“The clay calls me back to action, ordinary work, utilizing thought, yes, but shaping substance and wondering as the wheel spins”
—Charles Counts1
For Charles Counts, craft was his calling; making pottery, his life’s mission (Fig. 1). Born in Harlan County, Kentucky, in 1934, Counts moved with his family to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 1944, where he grew up and attended high school in the government-planned secret city that was the headquarters of the Manhattan Project for the atomic bomb. He received a first-rate education there, with art and science taught in equal measure. But, more importantly, as Counts later wrote, “growing up in Oak Ridge made me alive to larger citizen-like responsibility. . . . My pots were not protest-pots. My way of life itself became a protest.”2
Counts moved back to Kentucky to study at Berea, the first integrated and co-educational college in the South.3 Students trade work for tuition at Berea, and Counts discovered pottery following a student work assignment; his job at the kiln “sparked his initial interest in a vocation as designer-craftsman.”4 After college, he received a graduate fellowship from Southern Illinois University, and then moved west to study ceramic design at one of the most technologically advanced ceramic studios, at the University of Southern California.5
While on the West Coast, Counts also apprenticed with Bauhaus potter Marguerite Wildenhain, proprietor of Pond Farm Pottery in Guerneville, California. Charles and his first wife, Rubynelle, worked one summer at Wildenhain’s pottery, where, he wrote, he “learned more . . . in six weeks than all my six years in college or university.”6 Beyond absorbing Wildenhain’s philosophy around the craft of ceramics, he was receptive to her way of life—a life of integrity guiding a program in a remote, inaccessible part of northern California.
Following his service in the US Army, Counts and Rubynelle moved back to the South, establishing Beaver Ridge Pottery, near Knoxville, Tennessee, where they made over ten thousand pots between 1959 and 1962. In 1963 they moved to the Georgia side of Lookout Mountain because suburban sprawl had begun to permeate Knoxville, and they desired more space for living and working. The studio in Georgia, Pottery Shop at Rising Fawn, was named for the valley near the southern stretch of Lookout Mountain, where the Countses created a community craft center for quilting, rugmaking, and weaving.
As ceramics became Counts’s professional and personal calling, it also became the way in which he expressed himself. He was determined to make pottery in order to “not . . . be caught like an organization-man in a steady climb to the top of nothing-ness,”7 a comment suggesting knowledge of William Whyte’s classic 1956 book, The Organization Man, which described a society built on economic globalism, and in which citizens lose their individuality.
The Countses felt a deep need to be in a rural area, with direct access to nature. Part of this mentality anticipated some of the late 1960s environmental movement, but Charles also wanted to embed himself in existing creative environments. Learning from, working with, and championing the production of Appalachian potters—many from multi-generational lines of ceramists—was at the heart of his practice during these years; he hoped to keep their way of life alive, to document traditions before they were erased or replaced by modern life, and, in the process, to learn from these craftsmen.
Ensconced in the culture of Appalachia, Counts helped form the group Designer-Craftsmen of the Southern Appalachians, and was a member of several cultural organizations, including the Southern Highland Handicraft [today Craft] Guild, the Council of Southern Mountains, the Georgia Arts Commission, and the American Craft Council (in which he served alongside other notable figures like Arline Fisch, Jack Lenor Larsen, and Mary Walker Phillips). Recognized as a strong voice for Appalachia, Counts became a consultant for the Smithsonian Institution, working with the Economic Development Administration and publishing a pamphlet titled Encouraging American Handcrafts: What Role in Economic Development? in 1966 under its aegis.
Craft Horizons, an important arbiter of taste at mid-century, praised his work during the 1960s and counted him among the outstanding craftspeople working in the South in the June 1966 special issue devoted to crafts of the Southern Appalachians (Fig. 5). The account opens with a quotation from Allen Eaton, author and curator who had championed the craft revival in North Carolina and the broader American South in his 1937 book Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands. Following Eaton is a foreword Counts wrote for Rose Slivka, editor in chief of Craft Horizons from 1959 to 1979, a period that was arguably the most exciting for US studio crafts—and a kind of second wave to the first discussed by Eaton and others in the early twentieth century.8 In the pages that followed, a special section on “Crafts of the Southern Highlands” profiled several craftspeople, including Counts, as exemplars of their craft.
Politically minded, Counts wrote about the Civil Rights movement and the political campaign to elect President John F. Kennedy as some of the most important milestones of his youth. A lidded jar recently acquired by the High features incised scenes ripped from the headlines in 1963 (Figs. 4a, 4b). Beneath the inscription “LIFT UP OUR VOICES AGAINST THE MOB ,” Counts re-created the terror that erupted following the May 11 bombing of African American civil rights leaders in Birmingham, Alabama, using images disseminated through newspapers—firemen blasting protestors with water (Fig. 6) and policemen using menacing dogs (Fig. 7). Counts and Rubynelle had arrived in Birmingham a few days after the bombing to display their artwork at the Sidewalk Art Show, which had been organized by the Birmingham Art Association as a fundraiser for the Birmingham Museum of Art.9 Years later, Counts wrote specifically about this show, noting that the space in front of the museum was rearranged from a city park to a suburban churchyard because leaders feared protest crowds and “Bull” Connor’s police tactics which “might spoil the occasion.”10
A lecture about African pottery by English studio potter Michael Cardew, given at an American Craft Council conference at the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, the oldest crafts school in Tennessee, altered the course of Counts’s life. Following this encounter, he traveled to Nigeria in 1972 and met Ladi Kwali at the Pottery Training Center in Abuja. Kwali was the first female trained in Abuja, eventually working there in wheel-thrown ceramics, taught by Cardew, and in the more indigenous freehand methods for which she would gain global renown. Counts was inspired by Nigerian modern ceramics, particularly from the village of Kwali, where many ethnic Gwari women were working. On his February 1972 visit, he bought a water pot made for daily use, hand built of local clay and fired in an open pit, that is now in the collection of the High Museum of Art (Fig. 3).
