There are more than 250 clubs on campus—some of which you probably have never even heard of, and some that go in and out of style over the years. The Brandeis Pottery Club is one of those clubs. It has been around for a long time, but until recently, it was not very well known by the Brandeis community. This semester, the Pottery Club is coming back into the spotlight as a new leadership team works to revitalize the club.

The Pottery Club has never had a conventional structure, and this may be the reason for its ups and downs in recent history. “There’s not really a huge commitment to weekly meetings or anything. And because of that, we think that that’s when things started going a bit downhill,” said Brittany Finney ’17, one of the leaders of the club, in an interview with the Justice. “People stopped coming as much as they used to. [The studio] got dirty; they didn’t clean up after themselves. … There came a point where people didn’t even realize that there was a pottery studio.”

"We're ... making sure we revitalize the club for this semester—bring ourselves back from the dormant era to a more active era," said Finney. 

The current leadership of the club came together somewhat haphazardly. In their first year, James Conlon ’16 and Jack Holloman ’16—now members of the leadership team—became members of the club only after spending time trying to find the club studio, which is located above the laundry room in Usen Castle. The other two members of the current team, Marisa Rubel ’17 and Finney, started communicating last semester though Facebook about “getting things rolling,” as they were frustrated by the disorganization of the club. The four came together when Conlon and Holloman came back from studying abroad last semester.

Although Holloman acts as the club’s president, the other leaders do not have strictly assigned roles—the casual atmosphere allows them all to share responsibilities, they told the Justice.

The four leaders have mixed backgrounds in pottery. Conlon’s mother is an artist, and he attributes his involvement to that. Holloman and Rubel have both worked in pottery or art studios. Finney found her hobby in sculpting in high school when she needed to fulfill an art elective.

Finney said the creation of a Facebook page and the presence of the club at the Activities Fair really seemed effective at getting the club back on its feet. Its Facebook group has 144 members and 70 “new” members today, and the club received 95 new members to its Listserv after the Activities Fair, the leaders told the Justice.

The Pottery Club’s meetings are unique. Executive board members function much like teaching assistants, holding weekly office hours for those students who would like to come learn. They are also looking for other members of the club to hold office hours so that they can meet their goal of holding hours every day of the week. The four leaders have different specialties in the field of pottery, and students come in based on whom they would like to work with on a particular skill.

What does one of these “office hours” look like for a beginner? Holloman explained, “So, someone could come in and they could have never have done pottery in their life. And if they want to make something on the wheel and they come to my hours, I would sit next to them and I would just walk them through every step of making something on the wheel.” He said that a lot of that means that, for beginners, at least, that he would be the one taking on much of the work. The leaders each hold office hours for two hours per week, starting this week.

Besides getting a larger student group to be involved in the club, Holloman has already begun to incorporate faculty. He brought his class, “Sculpture Foundation: 3-D Design II,” taught by Prof. Chris Frost (FA) to visit the studio. The professor had heard of the club but had never seen the studio. “It was kind of disappointing that a sculpture teacher didn’t know where the club was,” said Conlon. According to him, that was a wake-up call that they needed to work on publicizing the club. Holloman hopes he can work out something with the professor so that the class can come into the studio one day and make pottery.

Holloman summarized the casual and relaxed atmosphere of this unconventional club in his thoughts on the club’s mission, which he says is “to have people come in and make what they want and [to be] a space where they can just create stuff and have a fun time.”