Text by Andrew Travers
Images by Will Sardinsky
Preparing tea for a visitor at his Carbondale studio, potter Alleghany Meadows serves it in a cup made by his own hand. A recent creation of red and white clay coated with clear and cobalt blue glaze, it’s marked by indentations from Meadows’ fingers and sgraffito writing etched in his illegible cursive. Meadows made the vessel in early 2023, when he traveled to Italy to teach and immerse himself in Etruscan ceramic traditions while working out of a 16th-century potter’s studio. Viewing a small, ancient cup in a museum in Rome, he noticed something that shook him to his core.
“There was a potter’s fingerprint that was perfectly preserved from maybe 2,500 years ago,” Meadows recalls with awe, back at home and perched above his pug mill and wheel in Studio for Arts and Works (SAW) in Carbondale. “I can imagine the exact moment when that person touched that piece of clay. That’s how I wanted to touch clay then—to leave a mark.” Meadows has certainly left his mark on the creative community in western Colorado. As the owner of SAW, the vibrant makers’ hub he co-founded with Gavin Brooke and moved to its current 8,000-square-foot space in 2011, he provides affordable studio rentals for an evolving cohort of 25 local artists.
In running SAW for a decade, Meadows found that artists were hungry to build community and connection. He found that same hunger in the nearby desert town of Fruita. “There were skilled professional artists living two miles away from each other who had never met one another,” Meadows says. So he and Brooke joined forces again in 2022 to open Fruita Arts Recreation Marketplace (FARM) in a former hardware warehouse, bringing the SAW concept down the Western Slope. (Unlike SAW, FARM also houses commercial tenants, including a bike mechanic and a Rocky Mountain PBS newsroom).
The SAW and FARM projects removed Meadows from his potter’s wheel and directed his attention instead on construction budgets, lien waivers, and spreadsheets. “I’ve been introduced to people as a developer,” Meadows says with a laugh. “But yeah, I am. It’s a development.”
Those initiatives in community building came after he made a name for himself nationally as a potter and as founder of Artstream Nomadic Gallery, a restored 1967 Airstream trailer that he took on the road in 2002 and that has since made hundreds of stops around the country and represented more than 150 contemporary ceramic artists throughout North America. He’s currently renting it out to the Carbondale Clay Center, and he hopes to soon pass it on to the next generation of arts organizers in the community. “It is interesting, in that passing along, how we create a context for people to grow,” Meadows says of the creative cross-pollination he’s been working to foster through Artstream Nomadic Gallery, SAW, and FARM. “Amazing things can happen when you build that space.”
Meadows is himself the product of influences from those who came before him. He’s worked alongside some of the greats of the ceramics world, including assisting Anderson Ranch Arts Center founder and American raku pioneer Paul Soldner in constructing his bespoke wine cellar at the Soldner Center in Aspen. At 19 he studied in Karatsu, Japan, under master potter Takashi Nakazato, and later they converged again when he and the Japanese potter became fixtures at the Ranch in the 1990s. Nakazato returned to serve as a visiting artist at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in summer 2023. Spending an evening with his mentor crystalized for Meadows the effect Nakazato had on him and his craft. “While I was working with Takashi, it became incredibly clear to me that I wanted to make work that people could actually drink from or use for food presentation,” he says. “Seeing him again, I realized it’s been 30 years now that I’ve been making utilitarian work, and that initial inspiration and commitment came from my time working and living in his house.”
Meadows is driven by the potential for someone to pick up his work—to hold it and use it—whether it’s a visitor sipping from one of his ceramic cups in the communal kitchen at SAW or a waiter serving diver scallops and pickled mushrooms on his one-of-a-kind stoneware dishes at Bosq in Aspen. His recent projects include new sets of dishes for Bosq’s Barclay Dodge, chef-owner of the recently Michelin-starred tasting-menu restaurant, who Meadows has been collaborating with for five years. “I might’ve made 40 of these for him, and every one is different,” Meadows says proudly as he runs his hands over a recently glazed dish destined for the tables of Bosq.
Witnessing the galvanizing effect his SAW and FARM projects have had on the region’s artist communities, one wonders: Is there overlap between creating community and creating a pot? Yes, Meadows says: “Being an artist is trying to make something when you don’t know what the outcome is going to be—basically inventing something from setting up a context.” Holding up one of the Etruscan-inspired mugs bearing his fingerprint, he continues: “It’s a leap of faith that people are going to want to come rent studios. It’s making something that is aesthetically energized. There’s a huge amount of the overlap.”