Great Barrington — Serene, elegant, quiet, strong. These are some of the adjectives viewers have used to describe “Flores cinis terra,” the ceramics exhibit on view at Simon’s Rock for another week. “People have been saying a lot of the words that I want the space and the show to evoke, and that feels good,” says artist Harrison Levenstein, “because it feels like I’m communicating something clearly.”
Someone wrote in the log book, “Literally every time I walk by I have to pause and look for a minute. Everything is so cohesive yet individual.” Like his other work, the various pots and vessels in the show are a study in neutrals: creams and beiges, tinted with gray green. “I’m so not attracted to glaring color and high chrome,” Levenstein tells The Berkshire Edge. His pieces are layered and subtle, which “invites you in.” He explains, “You don’t get the whole picture right away, you have to investigate it and interact with it to see all the detail that I’m trying to show.”
Levenstein, a native of California, has lived in the Berkshires going on five years, serving as Ceramics Lab Tech and a ceramics instructor at Simon’s Rock since 2020, where he says there is always a demand for ceramics. Classes are usually full, with a wait list, he says. “Flores cinis terra,” which will close January 15, is Levenstein’s first solo show at Simon’s Rock and will be one of the last art exhibits at Simon’s Rock before they relocate to the Hudson River campus next year.
The title of the show combines flowers, ash, and earth. When Levenstein was playing around with different ways of saying it, Google Translate rendered the Latin “flores cinis terra” to “the flowers of the earth are ashes,” and he thought, “Wow, that’s a profound statement.” The flower motif came about a couple of years ago. “It was late summertime, I had just built those two big pots, and I was trying to think how I wanted to decorate them.” Levenstein walked out his back door. “In the field next to the house was this grove of sunchoke flowers that had opened up, a sea of tall yellow flowers swaying.” He started carving a sunchoke onto the pots and kept exploring that shape over the next couple of years, using different carving techniques, sometimes rendering it more botanically realistic, other times more geometric to create pattern.
The sunchoke is a small, native sunflower, and “that’s another thing that speaks to me,” Levenstein says. In folk craft and folk art traditions, “it’s so much about place, and that feels important.” He used ashes from hardwood that grew here, salvaged from his wood stove, to make the glaze for the pots. “It’s a very old-school way of making a glaze.” The ash soaks and settles in a bucket of water, changed several times, until the fine remains get spread on a sheet on a sunny day, drying to powder.
The pots aren’t wood fired, though, making them distinct from his other body of work. They are fired in a natural-gas-fired kiln, a more contemporary technology. “Wood-fired pots have a totally different vibe,” he says, and it is a very different process.
The “terra/earth” of the title is of course the clay, which Levenstein buys from Sheffield Pottery. It doesn’t come from the ground here, because the local clay doesn’t fire hot enough to make pots out of, but it can be used for slips—watered-down clay brushed over the pots. Slips create contrast in color and texture, a smoke pattern behind many of the flowers. A couple pieces in the show do feature the local clay, which is iron-rich, and which Levenstein dug up on East Mountain.
At the same time, like his other work, the show explores the global traditions he has experienced, particularly Eastern ones. Pots made thousands of years ago “still speak to us because they’re beautiful,” Levenstein says. “They’ve captured some sort of beauty that transcends time.” He learned to build the large pots, traditionally used for storage of water, grain, or wine, while studying at Golden Bridge Pottery in southeastern India. Others are inspired by Korean pottery, specifically Buncheong-era stoneware, with its carvings over a white slip, including one piece that is a direct nod to a bottle he saw at the Met. Someone responded in the visitor’s log, “It’s like the flowers come alive on the vase, especially along the curves.”
One pot is very classical, with “handles that you’ll find on Greek pots. The flowers are reaching at each other, and the inspiration was the Michelangelo mural, ‘The Creation of Adam.’” But also, “this particular way of making [the pot], this high-fire stoneware, was not available to them at that time,” he adds.
“I’ve been using this word ‘syncretics,’ which refers to cultural drift, more in reference to spiritual or religious traditions, but I like to think it can cross over into other avenues of culture, like language and art.” Levenstein is planning an exhibition called “Syncretics” that will look very different from this one, but adds, “I feel like my work in general, that’s what I’m always thinking about.”
He likes to think about the places pre-globalization “where cultures were mixing and new traditions were born.” And now, “It’s just what our world is … But where’s the line between cultural appropriation or when is a new tradition born? … Can a new tradition even be born anymore? It’s an interesting space.”
Levenstein notes that he is thankful for the opportunity to exhibit in the gallery, overseen by Simon’s Rock photography teacher Daniel Karp. Several of the pieces have sold, and Levenstein has donated 15 percent of all sales to a nonprofit organization that is helping with hurricane relief for potters in the River Arts District of western North Carolina. He knows many who were devastated and are still struggling to rebuild after losing their studios and homes.
On that note, Levenstein and his partner, a musician, are currently house-hunting in the area. “We’re two local artists looking for their dream spot,” he remarks. He plans to build a studio and large wood kiln there.
About working with clay, Levenstein says, “I love being in it; it’s the process that is actually more interesting to me than the outcome, usually.”
The exhibit can be viewed at the Hillman-Jackson Gallery at the Daniel Arts Center, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., weekdays through January 15, or people can contact Levenstein at gettincentered@gmail.com to set up a showing. He also plans to put a virtual photo tour on his website.