Later that year, and partly due to Counts, Kwali came to America and she, fellow potter Clement Kofi Athey, and Cardew embarked on a two-and-a half-month tour of the country (Fig. 11). While in the South they stayed briefly at the Counts pottery, before presenting demonstrations and giving talks in Gatlinburg and Chattanooga, and traveling to Atlanta, where Kwali demonstrated her pottery technique for an art program in the Atlanta Public Schools (Fig. 10).
In 1973 Counts’s work was part of From Beaver Ridge to Rising Fawn, an exhibition that traveled from Oak Ridge in Tennessee to the High Museum in Atlanta. Most vessels were abstractly decorated and functional, but some combined text and narrative scenes, such as the covered jar Free at Last that Counts made to memorialize the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and which is still owned by the King family (Fig. 8).
Having encountered racial strife in the American South firsthand, Counts questioned whether life could be different in a new context. After his first trip to Nigeria, he moved back and forth between there and Georgia for many years, seeking, in his words, “to understand directly whether a sense of identity could be established and shared with others, black or white, rich or poor, highly-schooled or illiterate in terms of modern education.”11 He taught in the fine arts department at Ahmadu Bello University, in Zaria. Inspired by the artistic heritage of Nigerian pottery, he argued for a ceramics program at the university that embraced tradition—learning from the hundreds of villages with unique ceramic traditions—alongside the technological future the university promoted. After years of going between Nigeria and the United States, Counts accepted a professorship at the University of Maduiguri and settled in Nigeria in 1990, where he contracted malaria and died in 2000.
Charles Counts taught his students to make pots that fit their purpose. But pottery was more than just about making: he firmly believed that art could provide a reason for living and, maybe, make us better people. I understand Counts as a postwar new humanist, grounded in early twentieth-century anti-modernism—specifically concerning the return to an authentic, handmade world—but also aware of the power of technology and industrialization, which, in the right hands, had the potential to serve humanity. Time and again he reflected on his academic training and on the work of being a potter; for him what was important was not just what one knows, but what one does. That he was active in important cultural organizations, and, in 1973, received the Governor’s Award in the Arts from then–Georgia governor Jimmy Carter conveys that his passion for potting extended beyond the vessel. His advocacy roles reinforced his beliefs about a greater mission for pottery and handicrafts: that the hand of the craftsperson can help create a better, more humane, and joyful world, whether in Appalachia or Africa.
This article is excerpted from my presentation at the Henry D. Green Symposium of the Decorative Arts, University of Georgia, earlier this year. I would like to thank Kyle Mancuso, curatorial research associate at the High Museum of Art, for his assistance.
1 Charles Counts, “Staying and Leaving,” Appalachian Heritage, vol. 5 (Summer 1977), p. 45. 2 Charles Counts, “A Handful of Clay: A Memoir on Oak Ridge,” Studio Potter, vol. 22 (December 1993), p. 46. 3 Founded in 1855, Berea established the Berea Student Craft Program in the 1890s to promote student creativity and to provide opportunities for students to sell their work. In 1920 Berea added ceramics to the concentrations on offer. 4 Dorothy “Dot” Tredennick, professor at Berea College, quoted in From Beaver Ridge to Rising Fawn: An Exhibition (Oak Ridge, TN: Oak Ridge Community Art Center, 1973), n.p. 5 F. Carlton Ball and Susan Peterson, the influential ceramic artist, teacher, and author who became head of the ceramics department after Glen Lukens, taught during Counts’s time at USC. 6 Charles Counts, Common Clay (Atlanta: Droke House/Hallux, 1971), p. 95. 7 Counts, “Staying and Leaving,” p. 43. 8 During this period, the Countses participated in exhibitions such as Craftsmen: Southeast 66 at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, where contemporary artists like Edward Moulthrop, Bob Ebendorf, and Marilyn Pappas exhibited their pioneering crafts. Charles submitted Event at Rising Fawn, a wall panel with stoneware tiles; and Rubynelle showed two quilts, with her Winter Industry winning a national merit award. 9 Lily May Caldwell, “Saturday is Sidewalk Art Show Day in Birmingham,” Birmingham News, May 12, 1963, p. 90. 10 Charles Counts, “Nigeria: A Personal View,” 1980–1981, p. 2, Berea College Special Collections and Archives, Kentucky. 11 Ibid., p. 4.
MONICA OBNISKI is curator of decorative arts and design at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia.
