One-Time Pottery Experiences
$115-$130 per person
Discover the joy of working with clay in our hands-on, experience based, two-hour pottery class. Whether you're a complete beginner or just looking for a fun creative activity, this one-time session will introduce you to the basics of wheel throwing and'/or hand building, guided by a local Santa Fe ceramic artist.
Your experience begins with a welcome drink—choose from our selection or feel free to BYOB—before we take you on a tour of our vibrant studio, where local ceramic artists bring their creations to life. Afterward, you’ll get a demonstration of how to use the pottery wheel and/or how to hand-build and then you can get your hands dirty as you dive into the world of clay, creating your own unique pieces.
While your wheel-thrown creations will be recycled at the end of class, you won’t leave empty-handed. You will either receives $15 off any piece in our gallery, showcasing beautiful handcrafted pottery by our talented teachers, or you can take your hand-built creation home!
Wheel Experience
Dive into the most popular method of making ceramics. Working at the wheel is a meditative, yet challenging process. In this two-hour class, our potters will take you through the process of throwing a piece of pottery on the wheel. While pieces are recycled at the end of the class, each person will get a $15 credit to our gallery.
Cost: $115/per person
combo Experience
In this one-time, two-hour class, students will be introduced to fundamental techniques for working with clay both by hand and on the pottery wheel. Participants will spend the first hour on the wheel, and then have the option of hand-building with air-dry clay for the second hour. Hand-built pieces may be taken home at the conclusion of the class.
Cost: $130/per person
Private party
For groups of six or more, we host Private Pottery Parties. With the option to upgrade to our "pampered” package, we’ll make sure everyone enjoys your company outing, family reunion, or group get together.
WHAT’S A POTTERY “EXPERIENCE”?
Pottery Experiences prioritize touching, forming, and manipulating clay into expressions of art and are experience-based, meaning that at the end of each session students recycle their wheel-thrown work back into the clay mound. Students do not, however, walk away empty handed. They either receive a $15 credit in the gallery, which is full of ceramics locally-handcrafted by Santa Fe artists, or they can take their hand-built piece home at the end of the class.
There’s a long tradition of ceramic arts in New Mexico, and the process of making pottery is often viewed as a spiritual practice. Pottery is among the most ancient forms of art and is perhaps the most fleeting. Shards of ancient ceramics are scattered on bluffs and foothills throughout New Mexico and are a constant reminder of the transitory nature of our particular form of art and of our very human existence. For millennia, ceramic artists across New Mexico have transformed clay into vessels to be held between hands, to be filled with nourishment, to be brought to lips, and after serving their purpose, to be returned to the earth.
At Paseo Pottery we embrace this rich history, and we present our classes for travelers in the form of pottery “experiences.” During each experience, students have two hours to create their own works of art using the tools at their disposal in our studio, all the inner creativity they can muster, and a raw lump of clay. Our teachers start with a demonstration to give students basic pottery-making techniques, then act as guides while students unleash their inner artists and tap into the creativity they may find bubbling to the surface given the artistic energy that abounds in Santa Fe. Each student creates their own unique and beautiful expression of art. At the end of the experience, students present their wheel thrown masterpieces to the rest of the class, take photos if they wish, and then—in the spirit of embracing the ephemeral nature of art and of humanity—students ceremoniously recycle their masterpieces, deconstructing them, kneading them back into the lump of clay from which they came. Hand built pieces (using our air-dry clay) can be taken home.
Similar to monks on the other side of the earth who spend days, even months, creating sand mandalas, only to then blow them away in an instant, ceramic experiences at Paseo Pottery encourage students to learn our craft, to create, to appreciate, and then to let go. One might think of our experience-based classes as “mud therapy.”
Experiences are led by our professional ceramic artists who volunteer their time. Cost includes a two-hour experiential class complete with libations, clay, materials, and tools.