BY: NINA GOMEZ
Staff
A young intern riding along a median, gets out, crawls down into the ravine as police are coming after her and then she pops up and takes a picture. Her picture is printed as a banner headline photo, all across the front page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The picture? Jimmy Michael getting blown up on the highway during the Mob War in St. Louis during the ‘80s.
There was a bomb in his car. “Right before rush hour they blew up one of the mobsters on highway 55, back in the ‘80s that’s what was happening in St. Louis,” said Kathy Kuper while concentrating on molding her clay project in the back of room HE-132, the ceramics room.
The advanced ceramics class at STLCC-Meramec, meets once a week on Fridays from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. It currently consists of around less than 15 people. Most of the students are retirees and/or returning members of the class for over four years, and some that are brand new to the class. There are some that have photographed mobsters getting blown up and gotten nominated for a Pulitzer prize for photojournalism during desegregation, a married couple who own a local ginger liqueur brand, and some that say they have been here “210 years.” There are also some like Cindy Lamboley who smiles, shows her crafts and promises the clay seeds she’s making “are not turds,” but are a replica of her garden plant.
There are also some who have their own at-home ceramics studios like Christine Raquepaw who was a graphic designer and illustrator. “I have my own at home, but I just wanted to take a class and learn some new stuff and hangout with some other people, I’m usually by myself at home,” she said.
The instructor, Phillip Finder, assigns them prompts. However, they have the freedom of deciding whether to follow it, be inspired by it, or go a completely different direction. Their projects can take about anywhere from a couple weeks to a month to complete.
Finder shows them the prompts with thematics through a slideshow. “We saw some really interesting anti-foot pieces that were kind of fun and unusual. I don’t know if anybody did anything exactly like those. I doubt it, but they did inspire people to kind of think about the possibilities. That’s kind of what we start with, the possibilities. Don’t you think Christine?” said Bill Foster, a returning student in the class, as he turned over to his classmate. She smiled and agreed and began to show her work.
Raquepaw’s ceramic piece is making a replica of her grandparents’ house in Nebraska with all four sides of it and she said it’ll hold up photos. “I’m going to do the cows I could put on clay and fire or people in the windows,” she said as she quiets down when she specifies, “my grandparents and stuff.” Foster responds with how much he loves that idea.
She thought of the idea because, “Everything else I came up with was really sad and this was a happy memory, something to remember.”
Her project allows those who see it, a gateway into a personal memory for her, she said. It is a story to tell through her art. The real house was in a little town in Nebraska where her Polish immigrant grandparents lived. Raquepaw remembers visiting them for two weeks in the summers. “You wouldn’t think that was the most wonderful place on earth, but it was,” she said as she laughed.
Raquepaw remembers what she describes as her childhood wonderland, a big yard with a big garden. She laughs because they had no hose but they had chickens, geese and a pony at some point. “But if anybody influenced me in my life it was them,” she said.
Raquepaw liked how they lived, they didn’t have a lot of money, but they were very good to all their grandkids and very involved in their Polish immigrant community in their church.
She said they were very grounded. “It wasn’t about ‘Keeping up with the Jones’ or anything, it was just taking care of people and my grandmother made beautiful quilts,” she said as she remembers the time her grandma gave out slips with corresponding quilts she made for all the grandchildren for her 50th wedding anniversary. “I was probably eight, but I got the best quilt.”
When she finishes showing her work she looks over to Foster’s work, points and says, “That is a whole ‘nother level.”
Foster is not only a returning student but is also married to mob-capturer Kathy Kuper. He says they have been together 46 years since she moved in after the first date, and are still together in their ceramics class at opposite ends of the table.
Foster’s work also reflects a story that he says is near to his heart. “It reminds me of a simpler, creative time with my son. Now he’s 35 he’s got his own life and we still get together, still very close. But it’s never as simple as it was. When everything’s a wonder, new, different and exciting, and so this kind of captures that,” he said.
His project is what he describes as a tall mythical mountain that is also a cave with intricate smooth curves that look carved by the wind with fantasy creatures and faces surrounding the piece. It has a variety of different entrances both big and small with windows and gargoyles. “It will have this crystal with a rose window in it that will reflect colored lighting inside when the sun shines on it,” he said.
His project was inspired by Finder’s “reliquary” prompt, when the Catholic church used art containers to hold a relic from a saint or other things. Foster’s reliquary being the clay snails and dragons he would mold with his son that he has kept for around 31 years. “When my son was four years old, he’s a bit on the ADD side, so we had to keep him very busy, so we frequently did art with him. I worked with him, and we spent the day molding clay into mythical creatures,” he said.
He plans on making it as interactive as he can and giving it to his son as a gift.
Kuper, his wife, has made a reliquary in honor of the cicadas, an unwanted pest to most, but adored by her. She likes how they come up to “sing” to her. “We thought they were wonderful,” she said.
Her project has what she calls a “Fred Flintstone” look with unconventional open slots that could hold the dead cicadas that she brought from home in a Tupperware container. It’s got a long real trunk that connects with the piece and a clay mantis that’s bigger than the slots. “I have a feeling for the natural world,” Kuper said.
She adapted the look after the class had a “critique session,” where they seem to know her well enough to say that her first model was “too uniform.” “People said – you know that doesn’t really follow what you do best. So then I tried it again,” she said.
The class critiques are just another way where this community and their stories can help build one another, shape the other’s piece and help each other create their best possible piece. “People have a lot more experience than we do. And so they’re always willing to share suggestions for how to go about doing something in a different way than we’ve ever thought of. I was talking about the glazing and multi-bisquing with Christine this morning and she’d never heard of that before,” said Foster.
They describe each other as honest, constructive, creative and friendly. They all report satisfaction with the class and Foster claims he leaves the class happier than when he enters. He and Kuper emphasize that this also depends if the project is going good or not. “I’ve had some pieces- I think we all have- that come out with something wrong with them,” Foster said.
“I’ve never had that happen,” said Raquepaw.
Foster changed his look and said, “Hey I heard about that crack in your roof.”
They burst out laughing in a room filled with conversation.
