About Front Avenue Pottery and Tile

Front Avenue Pottery & Tile established 2001, designs and creates fine crafted, high quality, playfully decorative dinner and serving ware & clay tile.

A BFA graduate from the University of Minnesota, artist & potter, Mary Jo Schmith, was undoubtedly influenced by professors Warren McKenzie & Mark Pharis and their commitment to functional pottery. Now with 20 years of clay production experience she works daily to produce inspired functional fine craft for your table, kitchen & home.

Front Avenue Pottery and Tile is located 2 blocks south of Como Park, St. Paul, Minnesota. With an open door policy the studio & its gallery are open to visitors during studio working hours, M-F, 8AM – 5PM, & gladly by appointment.

Stoneware crafted by Front Avenue Pottery is wheel thrown and often altered to produce interesting yet functional forms. Some dinnerware pieces are hand built from rolled clay. The pottery is always worked in a series; several similar pieces made at one time.

Front Avenue carries on the tradition of working raw clay into quality, functional stonewarethat is durable and finely crafted. The studio houses two 40 cubic foot natural gas kilns; it’sdinner & serving ware is reduction fired to 2300-2350 degrees *F, vitrifying the clay & giving the studio’s glazes a warm coloring.

Studio formulated & prepared food safe glazes are dipped, hand brushed, slip trailed or airbrushed in playful decorative motifs often repeated in series or sets, making each piece unique!

Lead and Barium free, Front Avenue’s pottery is food, oven, dishwasher & microwave safe.

Inspirations for the studio’s decorative motifs can come from something as insignificant as a daily walk in St. Paul’s Como Park…the budding of the Chinese Chestnut tree…to something more purposeful like a study of the Blue Heron…many hours of paper drawings happen prior to any ceramic decoration.

The pottery’s decorative imagery expresses an ongoing fascination with the cycles of life that surround us everyday. References from nature...the animals, fish, the sun... illustrate some very basic elements of our lives, such as water, air, soil, animal and plant; images of nature that move with us through our lives. Cycles that continuing year after year regardless of our current destination.

Clayworking is first and foremost a learned craft. Skill and technique, accumulated through practice, defines a pot’s quality. Enhancing articles we use everyday with images important to our daily lives make it all the more fun!

Like farming, clayworking is a lifestyle, almost never free from the process of clay’s constant change.

A love for the beauty of craft, the science of raw materials & the unpredictable forces of fire keep every pot a new challenge.