Rigorous Generosity

“Rigorous generosity” is at the heart of Carleton’s Empty Bowls, an annual fundraiser for Northfield’s Community Action Center (CAC) created by art professor Kelly Connole in collaboration with Carleton’s Center for Community and Civic Engagement. The shared meal of community-donated soup is served in some 600 bowls, most handmade by Connole’s students.

An international grassroots project, Empty Bowls allows anyone to use its name as long as the event helps combat food insecurity. Carleton’s version, which turned 20 with this May’s edition, is unique because it transforms the College ceramics studio into a pottery—a full-fledged production facility—for a month. Student workers assist as Connole teaches her Academic Civic Engagement class, Ceramics: Throwing, which became the heart of the Empty Bowls event a decade ago.

“We talk a lot in this class about what academic rigor looks like in visual arts,” Connole says, “because it will probably look very different than it does in their history or chemistry classes. This is Carleton—we still want all our work to be grounded in excellence—so what does that look like in this context?”

Rigorous generosity is the notion that Connole and her students have landed on, and it shows up in a big way with Empty Bowls. The event has raised nearly $160,000 for the CAC food shelf over the last two decades—including more than $30,000 raised in the 2024 edition.

Generosity is central to Connole’s pedagogy, as students who fall in love with art can sometimes feel selfish for choosing it as a major or profession—especially when the arts are often seen as an “extra” by society. But through Empty Bowls, she can show them the power inherent in working together to make art.

“I want them to know that the skills they gain through making objects—experimentation, curiosity, communication, community-building—can be used for making change in the world,” Connole says.

Part of the Empty Bowls course is learning the 30,000-year history of ceramics, with Connole emphasizing through experiential learning that most objects throughout time were not made by one individual but rather a community of artists working together.

“Everyone throws, trims, and glazes, so all of the bowls are touched by multiple sets of hands,” Connole says. “The bowls belong to all of us and none of us.”

Connole’s version of Empty Bowls also allows beginners to create professional-quality bowls that would otherwise be beyond their individual skill levels. Even for more advanced students, “they have to get to know the bowl,” Connole says, especially since they’ll be working on vessels that they did not create. This allows for deep engagement with the object and an unmatched appreciation for collaboration. Plus, all the students’ individual art improves immensely, which Connole attributes partially to the amount of reflection they do as part of the class.

Connole experienced such reflection herself in college, at the University of Montana. A pre-med biology major, she had intended to take ceramics in her junior year only to make dishes to furnish her apartment. Instead, “I discovered magic,” Connole says with a laugh. “I made a goose-shaped soup tureen for our first assignment, and it was the happiest I’d ever felt in my life.”

She changed her major and fell in with the art kids, spending the rest of her college experience “finding the meaning of life and being a mess” with her new best friends. In the process, Connole learned a lesson that has guided her work and life ever since: “We need joy.”

“I’ve learned that we can do serious work and, at the same time, experience joy,” she says, “and I’ve had students tell me that their favorite part of Empty Bowls is the profound joy they experience in sharing it with others.”

Connole’s favorite part of Empty Bowls? “All of it.” But if she had to pick, she says it’s her love of the feeling of working together on the same piece of art.

“We have different levels of knowledge and experience, but we’re all equals,” Connole says. “It’s profoundly democratic, and to me, that is what makes a community strong.”