Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Today is the last of our Future of Fine Crafts guest series from our friends at the Peters Valley Craft Center, which is set to celebrate its 40th anniversary as a national center for fine craft education.

Special thanks to the contributors to this series: Kristin Muller, Kathe Brannon and Susan Kornacki, as well as today’s guest blogger Julia Whitney who shares with us her assistantship experience from the last 10 weeks. All we have to say is: wow, what a list!

My name is Julia Whitney and I have lived and worked for ten weeks in the Delaware River Gap, assisting nine workshops for the Ceramic Department at Peter’s Valley Craft Center. There are student assistants for each department, chosen by applications, from all over the country.

Traveling from Alton, Illinois a small river town and suburb of St. Louis Missouri, my experience at PV has far exceeded my expectations. I work facilitating ceramic workshops, helping instructors and students, and maintaining equipment, and overall studio conditions. This includes eight to twelve hour days, six days a week. After a long days work I enjoy speeding off on my bicycle to meet fellow assistants to pick black raspberries, and swim in the eddies of the Delaware River. Afterwards we head back to our residence for long conversations at the ever-popular picnic table, or bike back to the studio to make art.

Being the final week of my assistantship at PV, I sat down to reflect on what made the experiences so worthwhile to my growth. Following is a list comprised of points that resonated with me from each workshop that I took directly out of my sketchbook. I think that each of these notations captures a little bit of the essence of the center and what it is that instructors, students and staff take back into their everyday lives.

1. Peters Valley is about educating our intuition to create more freely
2. It is about making a safe place to work, and to share
3. To think about words, and what you want to communicate
4. To express gratitude
5. To ask questions
6. PV is about working for discovery rather than product
7. To develop ideas and use fundamental building blocks to complete the work
8. It is a place to try everything, and figure out what you are doing
9. It is a place to understand when art does and does not work
10. It is a place to build around others, and in doing so, build confidence
11. To be aware of our sensitivities
12. To address concepts of form, surface, and idea
13. To balance between the physical and the visual
14. Students are pushed to ask where their sense of beauty and taste originate
15. To find beauty in organization
16. To use simple materials
17. To work hard, and see results
18. To engage in peer review, research, and discussion
19. It is a place to meet new friends, and reconnect with old acquaintances
20. It is a place to foster your love of learning
21. To practice patience with developing technique
22. To test your limits and break through boundaries
23. Peters Valley encourages engagement in the natural world
24. To make mistakes intentional
25. And to master a material
26. To disregard what you are good at and focus on what you may learn
27. It is a place to create themes, initiate and investigate
28. To build your bibliography
29. And to focus on the sweep of a bowl
30. To collect what happens beyond a photograph.
31. To be resourceful
32. To make “do-dads”
33. To be considerate
34. To heal
35. To help others
36. It is about working with the earth to become connected to the community
37. To increase your vocabulary
38. To understand what you are trying to get back to
39. To seek truths
40. To begin with an idea
41. And then stop to think
42. It is a place to understand the meaning of different
43. To be dependable and selfless
44. To take a technique and push it until it becomes your own
45. To understand an object’s story, and our own personal stories
46. To create metaphor
47. Peters Valley allows you a place to make work for you!
48. To appreciate small gestures
49. To gain inspiration
50. To see the stars
51. It is a place to continually try new things
52. It is a place to question levels of information versus wisdom
53. To focus on the details
54. To realize the full potential of a curve
55. PV is a place to create something done before, and something new
56. To capture visual breadth
57. It is about understanding how you relate to art and life
58. To play
59. To find your voice
60. To put your notes away
61. To develop a personal rhythm
62. To let go of insecurities
63. To let your competitive nature out with a healthy dose of badminton, kick ball, or basketball
64. To open your heart and mind to others
65. And to speak confidently.

I want to say thank you to Peters Valley for making this list possible, as well as to all the instructors I gained these insights from; they include: Kristin Muller, Shanna Fliegel, Joyce Michaud, Chris Staley, Jeff Oestreich, Leigh Taylor-Mickelson, John Dix, Arthur Gonzalez, and Takeshi Yasuda. Thank you to my fellow assistants, as well as the students for creating such a rich and fun learning environment! And a very special thanks to the department head of ceramics, Bruce Dehnert and his wife Kulvinder Kaur Dhew for allowing me the opportunity to grow as an artist and as a person. It has truly been a unique and invaluable experience.

Please visit the Peters Valley Craft Center website for complete information about the center, including their workshops, craft fair and store.

