ArtsWatch: Craft Center's Pottery Invitational offers face-to-face connection with the artists and their art

Tom O'Malley, ceramics department head, loads the soda kiln at the Worcester Center for Crafts. He will be among the artists participating in the Pottery Invitational. T&G Staff/Christine Hochkeppel

By Nancy Sheehan

Correspondent

Posted May. 8, 2016 at 6:00 AM
Updated May 8, 2016 at 5:09 PM 

"You just might find yourself bowled over by the Pottery Invitational show at the Worcester Center for Crafts, which runs May 13 to 15.

The show will feature not only the work of 19 nationally known ceramic artists but the artists themselves, who will be standing by their booths in the Craft Center’s Krikorian Gallery to discuss their work with show goers.

That artist-to-visitor interaction is one key difference between an invitational, for which curators invite individual artists to participate, and the more common juried show where jurors cull from all the applicants who respond to a general call.

Pottery invitationals happen in only a smattering of other areas in the country, notably Demarest, New Jersy, where an annual show has run for decades, and also Minnesota, western New York and Dallas. “But as far as New England goes for this type of pottery invitational, the Craft Center is where you come to see it,” said Todd Wahlstrom, co-curator of this year’s Craft Center invitational with his wife, Aysha Peltz. They both are potters working in Whitingham, Vermont, although Wahlstrom grew up in Shrewsbury and took his first ceramics course at the Craft Center more than 30 years ago."

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