Jessie Lazar molds community, one form at a time
Interview by Jillian Scheinfeld
Photography by Stephan Schacher
In Eldred, across from Peck’s, next to the post office and behind the library, you’ll find Sullivan Public. A garage-turned-art-studio, retail space, and community classroom, the 3,400 square foot building has been reborn with the love and care of artist Jessie Lazar.
The daughter of a labor historian and a physical therapist who ushered at theaters, Jessie carries the DNA of a particular New York upbringing: Upper West Side, immersed in museums, galleries, performances, and a community that encouraged curiosity. Inheriting her father’s knack for dealing in the permanence of historical record, she expresses herself through the eternal nature of mud, turning earth into vessels that will outlast us all.
While many potters embrace the whimsical, wabi-sabi nature of clay, Jessie’s pursuit of technical mastery means that every lid fits, every wall is uniformly measured, and every piece of clay is weighed with precision. This meticulous approach lies at the heart of her craft, transforming solitary, methodical work into a meditative practice that softens the noise of modern life. For an artist who grew up with constant cultural stimulation, the slow-motion alchemy of clay—a piece taking weeks to finalize—has become the ultimate counter-rhythm to a world that doesn’t wait.
On an unusually warm autumn day, I sat down with Jessie to discuss the relationship between craft and community, and how a single artist’s practice can ripple outward into a shared creative life.
Being here with you, I sense an incredibly special community happening, with so much going on.
It’s been very organic. There’s a talented, primarily female creative community here, so we’ve been lucky to have sold-out workshops year-round for kids and adults. It’s even busier in the winter, because there’s nothing else to do. We had classes after school three days a week last year: sewing, Lego, ceramics, and a drop-in Sunday class.
How did you end up in Eldred?
All roads in my history somehow led me here. I grew up going to a bungalow colony about 40 minutes away, called Unity House, which is, sadly, no longer there. My dad was a historian and part of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. So, I’ve always had this seminal connection to nature and this area, and I also went to sleepaway camp here. Then in the early 2000s, a friend of mine had a house in Liberty, and they threw us the keys for the weekend. We came up, drove around, and were totally enamored. My husband was like, Who do you think we are? We can’t get a second house. Then we started looking at real estate, and it was really affordable then. We bought a little cabin in Yulan, three miles from this shop. And that was 12 years ago. Initially we were just weekending and, you know, ripping up carpet and painting, and then we moved up here full-time when Covid hit and my daughter’s preschool shut down in the city. Now we’ve dropped some serious roots.
Your husband is an artist too, right?
Yes, he’s a film editor. Our basement is filled with monitors, and he’s been able to really translate what was an in-person job to the woods.
“I’m trying to find a balance: to keep creating humble, everyday items that feel special because they’re made by someone who genuinely loves making them.”
While researching your background, I saw that you studied Fine Arts at Bard, but I’m curious, what first introduced you to the arts? Were you always someone who loved making things?
I’m grateful I grew up in the city in a way that let me enjoy it. I took my first steps in a museum. My mom ushered at theaters, and I was constantly being taken to dance performances and galleries, so all of that was really nurtured. I never had a school notebook that wasn’t covered in collages and drawings. My parents weren’t artists by profession, but I grew up in a community of outspoken, liberal Upper West Siders, where you were encouraged to follow your intuitive path based on what you were exposed to. I knew I wanted to do something creative. I went to Bard as a double major in Critical Theory and Photography. My dad was a serious academic, an American labor historian, and that part of me didn’t want to just go to art school. But I’ve always had busy hands, making things—clothing, quilts, whatever caught my interest. Ceramics came to me after college, but I think the solitary, methodical craft of photography is really similar in a lot of ways to pottery.
I was watching some of your therapeutic-like Instagram videos of you on the wheel. It’s such an elegant-yet-messy endeavor. The medium has this freeform fluidity to it. Do certain elements of pottery come easier than others?