Welcome back to our 4-part series, the Future of Fine Crafts, in which we’re following student-artists and their experiences at the Peters Valley Craft Center, a national center for fine craft education which is celebrating its 40th anniversary.

Today, we hear from Susan Kornacki, whose experience at Peters Valley reminds us that art and the act of creating can bring us together as a community.

Making paper (left) and sculpting with it in the Fibers Studio

Susan Kornacki

I recently graduated from the State University of New York College at Fredonia with a Bachelor of Arts in English and Visual Arts, a combination that tends to elicit raised eyebrows and questions like “And what do you plan to do with that?” I accepted an Assistantship position at the Peters Valley Craft Center Fibers Studio with the hope of finding some excellent, pithy answers to that key question – and, to my joy, ended up finding much more than that.

When I arrived in Peters Valley, dusk was settling and the day lilies were just beginning to close. I was awestruck by the natural beauty around me: unpacking was slow, as I kept getting distracted by the majestic pine forest across the street from Hilltop House, where I would be staying for four weeks. Bullfrogs chortled in a nearby pond, and gradually the fireflies began to illuminate the darkening air. That night I slept in a new bed in a new home, wondering what tomorrow would bring.

The next day I met with Fran, the Fibers Studio Manager. After a brief studio clean-up, we headed down to the kitchen to eat lunch. My nerves jangled as I contemplated meeting a host of new people. Any concerns were immediately erased as I settled onto a wooden picnic table bench with my plate full of food, however – pleasant laughter rang around me as the other people at the table gently eased me into their conversation. I was struck by the warm atmosphere, and the sense of community I immediately felt. As I reflect on my experience at Peters Valley, this first meal remains a vivid memory. Never have I felt so comfortable in a new place, on the first day of a new job.

Throwing a bowl in the Ceramics Studio

I had the pleasure of assisting Pat Hickman’s class, “Tensile Translucence.” As the studio assistant, I was responsible for ensuring that the students always had whatever they needed, and were comfortable and well-supplied; connecting Pat to any resource she might need; and keeping the studio pristine. Going into this experience, I knew I would learn about a variety of new materials and techniques, and would have the unique opportunity of meeting and working with a range of artists. As a sculptor, the former appealed to me, and as a brand new professional, the latter was essential, too. What I did not anticipate was how much I would learn about pedagogy at Peters Valley.

Observing Pat Hickman teach was an insightful, educational experience. By incorporating her knowledge of various cultures and textile traditions into her lesson plans, she brought an anthropological twist to her class on hog gut sculpting. I’d been wondering how to combine my interest in cultures and women’s studies with art education, and Pat showed me how to blend all three seamlessly. She shared anecdotes about Japanese women tying a thousand red knots in a war memento for soldiers leaving a village, and Turkish women communicating secret messages through intricate head scarf embroidery. These insights supplemented assignments created to encourage the students to explore their own definitions of home, breath, and power. By assisting this class, and learning alongside the students as I facilitated their working environment, I was exposed to a new teaching style that inspired me to pursue and overlap my interests.

Sculpting with paper, grass and light in the Fibers Studio

During my assistantship, I was able to continue creating my own artwork while assisting others in the creation of theirs. With Fran’s guidance and support, I learned papermaking skills and began sculpting with my homemade paper. I also experimented with hog gut, and at the end of my assistantship, was able to take the free class that assistants earn: I enrolled in “Firing the Noborigama,” and fell in love with the wood firing process. My already deep fascination with ceramics was strengthened by John Dix’s excellent workshop on this Japanese firing method.

Loading the Noborigama

Something magical happened in this class: we bonded. I’ve seen communities spring up quickly and unexpectedly in ceramics studios before, and should not have been surprised, but this was the fastest I’d seen it happen. In five days, we warmed up to one another, joked, shared stories. As I watched the boundaries come down between the students, I pondered the power of art to form communities. In a rapidly digitizing world that can isolate human beings, the development of community is becoming a fascination of mine. How does one create an environment where people feel not only inspired but also safe, a space that nurtures a sense of belonging?

Peters Valley is such a place. Through my assistantship and as an emerging artist, I was able to benefit from the warm and creatively active environment, and begin to learn how one might foster similar community art centers in other spaces. Peters Valley helped me hone my professional ambitions and sense of social responsibility into a cohesive plan: in the future, I will attend graduate school for either studio arts and art education, or non-profit arts administration. Thanks to Peters Valley, I am now equipped with a variety of tools and ideas with which to achieve my goals and dreams.

