before returning to his independent artist’s life, his days are filled with constant interaction with students, faculty and administration. Yet it was not until the COVID-19 pandemic shut down all operations at The Art League that Meerfeld was able to reflect on his experience and fully appreciate the importance of human interaction in the creative process.
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A Layered Approach Dual Exhibition: Brian Peters and Philip M. Soucy
Two Pittsburgh artists will bring their work to ClayPlace@Standard for "A Layered Approach," a joint exhibition this coming October. Philip M. Soucy and Brian Peters share a similar technique of stacking clay coils but have a vastly different approach to the method. Soucy’s organic works are built by hand; Peters’ precise pieces are created using a 3-D printer. Each reveals a respect and affection for the material and creates pieces that challenge our ideas about humanity’s history of building and altering its environment.
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