Big Creek Pottery

A social history Al Johnsen and Bruce & Marcia McDougal took over the Big Creek Pottery school in 1970 and created an international destination. Workshops for novice and experienced artist were led by illustrious potters: John Glick, Paulus Berenson, Michael Cardew, Warren McKenzie, Toshiko Takaezu, John Reeve, Jim and Nan McKinnel, Paul Volkening, Harry Davis, Karen Karnes, Ruth Duckworth, Michael Casson, Cynthia Bringle, and Bruce McDougal. For several weeks, they threw, glazed, built and fired kilns, and cooked, ate and made music together on a restored late 19th century, central California coast dairy ranch near Davenport, California. Big Creek Pottery School opened in 1968, perhaps the first residential school for pottery making in America’s Western states, and by 1984, its last year, over eleven hundred students and teachers had shared fifty workshops.