* * *

Located in the Delaware Water Gap, Peters Valley offers 2- to 5-day workshops in blacksmithing, ceramics, fibers, fine metals, photography, wood and special topics including printmaking books & paper, drawing, and glass. The Center provides immersion experiences that appeal to anyone who wants to be a part of a creative, learning, and solutions-seeking community.

Welcome back to the Future of Fine Crafts Mondays, where we are following four artist-students during the month of July as they reflect on their experience, art medium, skill development and works of art created during recent classes at Peters Valley Craft Center.

Last week, we heard from Kristin Muller, Executive Director at the Center. Today, we hear from student/artist Kathe Brannon, who reminds us that you don’t have to be a professional to take classes at Peter’s Valley – they welcome anyone with a passion for creativity.

Kathe Brannon

A friend talked me into joining her in an intermediate felting class at Peter’s Valley. We rode together, and every night after class, I thanked her for encouraging me. I knew about PV but never considered taking a class. I thought it was for “professionals,” not avid amateurs like myself.

I’ve been involved with needlework and fiber all my life so I decided to try something new. The environment at Peter’s Valley was perfect: we were at Thunder Mountain in a studio with a beautiful view of the Delaware valley. Also, the lunches at picnic tables were healthy and delicious, the students and instructors were relaxed and pleasant to be with, and the learning experience was exceptional.

In my class, we had a small group of 5 people of all levels of competency. Each person brought their ideas to the group and shared their challenges as well as their successes with everyone. It was a very supportive environment, with humor added in as we worked the felt into vessels. The intimacy of the setting provided our instructor the ability to keep in touch with all of us in the large studio. It was tough work physically, and it was mentally challenging as well – going to the right side of the brain for 8 hours at a stretch was exhilarating. Pam MacGregor, our instructor, was so encouraging, knowledgeable, and positive that I’d take any class she taught.

What I discovered during my time at Peter’s Valley is the tremendous resource it is to our community. As we all struggle with overloaded schedules, a class at PV can be just what we all need to kick back, put on our jeans, and discover new skills. I love working with my hands and felting certainly challenged that! It’s an upper body workout that starts out a mess and becomes an object of beauty through manipulation of the wool. The overall experience was just so positive, I can’t stop telling everyone about it (plus showing off my accomplishments!).

You can learn more about the the Fiber Studios at Peter’s Valley here.

Welcome to the Future of Fine Crafts Mondays! Peters Valley Craft Center (a Dodge grantee), getting set to celebrate its 40th anniversary, is a national center for fine craft education where people’s lives are enriched through the exploration and execution of fine craft.

Located in the Delaware Water Gap, Peters Valley offers 2- to 5-day workshops in blacksmithing, ceramics, fibers, fine metals, photography, wood and special topics including printmaking books & paper, drawing, and glass. The Center provides immersion experiences that appeal to anyone who wants to be a part of a creative, learning, and solutions-seeking community. We will follow four artist-students during the month of July as they reflect on their experience, art medium, skill development and works of art created during recent classes at Peters Valley Craft Center.

Our first story comes from Kristin Muller, Executive Director at the Center who is an artist in her own right and was drawn to Pat Hickman’s workshop on Tensile Translucence.

Pat Hickman

On Friday evenings at 7:30, visiting instructors and students convene in the Bevan’s Church for an evening slide presentation. It is my favorite time of the week because I get to introduce our summer studio assistants who, in turn, introduce our visiting instructors with a brief bio. Each instructor presents images of their work and a ten minute lecture. Depending on the week, we have anywhere from 4 to 8 instructors presenting what they make and why they make.

Time seems to fly as you listen and see art history in the making. Our fabulous instructors come from all walks of life. They are teachers, makers, inventors, and innovators who work in mediums such as clay, fine metals, wood, fiber, photography, glass, encaustic, polymer, basketry, found objects and more. It is a treat to hear people speak about what has inspired a specific direction in their work.

Pat Hickman’s presentation of her knotted and stretched work simply blew my mind and here is why. She ventured to Alaska, curious about how the native people live and work and the materials they use. She shared what she discovered, a raincoat on display that was translucent, light weight and totally water proof made of walrus gut. Yes—walrus gut. The raincoat was very elegant and had an ephemeral quality about it. During her time in Alaska, Pat managed to learn more about how gut is processed and what it required to be worked.

