Wednesday, November 18, 2015 // The Statement
4B
Wednesday, November 18, 2015 // The Statement
5B
“Every morning when I walk to work,” he
says, “I walk by this big oak tree and I nudge
it a little bit, trying to establish some camara-
derie.”
For the past sixty-four years, Abernathy
has watched Ann Arbor grow up. New lay-
ers of asphalt, an ever-expanding university,
and 24-hour Speedways have transformed
the once sleepy village into a bustling city.
Born into an agricultural society, Abernathy
observes this progression with reserved dis-
taste. He remembers the Great Depression,
the Dust Bowl, his family’s “meager exis-
tence” on a cattle ranch in southeastern Okla-
homa: mornings plowing corn with a mule,
rabbits, and bread for dinner, nights playing in
his grandfather’s blacksmith shop, and eigh-
teen years without electricity. He has little
patience for city life.
Yet Abernathy has a certain affection, a
curious gratitude, for the lively Ann Arbor.
“I believe those who live here live in the
upper one-billionth of the world,” he says.
Perhaps J.T. Abernathy, a WWII veteran,
world-renowned potter, and soft-spoken
scholar, now considers himself among the
world’s upper one-billionth. He has a Bach-
elor of Fine Arts degree in ceramics and an
Master of Fine Arts degree in kiln-building
from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloom-
field Hills. He has worked alongside famed
potters, and his art is featured in thirty muse-
ums around the world— Tokyo, Amsterdam,
Toronto, and all across the United States. And
he’s routinely viewed as an Ann Arbor legend.
Abernathy continues his walk, the four
o’clock darkness allowing him to mistake the
City of Ann Arbor for a simpler Village of Ann
Arbor, circa 1951. He is immensely grateful.
Grateful for the Potters Guild where he works,
grateful for belonging among the group of art-
ists who work there. But more than anything,
he is grateful for being able to perceive beauty.
“Whenever I’m lost,” he says, “I go for a
walk, and look.”
He picks up a leaf, crushed under the har-
ried feet of nine-to-five workers, marveling
at its resilient structure, its color, its propor-
tions. He cannot see detail, he says, but he
doesn’t need to — Abernathy simply absorbs
beauty. Stopping on the corner of Hill Street,
he stares at the lines: telephone wires and
wood-paneled fences and the angled, rust red
roof of Fingerle Lumber.
“You can see the various planes, and if you
squint at it,” he says, pausing, “you can see
depth and you can see basic design.”
Pausing at the base of an old pine tree, he
observes the trunk’s architecture, the pine’s
sturdy framework— “It all makes sense,” he
says matter-of-factly. “The way the damn
thing sits in the earth … I may be blind, but
God I can see.”
Abernathy now unlocks the Potters Guild’s
front door, recently painted a cheerful teal
to liven the building’s unassuming facade.
For three hours, he removes himself from
the city’s fluorescent street lights and steps
inside the clay-covered, glaze-coated world of
ceramics.
The Guild is the quintessential artist’s
workshop. Plastic yogurt cups line the coun-
ters, each filled with kitchen utensils and
dental instruments — rusted butter knives,
wooden mixing spoons and tooth scalers, all
caked in dried clay. A Hellmann’s Real May-
onnaise jar is sealed to preserve some murky
ingredient. And a Lipari bottle, once full of
crushed red peppers, now holds two inches
of a wine-colored liquid. Glaze ingredients —
titanium dioxide, tin oxide, black iron oxide
— sit in half-gallon jugs, and sample glaze
tiles cover the walls like paint swatches, each
numbered in an elaborate inventorying sys-
tem. Shelves are stacked floor-to-ceiling with
unfired stoneware, unglazed bisqueware, and
unsold vessels; vases, bowls, plates, mugs,
sculptures and the occasional ceramic wood-
land creature await their debut at the Guild’s
upcoming winter sale.
Abernathy navigates the Potters Guild’s
ceramic maze with the effortlessness of a
founding member. Traces of the morning’s
newly made batch of clay hide under his fin-
gernails, cling to his faded blue jeans, and
speckle his black loafers, as if seeking com-
panionship with the artist: Abernathy the
Creator. Creator he is, having built the Guild’s
first kiln, its bricks eroded and pipes char-
coaled from fifty years of constant use.
“I design machines for fun like some people
play music,” he says. “I’m not lacking in imagi-
nation.”
Unbeknownst to his colleagues, he stores
his finished work in a “secret spot”: a small
hut out back where brave potters conquer the
flames of raku glazing. There, Abernathy’s
traditional and experimental art collide: his
meticulously crafted vases in matte blacks
and silvery whites sit beside a pair of abstract
masks, whose pastel oranges and blues form
subtle lips, chins, and eyes. A rough slab of
clay, doused in primary colors, stands behind
his stoneware pots, whimsically painted with
cobalt blue brushwork. He points to an egg-
white pot, a little misshapen, perhaps on pur-
pose— “I like them sometimes when they look
like they’ve just been dug up.”
The Simple Life of the
Almost Famous
By Kristina Perkins, Daily Staff Photographer
J.T. Abernathy rises before the sun each morning. By four o’clock
he has cooked a plain breakfast, cleaned last night’s dishes and
scrubbed his teeth — carefully placing a tweed wool cap on his head
before stepping outside. Walking to work, the 92-year-old is not in
a hurry. He lingers, allowing his curious eyes to ponder the bashful
color of mid-October leaves, the clean planes that emerge from the
star-lit horizon, the depth of the Ann Arbor skyline.
See POTTERS, Page 8B
KRISTINA PERKINS/ Daily