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Billy Ritter | Episode 538
Billy Ritter 77 is a ceramic artist from Cleveland, Ohio. A graduate of Kent State University (MFA), and Slippery Rock University (BFA). For the past five years he has taught and inspired many as a professor of art and ceramics at Cuyahoga Community College. At his Cleveland studio he offers one-on-one tutoring and workshops. Billy exhibits and sells his work at his studio as well as at many artisan markets throughout Northern Ohio. Atmospheric firing, community, and story telling through process, are the focus of his work. His limited editions of functional tablewares and vessels are utilized by chefs, home cooks, photo studios, and collectors both nationally and internationally.
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Do you consider yourself a production potter?
Yes and No. I will do and have done lots of production orders but I don’t do that exclusively.
In the past you had a variety of sculpture and drawings and functional pottery. What made you decide to be the functional dude and not the eclectic dude?
I like to be eclectically functional. If that’s a box we can check. I honestly go back and forth, Paul. So if you scroll down (on Instagram) you will see vessels that are not functional and are enclosed sculpture. There is always on ongoing series of heads. These heads that I build that are 18-24 inches, not functional. Yeah, I gravitate towards functional work. I do. I just like the utility,obviously. And beyond utility just the communal experience-there is nothing better as a functional potter than seeing a long table of people eating off of your work. If your heart doesn’t explode at that point, you don’t love what you are doing, you know, that’s the coolest.
On your website there is a picture of you with a chef. Tell me about that connection. Are you making work for restaurants?
Well, yes. It is happening right now, actually. So that story is equally as fascinating as other stories, in my eyes. So I was at a pizza restaurant one night with my girlfriend and she introduced me to the chef, and the chef is Doug Katz. Everyone knows Doug Katz in Cleveland. So Doug and I were talking an he said, I have really wanting to do pottery. And I said, You should come do pottery. So Doug came to do pottery and that was over 2 years ago and he never stopped coming back. He just super got into it. I thought it was going to be one lesson,Here is how you center the clay… and he just really got into it. What I will say about the parallel about people who work with food and the people that work with clay, it is the same exact thing. The material parallels are uncanny. We use slip, we deal with materials at different stages of firmness. Same thing with vegetables, and meats, and soups and purees. They are processing food stuff, right? So Doug kind of had this leg up on everything. He could pour six gallons of liquid from a bowl from two feet up and not spill any of it because he just does that every day.
So you said you are starting to make for restaurants, tell us about that.
Well, thanks. So in 2016, 3 years ago, I got approached by a restaurant in Cleveland and they wanted to do a special event dinner. So we talked about what that looks like and it would be a one night only thing. And this isn’t a new idea, so many potters do a kiln to table experience. I did that and that is what I am talking about when my heart just exploded. Here was this room full of all these new faces and some friends that I didn’t know that were dinning and having this great night and experiencing their great culinary master works on these pots that I made. Just real simple, we did plates, bowls, side bowl and everybody loved it and people still talk about that. The next year I picked a different restaurant. I met with the chef and I said, Let’s design something together. So he and I dialogued about what are the dishes and how to present them.Then I made 7 different forms that were all totally different that came out in a course. Seven courses that you would experience and that again was the best experience. So it keeps happening and chef Doug Katz has new restaurants opening up and I will be making work for them, that is happening as we speak. I am pretty stoked about that..
How do you go about pricing a project like the one that is for one night only?
I think there are different ways to do it and when I did it I didn’t know any of those ways. So what I did, I just made all the work. I bought all the material, made all the work, we scheduled the event, and I brought all the work. So the condition was there was no fee or charge or anything. Organically what I hoped in my heart would happen, that people would have their meal, love their pieces and then buy their pieces, and that is actually what happened. I think hope is probably the worst plan ever, from a financial standpoint. Hope, that’s not your best bet, but that’s what I did and knock on wood it worked. In the future I am open to any suggestions on better ways to do that, but that’s what we did.
As soon as Doug learned how to throw bowls we created a soup bowl dinner that sold out immediately. It was basically the premise, and I hope I don’t get in trouble for this, but it is basically the premise of the empty bowls idea, I mean essentially. Except we made the bowls, we did donate the money, and so people loved that and they keep asking. People want that experience, right? Come in and get your own bowl and some really good soup.
When you would do that would you sell your work at market value or would you sell it at a discount because you have so many people to draw from?
I would say market value. I think once you start kind of moving your prices around and people see you doing that, that looks bad. As far as pricing stuff, there’s a market value everywhere, like regionally, nationally, some sliding scale that you can look at other people’s work and figure out what is your work worth. And inherently you know what your work is worth and just go from there. That’s kind of how I did it.
My last question for you, your website is billyritter77 Why do you call your business Billy Ritter 77?
So ’77 was the year I was born and when I was thinking about some really good, profound pottery name for my business, it occurred to me that even the most original thing that I could possibly come up with, somebody else was going to have, somebody, somewhere. You can’t be that, I’m that. So I thought, I will use my name and then I will use the year I was born. You can reduce it down to an acronym. So it is BR77, like a machine or something. Which I kind of think is great.
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Instagram: @billyritter77