Pat Hickman’s work with hog gut

Upon her return from the Alaskan adventure, she proceeded to investigate hog gut (common sausage casing) to see how it could be worked. Pat has developed an impressive body of work from wall installations to sculptural vessels, to architectural installations made of hog gut. I admit to feeling a bit squeamish about the subject but I was so taken by the delicate translucency that I approached Pat after the presentations and told her about a series of ceramic sculptures I had made two years ago. It was a breakthrough series for me. They are ceramic shapes that are very organic, almost cocoon like, that I call my ‘Papoose Series’. I had hoped to incorporate mixed media into them and was looking for a proper material to lace or close up the space left open in the forming process. I shared with Pat this spark of curiosity about the hog gut. She kindly invited me to join her class the following day.

I joined the group on Saturday afternoon and then again on Sunday because during the night I was seeing sculptures in my dreams. Pat set me up with a needle and a section of clean gut and showed me how to sew with it and how to stretch it. Students were using basketry materials to make shapes and incorporate knotted gut and stretched gut to the forms. In addition people were making pages for books, coloring the gut and making things such as jewelry to abstract sculptures. The group seemed entranced with the material. They had raided the metal scrap pile outside the blacksmithing studio and were redefining objects as they transformed into dancing tools with gut, and lace and paper.

What fascinated me the most was the simplicity of the membrane and it’s responsiveness. Most craft mediums are defined by a tradition. In clay for example there is a linear process through which one learns to manipulate clay on the potter’s wheel. There is a rich history to support certain aspects of the learning, but with hog gut, aside from the Native Alaskan traditions, there really isn’t an art tradition. Pat Hickman has been an innovator of sorts. Therefore the investigation took on a very free and abstract exploration.

Papoose by Kristin Muller

On the last day of class, during the final critique, I was simply stunned. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Six women had each made at least three significant, interesting, profound works.

Peters Valley students’ work

Every student seemed to have found new directions to continue investigating on their own. I for one have had dreams in which I see new work that incorporated the hog gut, and I was so grateful for the generosity from the instructor and the students who shared their materials, their support and their feedback with me.

As the Executive Director I spend most of my time in the office, on the phone, the computer or meeting with people. Sharing in this experience was a gift and an affirmation that Peters Valley Craft Center is a very special place. It is a place where you may be surprised at what will inspire you.

Today is the last of our Developing Your Board Leadership Series. For the last 6 weeks, we’ve been hearing from grantees who have recently taken part in our Board Leadership Training Series workshops and are now telling their stories about how they are applying what they’ve learned to their organizations.

Allison Trimarco of Creative Capacity kicked off the series with some really helpful and humorous advice about fundraising. We also heard about fundraising from Matt Finlay, board member of the Mayo Center for the Performing Arts. Ruth Fost of Pushcart Players talked about organizational succession planning while Liz Mitchell of the Printmaking Council of New Jersey shared her organization’s turnaround story. John Gattuso of the Hunterdon Land Trust Alliance discussed losing and choosing board members, while Eddie Rogers of The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey explained working through a major transition. Today, we hear from Maleyne Syracuse of the Peters Valley Craft Center and more about Nonprofit Lifecycles, a signature workshop of the Dodge Foundation’s Technical Assistance offerings.

A Nonprofit Is More Likely To Reach Its Programmatic Goals If It Is Well Managed

In her book, Nonprofit Lifecycles, Susan Kenny Stevens identifies the Seven Stages of Nonprofit Capacity:

1. Idea
2. Start-Up
3. Growth
4. Maturity
5. Decline
6. Turnaround
7. Terminal

According to Ms. Stevens, mature nonprofits have reached the stage in their lifecycle in which they are “well established, operating smoothly and…provide consistently relevant and high quality services.”

Peters Valley Craft Center celebrates its 40th Anniversary this year. After 40 years, one might expect Peters Valley to be a mature organization. But it’s not quite that simple. Maturity doesn’t necessarily come automatically or easily or simply with time. Nonprofit Lifecycles has been a valuable and vital tool for our Board and Staff in assessing Peters Valley and identifying those things we need to do to make PV a truly mature organization.

I’ve been on the Board at Peters Valley for a little over 10 years. And for as long as I have been involved and for many years before that, Peters Valley has experienced cycles of boom and bust: one or two good years of balanced budgets or even surplus followed by years of deficit and struggle to pay off debt.

We thought the answer was simply more money. Emergency appeals (“Help Save Peters Valley!”) were successful but when you launch an emergency appeal every 2-3 years, it’s no longer an emergency. The answer isn’t simply more money—more money is a tactical solution—it certainly helps in the short term but often, as it did in our case, the quick fix masks deeper issues.

