If, like us, you began hearing the name Helen Levi only a few months ago — well, there’s a pretty good reason for it. At this time last year, Levi was balancing four part-time jobs, working as a photo assistant, a pottery teacher, a bartender and a waitress. “I’d been doing pottery since I was a little kid, but mostly gifts or for myself,” she told me when I visited her Greenpoint studio last month. “It’s the dream to be able to make stuff you want to make and have that support you, but I never really thought that was possible.”
Then, at a random cocktail event last fall at one of the Steven Alan shops in Manhattan, Levi met the man himself: “I met Steven Alan by chance and was telling him about my work, and he was like, ‘Send it to me.’ I didn’t even have one photograph!” Levi laughs. “But once I met him, it was the spark. I quit all my other jobs and I just tried to do this. Maybe it doesn’t work out and I go back to balancing four things, but it didn’t take a huge investment of money. And so far it’s working.”
Working is an understatement. Levi not only landed a spot making ceramics for Alan’s new home store, which opened in Tribeca last March, but she’s also already completed her first dishware commission for a sushi restaurant and she’s working on porcelain charms for shops like Mociun. (Not to mention she’s the studio manager at a communal space in Brooklyn, where she shares with like-minded ceramicists like Josephine Heilpern of Recreation Center and Rachel Howe of Small Spells.)
“I figure this is the time to run with it and see where it goes. I have myself and my dog; that’s what I’m responsible for. It wasn’t until my sister was born that my dad went to law school, so I’ve always felt like you don’t have to have a serious career until you have a baby. And my parents have been incredibly supportive. Well, supportive with a measure of realism. I’ll be like ‘Mom, look at this write-up I got on Design Sponge.’ She’s like, ‘Helen, don’t let it get to your head.’”
Favorite everyday object: “My dog’s rope leash. An old strapless batik dress of my mom’s. My cell phone camera because I take like 50 pictures a day on it. This really amazing drug store chapstick called Baby Lips.”
Favorite place to shop for materials: “I love shopping, not just clothes but grocery shopping, hardware shopping, and now, ceramic supply shopping. There’s a store in upstate New York called Bailey’s that I love so much. The ladies who work there are so sweet and so knowledgeable. I’ve called them many times just to ask random questions and they always indulge me. They have an incredible showroom as well so whenever I go up to my parents’ house upstate I always try to stop by and pick out some stuff. Last time I went I had my dog with me and I wasn’t sure if he was allowed in, but as soon as I brought him they each came out of their cubicles one by one with a Ziploc baggie of dog treats.”
Favorite Google Image search:
“Probably something to do with puppies. I’m always trying to figure out what breed my mutt is so I google image different breeds as puppies and see if they look like him.”
If you weren’t a designer, what would you be?
“A photographer. Or a math teacher.”
Visit Helen and see more of her work in person Friday, September 27 and Saturday, September 28 at the Back 2 Cool pop-up!
Levi in her studio, wearing an old jumpsuit handed down from her mother. “My grandmother was very square and my mom was very punk. My grandmother offered to buy my mom something from Sears or JC Penney so my mom picked something from the men’s section. It wasn’t like she was working in any field that required it,” Levi laughs.
Favorite material to work with: Porcelain. It’s so malleable.
What do you do when you’re not making ceramics? “My background is as a photographer and I still identify as one. I love shooting and keep up projects on the side. I’ve been working on a project for almost a year of the city law department offices in lower Manhattan on the weekends when no one is there.”
Another shot from the series.
Design or art hero: “Sylvia Plachy. This image is my favorite of hers: She took it because the wetness on the building looked like a profile of a face. I’ve worked for her occasionally and she really set the example for me of trusting your gut and not overthinking images. I am still learning to trust myself with pottery because I think the ability to do that comes from a confidence in your own eye.
What do you keep around the house for inspiration? “Above my bed right now is a good sampling of stuff worth holding on to: a porcelain bunny from an old studio mate, a box camera, a nightlight of Mary mother of Jesus, an old Russian painted egg, a plastic jewelry box from my grandmother, a beautiful green glass bottle and a little leprechaun figurine a friend picked up for me at Dead Horse Bay after Hurricane Sandy, a big ceramic hand I made, a children’s cube toy, a fishing weight I found at Fort Tilden, a tiny ceramic creamer from an old hotel that I got in Puerto Rico, and a seal one of my old pottery students made for me.”
First thing you ever made? “I used to make these drawings as a kid of ladies with long hair that was drawn as one long strand down to the floor.”
First thing you ever made? “This is one of the first pottery pieces I ever made, and it actually inspired my eye planters. I was teaching a private class with two little girls, friends of a friend, and I was doing this project with them and they were like how do you make an eye? So I made a bunch of eyes and stuck them on a little pinch pot. I kept it and liked it and was thinking about how to elevate that childlike element into a more refined idea.”
“So I threw it on the wheel instead of doing it by hand and I added gold luster onto the iris, and I just liked it. I didn’t know how it would be received but I wanted to put it out there.”
