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Potts mixes politics and...pots

Potts mixes politics and...pots image
Parent Issue
Day
23
Month
July
Year
1992
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Donated by the Ann Arbor News. © The Ann Arbor News.
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Potts mixes politics and... pots

The News is featuring a local artist each day during this year’s art fairs.

NAME: Ethel “Eppie” Potts

ADDRESS: Ann Arbor Potter’s Guild, 210 Hill St.

MEDIUM: Pottery

YEARS IN FAIR: A Guild member since the 1950s, Potts took part in the first Street Art Fair in 1958, continued to show until 1968, devoted her attention to politics and other activities until returning in 1980 and has taken part every year since.

PRICE RANGE: $6 bowls to $130 clay sculptures.

HER STORY: Ethel Potts waves at the large front windows of the Ann Arbor Potters’ Guild’s Hill Street building, motioning to the overcast skies and rain outside.

“Usually, we get sunlight pouring in here,” Potts tells a visitor to the building tucked away beside the railroad tracks.

Thirty-three years after she first exhibited in the Street Art Fair, Potts knows better than to worry about the elements for this week’s fair.

As potters, “we are probably the only ones who don’t mind the rain,” Potts says. “The only hazard is that as the bowls fill up with water and someone picks one up, they get a shoeful.”

Potts - widely known by her nickname of “Eppie” — is as much political animal as artist. She has run for the Ann Arbor City Council twice and currently serves on the city’s zoning board of appeals and acts as an informal adviser and aide to the Democratic City Council majority.

“I can sometimes tell when I get a phone call — if they ask for Eppie, I know it’s pottery or politics and nothing else.”

Though her last name’s resemblance to her art provokes a lot of bad puns, Potts says, “I just try to pretend I don’t know what they’re talking about.”

She signs her work “Kudrna” — her Czechoslovakian maiden name.

Potts, one of a dozen or so artists in the Guild’s two South University Avenue booths, says she enjoys the high-profile, high-quality nature of the art fairs. Looking back, she remembers clotheslines strung between parking meters to hold paintings and card tables laden with pottery.

“It was very amateurish,” she said of the first fairs. “It has grown into a really big celebration of the work of artists, very organized and very professional.

“Ann Arbor’s the kind of town where art matters to people and they’re receptive to it,” she says. “I think the nature of Ann Arbor is one reason the whole thing succeeded.”

- JUDSON BRANAM

NEWS PHOTO
D.A. BIERMANN

Ethel Potts, appropriately enough a potter, with some of her work in the Potters Guild building, 201 Hill St. She is a longtime exhibitor at the Ann Arbor art fairs.