I’m an analytical person, and there’s a lot of technical precision in the way I move through life. There are plenty of potters who sit at the wheel and just make whatever their hands feel like making—where the measurements don’t matter, and the lid doesn’t have to fit perfectly. There’s a part of me that wishes I could work that way, but that’s just not who I am. I’m happy weighing my clay, sitting with a ruler, and aiming for as much precision as possible. I love that I’m working with mud and that it’s tied to the history of humankind. I love that it’s soft and malleable and then becomes something permanent that lasts forever. But I’m not a loose potter.
It sounds like you balance making what’s needed with having space to experiment. How do you decide what to work on in a given day?
I’m lucky that I’m able to make money selling my work. This isn’t a hobby; it’s part of my family’s budget. Because of that, I don’t usually sit down to make just one mug. I’ll have an order for 60. I try hard to keep my shop stocked with things I want to make. Having control over my own retail space means I can create whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like it. But even then, I rarely sit down to make just one piece. If I’m in a vase mood, sometimes it’s just an exercise playing with forms, seeing how tall I can get a two-pound cylinder of clay. By the end of the day, I’ll have a little collection of them lined up. I also try to keep one day a week where I don’t make anything with intention—no orders, no deadlines. I have notebooks full of sketches. I’ll go to the Met, see a green urn, and think, Ooh, that’s good. Then the next time I’m in the studio, I’ll carve out time just to play. Sometimes I don’t keep anything from that day; it’s just about having that creative space. Often, though, something comes out of it, either from failing over and over or finally getting it just right. Those days are where new designs are born. That’s actually how I started making these jars [picks up a jar]. They’re a new thing for me.
“Sitting down and slowly keeping your hands busy, creating something—that ritual, that routine, that constructive distraction—it’s magic. It’s healing.”
I love this jar! It’s like a big, speckled egg.
It is kind of like a big egg. I should call this glaze Quail Egg. My dad died almost exactly a year ago. It was really awful. Just one of those terrible things that everybody somehow has to deal with. Afterward, I found myself driving around, remembering things, memories that would just slip in and out of my mind. I had all these little scraps of paper with notes and memories on them, and I wanted a place to keep them. So, I made some jars and started calling them memory jars. Each one is made of three pieces that come together to form the jar. The idea came from me just going into the studio, knowing I wanted to make something that served this function, instead of having all these scraps in a mug.
What a beautiful and useful way to channel your grief. In giving memory a physical home, you’ve made something that keeps presence where absence used to be. I imagine that kind of work changes how you move through your days—what does a typical one look like for you?
The truth is, between having a kid and running Sullivan Public, which means scheduling classes, updating the website, shipping orders, and then the business of actually making ceramics, I wear a lot of hats. I wish that when I came here, I started working, and when I left, I stopped. But most of the computer work (responding to people’s questions, handling orders) happens either before I get here or after my kid goes to bed. I try hard on the days the shop’s closed, to come in and get to work. I wish I could say I throw and touch wet clay every time I’m here, but I don’t. On the days I know I’m going to throw, though, I come in, apron on, phone silenced, NPR tuned in, and I can go through a hundred pounds of clay in a day. I’m very efficient, and I have to be. When I set out to make things, I sit at the wheel and work straight through until I have to leave.
It sounds like you have a really balanced take on it. What happens when a practice that’s rooted in such slowness meets the pressure to scale or produce more?
It’s stressful no matter what, when you’re trying to turn a craft into a profession where the money is necessary to live. I have spent 18 years doing this, and in a capacity where I’d say it’s a successful business for roughly 15 of them. I’m not wholesaling at all, not making 100 mugs for somebody and selling it at half price, not doing it. I realized at some point that making half as many mugs and being able to control my own retail is the privilege that allows me to be so definitive. If I needed to wholesale right now, I would, but because the store is doing well, I can’t make things faster than I’m making them right now.
So you’re never stocked in anyone else’s store?
Not anymore. I think that if I were to wholesale again, I’d want it to be with a store that can sell the work for a lot of money—and I’m just putting that out into the universe. I’d want to make one-off pieces, things I feel inspired to make in the moment. So instead of 60 mugs, I’d be creating special, one-of-a-kind items that exist only there. I’d love to make a special, two-foot-tall vase—something that feels like a creative exercise for me. I think that’s the key. If each piece were truly one of a kind, it would naturally be worth more, and I’d be more excited about making it.
