Face Jug

Face Jug

  • Clay
  • 8 x 6 inches
  • Signed
  • Provenance: Purchased from the artist
  • Screen Shot 2016-04-26 at 2.27.27 PM

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    Photo from Valley Ablaze taken by Dr. Allen Huffman

     

    As a teenager, Burlon Craig apprenticed to a local potter in North Carolina, gathering clay and turning objects on the wheel (Chuck and Jan Rosenak, Museum of American Folk Art Encyclopedia, 1990). He worked in a furniture factory for almost twenty years, but continued to make pottery in the evenings.

    Craig helped revive the Catawba pottery tradition, developed by German immigrants in the eighteenth century, which used wood-fired kilns and alkaline glazes made from local materials ("Burlon Craig," William Oppenheimer, Folk Art Messenger, 2002). He ran his pottery in Vale, North Carolina, and is honored there with an annual festival called Burlon Craig Day.

    "I'm partial to the jar shape because that's what I'm used to, that's all I've ever made and that's about what the oldtimers made." Burlon Craig, The Potteries, n.d.

     

    Additional Links:

    Smithsonian American Art Museum

    National Endowment for the Arts

    Burlon Craig on You Tube

    Valley Ablaze