The
Founding of the Potters Guild Shop
by Janis
Ross
(original
founding member 14 years as Guild
President)
In the late 1970's, a little gallery was opened on Shepherd
at Bissonnet run by Tom and Sue Verso and Ethel Billew and
they named it the Phoenix Gallery. A number of local clay
artists sold their work there on consignment and the
gallery put on some fabulous workshops with artists like
Paul Soldner and Peter Voulkos at the University of
Houston. In early 1980, the Phoenix Gallery closed and we
had no where to sell our work...again.
At the time, I was President of the Potters Guild which was
a 50-60 member organization having monthly meetings with
yearly sales, raku parties, seminars, etc. A Potters Guild
Shop was ready for creation.
I decided to see if there was any interest in the guild
starting a shop of our own and called a meeting in my
living room. I was delighted when 30 people turned up and
we had a very positive first meeting. Getting people to
really commit to the idea proved very difficult and it took
nine months before we actually had 11 firm members. We
initially agreed we would not start unless we had 12
members, but actually started with 11. Besides me, the
other really unwavering support came from Christy Bean. The
other founding members were: Bess Tourtellot, Irene
Pendergrast, Sue Verso, Leona Watson, Ellen Szekely,
Lorraine Deaton, Leila Rose (the other Brit in the group),
Jerry Bogard and Lynn Wilbarger. A friend of Irene's, Laura
Schweppe soon joined us completing our required number of
12.
Several decisions made during that time led to the eventual
success of our venture. We decided to commit ourselves
financially for a year at a time and paid rent and
utilities up front instead of month to month. We decided on
a central location even though the rent was higher and
meant a fairly long commute for several people. We found an
undeveloped store in the Meyerland Mall. This was perfect
for us since the Meyerland Corporation would build out the
space to our specifications. We each had to come up with
$1,000 to get the project started, and Edward, my husband,
drew up our incorporation papers. Actually, we all
recruited our husbands do enormous amounts of free work.
Lorraine Deaton's husband was a carpenter and he did most
of the work of building our shelves, desk and display
boxes. Someone else's husband was an electrician and he put
up our lights. All the male potters had fallen by the
wayside before we got to the commitment stage so we started
as an all woman outfit and stayed that way for many years.
We made everything that we could ourselves to save money;
including the two big signs on the outside of the shop
which were made by Christy and her husband. The shelves
were unfinished wood, as were the display boxes in the
middle of the shop which we filled with sand to stabilize
and display our common area pots.
The meetings, held monthly, were wild and funny. We really
had no idea how to run a shop and made lots of crazy
mistakes. Our chief problem was that none of us understood
double entry bookkeeping. Bess Tourtellot was our
bookkeeper because her son was a C.P.A. and Laura was the
Treasurer because she had just got her own bank account and
understood how to write checks. This was the closest we
could come to expertise with the result that Edward, a CPA
as well as a lawyer, who had the task of auditing the books
at the end of the year would be driven almost mad by all
the mistakes.
