Featured Center City Business: Clay College
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Photo by Bill Horin/ArtC. Story by Rob LaymonArtC.
Over the years, ArtC has collaborated many times with Jackie Sandro-Greenwell. First, at the original Clay College & in recent years with Jackie & Randy Wilfong at RCSJ Arts & Innovation Center. The work done there is amazing.
The thing about clay is that it brings people together. Director Jackie Sandro-Greenwell has spent 25 years at Clay College watching ceramics inspire not only creativity but community.
“Clay people are very down-to-earth,” she says. “I think there is a kind of unification in working with clay that makes us all part of the same family. It’s a very unintimidating medium—I haven’t come across a person yet who doesn’t smile when given clay to work with.”
Sandro-Greenwell has believed this and other transformative things about clay for as long as she has served as the director of the facility, part of Rowan College South Jersey.
For Sandro-Greenwell the artist, clay has always illuminated a clear path. With an MFA from Tyler School of Art and teaching experience, Sandro-Greenwell joined the push for Clay College at its very inception, when the idea for the Millville Arts District was taking shape.
Visitors to her facility will find all the equipment necessary to do good work in ceramics: pottery wheels, kilns, and ample space for students to work. The college is proud to provide hands-on training in techniques like wheel-throwing and hand-building, to a student population of all ages, available in both credit and non-credit courses.
What will be harder to see is the camaraderie formed by the common project of throwing clay and making beautiful things.
“We’re kind of like a gym,” Sandro-Greenwell says, “in that people can just come in to use the studio. I think there is something related to the process that makes it different from other art forms. There are steps involved, with chemistry, glazing and firing, and interaction with many processes. You never get bored with ceramics.”
Clay College
First floor, Arts and Innovation Center
321 N. High Street
Phone: 856-776-2380
Website: artsinnovation/clay-college
Email: aic@cc.rcsj.edu