While I was in Puerto Rico during the winter quarter of our sophomore year, attending a seminar for Carleton sociology students led by Byron Fox, I bought an amphora-shaped earthenware vase with yellow and green glaze dripping down its outside. My recollection is I paid $15 for it, though since my prior summer’s job lifeguarding paid about $2/hour, that amount seems high to me now. Then again, I’d fallen in love with pottery, and the piece was lovely. When we returned for spring quarter, my roommate, Jane Prohaska, likely saw the vase since it took pride of place in my corner of Second Myers.
When my husband, Steve Tomashefsky (Harvard ’72), and I moved to Chicago in December 1972, I learned about a wonderful ceramic artists’ studio and gallery, near where I had lived with Stan Greenberg while we attended the ACM Urban Studies program in spring 1971. Soon thereafter, I met the studio’s owner, Bruce Robbins, who guided many early pottery purchases of mine. Like Stan and me, Bruce was (and remains) a progressive political activist. Indeed, most of the potters I’ve met lean left. Lovers of the “back-to-the-earth” practices and environmentalism so many of us espouse, I’ve always felt at home with them.
Today, I own a large ceramics collection, mostly work by contemporary American women. When I was invited to speak at the annual conference of the National Council of Ceramics Educators (NCECA) in Minneapolis in March 2019, I reflected on the Minnesota potters in my collection, some of whom live near Northfield and are members of the Northfield Arts Guild. Their “grandfather” is Warren McKenzie, whose works were on exhibit in the Carleton library when I was last on campus and are always on exhibit in the home of another dear classmate, Beverly Jones Heydinger.
One of these younger Minnesotans is Kelly Connole, Northfield resident and Carleton faculty member. Another was Linda Sikora, who lived in Houston, Minnesota for many years, whose work I have collected since I first saw it at the NCECA conference in St. Paul in 1995. [Above] is a link to a catalog of her work in my collection. (Three of the pieces pictured are promised gifts to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.) Linda and Kelly are just two of dozens of women ceramists whose work I commend to your attention. When you seek them out, I hope you will be reminded of beautiful Boliou with the Arb beyond.
— Rebecca Anne Sive
View a catalog of the works in Rebecca’s collection by Linda Sikora.