The potters cannot keep their hands to themselves. And who could blame them? If you care about the legacy of earthenware, stoneware, porcelain—and they do—the International Museum of Dinnerware Design in Kingston is the Holy Grail. In ceramic, wire, metal, paper, fiber, abstract and functional forms alike, the museum’s collections tally anything and everything to do with dining, dinnerware, and the rituals of the table.
“Any material, any time period, but it has to be good design,” says Margaret Carney, the founding director. “What’s on display is a fraction of the 12,000 items we brought from Ann Arbor when we moved here. And over 9,000 pieces of flatware.” Carney, formerly a professor of ceramic world history at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, runs the museum with her husband, Bill Walker, a ceramic engineer. (The license plate of the car parked outside reads “DNWARE.”)
The IMoDD is niche, but it still covers a surprising amount of ground. The museum was based in Michigan from 2012 until 2024, when it settled in the cavernous old music store space on Broadway in midtown Kingston. From Chinese Song dynasty stoneware to a Pop Art lunchbox with a trompe-l’oeil loaf of sliced bread, the collection spans centuries and continents.
Most of these treasures are safely behind glass, but the three upstate-based artists I’m with visibly itch to feel each object with their own hands. A collection of mid-century dinnerware by industrial designer Russel Wright sparks a surprisingly passionate conversation about form versus function—lids on soup tureens that can’t be cleaned properly; impractical mug and teapot handles.
“Are you actually making something with the end user in mind?” posits Nicole Helen Brunner of Wild Bower Studio. “Or is your goal to simply make something stunning?” says Demetria Chappo, a potter in Kingston. “If I’m making and using it, I want to be able to reach out and grab it.”
Carney brings up the conceptual design of a Russel Wright butter dish. “You can’t get your hand around it,” she says. “And I have long fingers!” Everyone pantomimes the effort to lift a top that’s too wide and practically impossible to handle. Brad Lail, of Lail Design in Catskill, groans, seeming to carry some personal baggage about butter dishes in particular.
The potters look like kids in a candy store, only to be told they can’t try anything. Passing a Roy Lichtenstein paper plate on the wall, and a conceptual teapot from Canadian ceramicist Léopold Foulem—a solid block with a non-functioning spout—the frustration builds. Finally, everyone is allowed to play with the pieces Carney has laid out, including a set of Ruth Duckworth goblets that were actually the artist’s household cups.
Over lunch at the Fuller Building down the block, the artists’ work takes center stage. Rebecca Miller Ffrench of The Upstate Table has laid out a spread featuring place settings of Lail’s creamy stoneware plates. Organic vessels or hand-built, painted platters from Chappo and Brunner overflow with figs, pomegranates, roasted radishes, warm focaccia, and runny cheeses.
The potters ruminate over ceramic glaze techniques, texture, color, method. Chappo’s pieces are alive with the ghosts of her pit fires. She throws in everything—banana peels, snake skins, common reeds collected from the banks of the Hudson, scraps she gets from Migliorelli’s farm stands, seaweed brought back from the beach. It all contributes to the atmospheric process, the fuming and heat of smoke and flame that each artist develops as their individual style. “One of the strong pulls upstate was access to firing outdoors,” she says. “I looked for places with backyards so I could have more pit firings.”
Brunner, who ran a community ceramics space in Brooklyn, runs her Mountain Dale studio on solar power and collects rainwater for slip and glazing. Building out her workspace at home in this remote spot gives her more control over her environmental impact and creates a daily practice of living her values.
A morning spent among conceptual pieces and fine art—and everyday objects made precious by the act of placing them in a white cube—raises the question: When you’re producing work at scale, meant to be sold and used in homes and restaurants, does it still scratch the creative itch?
Photographs by Casey Kelbaugh