“I love that I’m working with mud and that it’s tied to the history of humankind. I love that it’s soft and malleable and then becomes something permanent that lasts forever.”
That makes sense. I hope the universe hears you.
Totally. And I’m grateful that people come in here and want to buy mugs. I love the idea of being part of someone’s daily routine: making that morning cup of coffee feel like a ritual, having a special mug that fits perfectly in your hand. Those are the ways I want to exist in people’s lives. That’s why I make functional work. I want to make mugs, but I don’t want to make a hundred of them. I don’t want to get to a place where I start to hate making them. I’m trying to find a balance: to keep creating humble, everyday items that feel special because they’re made by someone who genuinely loves making them.
With your experience and connection to this community, it seems like you’ve gained the ability to be more decisive about how you share your work.
Yes, and being out there like that got me the Instagram followers who now come and buy my pottery. So, in a way, it all worked out. I think it’s necessary, at least for a while, to put yourself out there and be visible in as many spaces as possible. But I’m happy that I’ve found a way to step back from that. It wasn’t just about selling—it was whole category of making that I didn’t enjoy. I don’t love the production side of things, but I love the act of coming into the studio and feeling excited to sit at the wheel.
I’m interested in the intersection between technology and the slower rhythms of everyday life—especially how fast everything can feel with the news cycle and constant stimulation. To that end, we live in such a frenetic world. Your work feels so rooted in process and intention, do you feel like clay offers an antidote to the chaos for you?
I think—and this is kind of the cornerstone of things like The Artist’s Way, or even going off to an ashram and immersing yourself—it’s about having a daily practice of something. Whether it’s working on a coat and sitting there piecing and stitching by hand, or any kind of repetition like that. That’s why there’s been such a resurgence in slow craft lately. People are making their clothes again. People are knitting again. Pottery’s suddenly having this big moment. There’s an appetite for balance, for the opposite of sitting at a computer, stressed out by a constant news feed and the general climate of the world right now. Sitting down and slowly keeping your hands busy, creating something—that ritual, that routine, that constructive distraction—it’s magic. It’s healing.
“Having a daily practice—whatever it is—creates a rhythm that steadies you when the world moves too fast.”
There’s a reason pottery is used in art therapy. It’s great for older people, and babies love Play-Doh. There’s something about the malleability, the impermanence, the simple tactility of it. Clay is such a powerful medium. And the excruciatingly slow pace of it has taught me patience in a way almost nothing else has. From pulling out the wet clay to having a finished piece, you’re talking about weeks and weeks. It’s a really slow process. But then it lasts forever. It’ll outlive you. It carries stories (the ancient Greeks, the history of Korean culture, entire civilizations). Squishy mud becomes this permanent testament to whoever made it and whatever culture it came from. And you can fire it outside in a pit of wood, in a gas kiln, in an electric kiln. There are endless ways people have figured out how to make vessels for something.
Beyond pottery, I also notice other objects in this shop like vintage clothes and toys.
This fall we’re going to start bringing in other people’s work. There’s just too much square footage for one lady to fill. I always had a mix of things in my original space around the corner on Route 55, I just have a lot more of it now. I opened that place with a collection of fishermen sweaters, so that’s always been part of my vision for a retail space. It’s never been just about my ceramics. Curating beautiful objects and clothing has always been part of what I love. I enjoy hunting for treasures and having kids’ toys here too. It’s partly because my daughter doesn’t have many places locally to shop for things. Some of this came out of necessity. It was always meant to be more than just a ceramics shop, that was the original intention. I just finally got to go for it now, in this enormous industrial building.
It’s wonderful you have space that’s fully you, but also it’s a public utility—giving people a place to go and make stuff.
When I moved from around the corner (literally about 200 feet away) into this space, I felt like I was stepping into something new. It’s 3,400 square feet, which is massive. There was a community here, especially young families, that just wasn’t being served. There were also artists who wanted to teach but didn’t have a space to share their skills or earn money from them. That’s a big part of what I wanted to create here. There are artists who need to make a living doing what they love. Having that intersection—where talented people can come and teach, and monetize their skills, while the community gets to learn and become enriched—is huge.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
