In the tradition started by Marblehead pottery, the Los Angeles Pottery Show is fostering the connection between pottery and social welfare by donating proceeds from verbal appraisals to Homeboy Industries. This year, the Los Angeles Pottery Show is being held a couple of weeks earlier, on January 23rd and 24th, which is a real strategic advantage, since it won’t be conflicting with the ever popular Clock Show and the Vintage Fashion Expo. Los Angeles Pottery Show promoters Ken Stalcup and Dennis Warden along with David Rago and Suzanne Perrault will be raising money through verbal appraisals to get kids out of gangs. There are many projects taking place at the organization, and placing art on pottery is one of them; several stunning examples will be shown at the show. Marblehead Pottery started the tradition of social betterment through pottery when in 1904, Dr. Herbert J. Hall, a studio art pottery in Marblehead, Massachussetts, took the controversial step of using ceramic making and decorating as a rehabilitation and therapeutic aid to local sanitarium patients at Hall’s Devereux Mansion Sanitarium. He did this despite the vocal objections of so-called community leaders. Marblehead was not the only sanitarium to take up potting. Dr. Phillip King Brown at the Arequipa Sanitarium thought that patients should be given some sort of occupation. According to Sandy Raulston, one of the promoters of the Golden California Show, a lot of the potters were women, since a lot of the patients were women. ”There were a lot of mad chamber maids from San Francisco,” he said. “They worked inside where it was cold, dark and damp so they tended to get it much worse than the men who worked outside.” The work that the patients provided would be sold and the profits would help pay for the care that they were given. Also, the work would give the patients something to do instead of resting, which he felt would bring about idleness. The first occupation that they attempted was basket weaving, but baskets failed to reap in enough profits. Dr. Brown heard about the success of pottery making at the Marblehead Sanitarium and decided to give it a try at Arequipa, and to call it a success was an understatement. At the Panama Pacific Exposition, Arequipa pottery had its own booth with three former patients showing how the pottery was made. A lot of credit should also be given to Frederick Hurten Rhead, a potter from Staffordshire, who decided to take the job of starting pottery making at Arequipa. Collectible art created by patients was not just restricted to the world of pottery. Prison art was a popular and productive way for inmates to spend their time, from caricatures on envelopes to cigarette wrappers folded into baby shoes. Vintage prison art is highly collectible. Tauni Brustin, co-promoter of the All-American Show, is a collector of prison art who also regularly attends the Los Angeles Pottery Show. The Los Angeles Pottery Show has become the biggest and the best of its kind. Back in the old days, there used to be the Pottery Show Calif, started by Al Nobel and continued briefly by Penelope, the Orange County Pottery Show in Buena Park presented by Bobby Murphy, and Steve Sanford’s Bay Area Pottery Show, which was held in San Jose. Although it is held in the expansive Pasadena Center now, when it started out, the Los Angeles Pottery Show occupied a much smaller venue
