James Dahl, now 80, still recalls the silence of the workshop during his time as a student at Pond Farm Pottery in the summers of 1968 and 1969. There was no electricity in the barn where the students worked. The only sounds were the whir of the old-fashioned kick-wheel and an occasional hand slapping clay. That and the voice of master potter Marguerite Wildenhain.
“When you walk through that gate, and you walk up to the barn, you park your ego at the gate,” Dahl says. “I can still hear her voice, ‘Oh, James, you’re torturing the clay. Stop. Cut it off the wheel and start all over.’” (It’s common for beginners to work the clay too long.)
Nestled atop a Guerneville hill in what is now Armstrong Redwoods are the remains of Pond Farm Pottery — once a summer workshop and training ground run by Wildenhain. A French-born potter of Jewish ancestry, Wildenhain trained at the Bauhaus school in Germany, ran a pottery shop in the Netherlands and immigrated to the United States in 1940 to escape the Nazi invasion. She taught summer workshops at the site from 1952 until 1980.
At a moment when San Francisco’s last nonprofit art school, California College of the Arts, is about to close its doors for good, many are turning to alternative models of arts education. In recent years, a number of small-scale and DIY “schools” have cropped up around the Bay Area, including Bathers Library, Present Company and Salmon Creek Arts, and the forthcoming Art + Water and California Academy of Studio Arts…