Baltimore Clayworks is a community-centered ceramics institution in the Mt. Washington neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland. Our organization was founded by nine artists in 1980 and in 1984 received its nonprofit 501(c)3 status. We are known for our attentiveness to our city, and possess a national and international reputation for artistic excellence, artists’ support, and community involvement.
Our Vision
Baltimore Clayworks’ vision is a welcoming and creative community where all people can access and experience joy through clay.
Our Mission
The mission of Baltimore Clayworks is to develop, sustain, and promote an artist-centered community that provides outstanding educational, artistic, and collaborative programs in the ceramic arts. Its core values are artist-centeredness, excellence, inclusivity, integrity, and joy.
Our Core Values
Baltimore Clayworks is Artist–Centered, committed to the principle that making and appreciating art are essential to the nourishment of the human spirit.
Baltimore Clayworks is Inclusive, bringing a lens of equity in race, disability, and gender to all decisions as we deliver programs to both new learners and professional artists, students, and collectors and artists and collectors from diverse economic, cultural, ethnic, and geographic backgrounds.
We strive for increasing levels of Excellence in our art and in our management. It supports growth and gives us credibility among experts and peers.
Baltimore Clayworks programs and management decisions are planned and executed with Integrity.
Joy is pervasive in the Clayworks workplace – classrooms, studios, community facilities, offices and even the Boardroom. This is expressed through the joy of accomplishment, of working in environments of trust and excellence, and of being inclusive and transparent.
What We Do
Provide affordable studio space, equipment, and professional opportunities that encourage participation by national and international ceramic artists who produce ceramic artworks of the highest quality.
Bring stellar emerging and established artists to Baltimore through our residency and exhibitions programs.
Offer hands-on studio and community classes in all aspects of pottery, clay sculpture, and ceramic processes for children and adults. Clayworks’ educational programs are led by artists who are both locally treasured and retain high national profiles in the field of ceramics.
Present on-site, off-site, and online exhibitions and sale of the work of local, national and international ceramic artists, in solo and group format, curated or juried by professional artists in the field. Our exhibitions showcase the best of international, national and local ceramic artists working in sculpture, pottery, installation and conceptual ceramics.
Develop sensitively conceived and collaboratively designed programs with artists and community organizations that bring art experiences of authenticity, excellence, and meaning into the lives of children and adults who do not usually have such access.
Our Commitment to Diversity, Equity, Access, and Inclusion (DEAI)
By employing an anti-racist/anti-ableist framework, Baltimore Clayworks (BCW) affirms the gifts of all artists to harness the power of clay. We acknowledge the systemic inequity that exists in the nonprofit arts world we inhabit. BCW opposes injustice that limits access of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) peoples, individuals with disabilities, and all creatives who are underrepresented and devalued in the world of art.
As a community arts hub, we believe that art and arts education are central to the healing process of our city. The multicultural and universal medium of clay is one of Baltimore Clayworks’ greatest attributes in connecting and celebrating all people.
As artists, our mistakes often become unexpected gateways to discovering our truth. Likewise, as an art community, BCW seeks to examine past wrongs and to redress inequities in order to more fully realize our core values. Together with our Board of Directors, staff, resident and teaching artists, students, and extended Baltimore family, we commit not only to forging clay artworks, but to taking action to create the best expression of the DEAI ideals of Baltimore Clayworks. DEAI Resource Pagei