The answer wasn’t more programs either. Like many nonprofits, PV tried to “program” its way out of its boom and bust cycle. But while new programs are grand to talk about and fundable in the short term, over the long term ours were not self-sustaining and created drag on organizational resources.

Recurring cycles of boom and bust are exhausting—for the Board, the Staff, donors and constituents. Peters Valley needed to create a sustainable turnaround.

Using the lifecycle framework, the PV Board saw that organization was stuck in a pattern of flipping from “Growth Stage” to “Decline” and back. While PV did not slip irretrievably into the Terminal stage, Peters Valley never fully matured either. One of the reasons the organization did not fully mature was that much of its administrative/management systems and infrastructure did not really progress past the Start-up stage.

Mature organizations must have a healthy balance between (1) their mission and programs, (2) their capital and (3) their organizational capacity. These are the 3 legs of the stool. If any one or more of them is not as strong as the others, the stool topples over. Peters Valley has a vibrant mission and wonderful programs. It has capital – some times more than others. But it had not fully developed the organizational capacity it needed to fully achieve its programmatic goals: enough people in the right jobs, all the proper space and systems and all the appropriate processes that would allow it to do everything it needs to do and do well.

I want to be clear that this is not a criticism of the PV Staff. Peters Valley has great, hardworking and dedicated staff. But even the best, most hardworking staff need – frankly deserve – strong organizational capacity. Without a systematic approach to the organization’s growth—a truly strategic division of labor, evolved systems and planning and detailed policies and procedures—it’s just not possible to run an organization as complex as PV efficiently. Peters Valley offers over 150 two to five-day workshops, uses more than 100 guest instructors, welcomes more than 700 students (many of whom live and eat on campus), and operates more than 20 separate buildings, including studios, dorms and a kitchen, many of which are historic structures. And that’s just our Summer Adult Workshop Program!

Peters Valley Craft Center store

So why did Peters Valley not fully develop the organizational capacity it needed? It’s not uncommon for an organization’s programs to get ahead of its capacity and there are many reasons for this. I will mention one that is probably relevant to other organizations: an overreliance on volunteers. As PV grew and its programs evolved, especially when resources were slim, we were blessed with many dedicated volunteers, especially Board members, who were more than willing to jump in and help out where needed. This is great for a nonprofit in the Start-up or early Growth Stage. But as an organization matures, it can’t continue to simply rely on the good will of volunteers. As volunteers came and went, often there was no paper trail and limited institutional memory about who had done what, what had worked, what hadn’t worked or when things needed to be done. It is possible to use volunteers successfully (we have an excellent volunteer who runs our annual craft fair very successfully), but it takes structure, systems and organization!

So where are we today? As I said earlier, capacity building isn’t necessarily easy and it is the Board’s responsibility to ensure that the organization has the resources it needs to build capacity, a responsibility that the PV Board has embraced. Efforts are underway to ensure an appropriate division of labor among staff members, identify functions that need to be filled and create position descriptions. Written policies and procedures are being developed to cover all of our functions. Moreover, last year, the PV Board committed itself to a comprehensive strategic planning process, in order to ensure that we evaluated and took appropriate action with respect to all 3 legs of our stool: mission and programs, capital, and capacity.

I could devote another whole blog to our strategic planning process so I won’t go into a lot of detail here. But we are very pleased that among the 15 Board and staff members who participated in our goal setting retreat on April 17th, we had broad consensus around goals and, not surprisingly, several addressed organizational capacity. We are working now on the strategic plan itself and an actionable implementation plan. But it all began with a frank assessment of where PV was in its lifecycle.

Maleyne Syracuse is the President of the Board of Directors of Peters Valley Craft Center. She is also is President of Board of Directors of the Pike County (PA) Public Library and serves as a member of the Board of Trustees of two NYSE traded closed ends funds. Ms. Syracuse retired in 2007, after over 25 years as an investment banker, most recently as a Managing Director with JP Morgan. She enjoys gardening and fiber arts—a passion she developed after taking weaving courses at Peters Valley. Ms. Syracuse lives with her husband and their two cats in New York, NY and Milford, PA.

The Dodge Foundation thanks all of our guest bloggers in the Developing Your Board Leadership series for their time and thoughtful input. We hope that these blog posts have been informative to all of our readers. For further information about our Technical Assistance workshops, please visit the Dodge website.