Where do you get ideas about color? “Every day things I see around me. The beach, my dog Billy’s fur (above), being upstate, rocks, the ceiling at the swimming pool when I do backstroke.”
Favorite design object: “Beautiful kitchenware: Le Creuset and Dansk Kobenstyle. My Kitchenaid mixer.”
Fictional character who would own your work: “Maybe Willy Wonka would have liked my gold eyeball pieces.”
Last great exhibition you saw: “A really great pop-up show by Bower NYC, Fort Makers, and Flat Vernacular at the South Street Seaport mall. They took over a storefront that used to be a Victoria’s Secret and totally transformed it. It was really great.”
Why pineapples? “The first commission I ever made was for a friend who asked me to make a big pineapple! I wouldn’t have thought of that myself but then once I made it I thought about so many other things. So for that show, I made other fruits, like a big watermelon with a slice cut out of it, and I really liked them. But to have a giant watermelon in your house is not an easy sell. So I thought about shrinking it down really tiny. People seemed to like that so I expanded the line.”
“It’s a nice break from the wheel for me to sit down for a half an hour and make some beads. It mixes it up. These are some strawberries I’m making for Mociun.”
If you had an unlimited budget for a single piece, what would you make?
“Probably something huge covered in gold luster! It is so prohibitively expensive, but so special. The biggest piece I’ve ever used it on is the tiny golden hand that I sell and even that piece is pretty spendy.”
Most inspiring place you’ve ever been to: “My parents’ country house in the Catskills. I grew up in the East Village but always have spent a lot of time there and I get a lot of ideas when I’m there. I have a list of photo projects I plan to do up there in my lifetime. This is a portrait of my mom on our stream upstate.”
Favorite collection: “I collect vintage and new drinking glasses, and if I spy a really special one when I’m at a restaurant or bar I try to buy it from the waiter on the spot.”
Dream place to install your work? “I’d love to do more dishes for restaurants, and have more people eating off my pieces every day. I did some dishes for a sushi restaurant on Clinton Street in Manhattan. I had to do 180 pieces for them, and it’s like a 7-course meal so for each course they wanted a different motif on the glaze. They wanted the slabs like this — really unfinished, like they’d been pulled by hand. They really didn’t want it to look that uniform. We talked about a color family, talking a lot about the ocean and fish.”
“From doing that job and experimenting, I started thinking about how I’d interpret that in my own pieces. I ended up taking these two glazes, because I’d been working with them for the sushi restaurant and started playing around with it in this marbled way. It’s always so much experimentation.”
Last thing you bought on eBay: “I’m a total eBay scavenger. My favorite eBay find of all time was deadstock expired film from the 80s. I have a common vintage box camera that I wanted to play around with and the current film sizes don’t fit on the reels for that camera. I saw one roll for sale, bought it, and then the same seller listed another roll. I bought it again and sent him a message asking if I could buy him out. He had more than 50 rolls he’d gotten from an estate sale, and sold me the whole lot. I still have a couple left.”
Right now, Helen Levi is: Manning her table at the Back 2 Cool pop-up shop, at 1 Great Jones Street in New York. Come visit!
Before he moved to Philadelphia in September of last year, Ben Fiess was living on a Minnesota farm, 20 minutes south of St. Paul, five miles from the nearest small town. “One of my friends in graduate school’s parents had recently retired and inherited the family farm,” Fiess says. “No one had been there for a decade or so, so it was in disrepair, but they actually had a lot of kilns and equipment because my friend’s mother taught art. It was a good opportunity to live for free and keep making work.” When he wasn’t making ceramics, Fiess spent his time planting asparagus roots, working at farmer’s markets across the border in Wisconsin, and ripping up sod. “I could go a week without seeing anyone unless I drove into the city,” Fiess remembers. So how is it that when we visited Philly back in January, every other artist and designer we met knew exactly who Fiess was? (“That guy moved to Philly? That’s so cool,” was the typical refrain.)
To understand what it was like for Ian McDonald growing up in California’s Laguna Beach, it helps to refer back to one of the greatest television dramas of all time. Not, mind you, MTV’s reality show of the same name, but the heart-wrenching high-school football epic Friday Night Lights — McDonald’s hometown being pretty much the diametrical opposite of Dillon, Texas. “Laguna was founded as an artists’ colony,” he says. “Our school mascot, The Artist, ran around with a brush and palette and a beret. Even the football stars took art classes.” In fact, one of McDonald’s earliest run-ins with the medium that would eventually become his life’s work happened when his own sports-star brothers brought their ceramics projects home from school, where their art teacher was a local studio potter.
To know a ceramicist is to see their test pieces, and Bari Ziperstein has the kind of overflowing studio that doesn’t happen in a minute, that comes from years of private experiments and the hard work of learning not to care so much. “I think of these pieces as sculptural doodles,” she says, referring to a series of small, accidental ceramic sculptures. “They’re such a discrepancy from how I usually work, something no more than two inches. It’s really free and immediate.”
