Members of John Bryan Community Pottery showed off some of their works — bowls, cups, mugs, vases and even a ceramic chain made into a snake’s likeness — on a sweltering afternoon earlier this week. They crowded in front of the studio’s relatively new mural, which still incorporates the iconic penguin motif. (Photo by Reilly Dixon)
Meet Your Nonprofits | John Bryan Community Pottery wheels into new era
- Published: July 10, 2026
MEET YOUR NONPROFITS
This is the fourth installment in a series profiling the ongoing work of Yellow Springs-based nonprofit organizations.
By Alissa Paolella
The kiln had been a fixture of the pottery studio’s kiln yard for more than a decade — a hulking, hand-built wood-fire kiln that demanded everything from the people who loved it: weekends spent hauling lumber, marathon firing sessions stretching to 36 hours, a kind of devoted physical labor that drew a particular type of potter.
Over its lifetime, it logged an estimated 130 firings. Last year, it was retired and removed.
For Meg Smallwood, who became studio director of John Bryan Community Pottery in 2024, the decision was both practical and symbolic.
“It was, indeed, a tough decision,” she said. “But looking at what our population is like now, the cost of running it, and the cost of rebuilding it — trying to fill two equally massive buckets to rebuild kilns was just not practical for us as an organization.”
The wood kiln’s departure is perhaps the clearest marker of a studio in thoughtful transition. John Bryan Community Pottery — tucked at 100 Dayton St. and known to regulars simply as JBCP — has been a cornerstone of Yellow Springs since 1962.
What began as a co-op of four potters who pooled resources because, as Smallwood puts it, “Dude, we can’t afford all this stuff; let’s go in together,” has grown into a fully operational 501(c)(3) with 34 studio members, a packed class schedule and a waiting list that stretches 12 to 16 months.
Under Smallwood’s leadership, the studio has moved through a significant period of reinvestment. Two grants from the Yellow Springs Community Foundation in recent years funded what she calls the unglamorous but essential work: HVAC installation — the studio was previously cooled in summer with fans alone, which can be a health concern in a clay-dust environment; an expanded member workspace; a new glaze room; chemical storage; and most recently, new gas kiln burners and a replacement kiln shed.
A third grant, received this spring, is funding improved ventilation hoods over the electric kilns.
None of it is flashy. All of it, Smallwood said, is about ensuring the studio can run for another 60 years.
“Some things have been coaxed for very long, living with a nonprofit,” she said with a laugh. “We need quality equipment that’s going to last a long time.”
That ethos of longevity extends to how JBCP thinks about its community. The studio offers six-week classes in wheel-throwing and hand-building — from beginner through level 4 — as well as workshops ranging from a single day to three weeks for those who cannot commit to a longer session. Classes are currently booked through September, with openings through December. The class fee covers clay, tools, glazes and firing; students arrive and create, no gear required.
But Smallwood was quick to note that accessibility means more than an open door. The studio runs a scholarship program — seeded by the first annual fundraiser with Yellow Springs Brewery three years ago — that awards three free class enrollments every six months by lottery to adults in the Miami Valley region who demonstrate financial need.
“Pottery is expensive. There’s no getting around it,” she said. “Being able to provide an opportunity for somebody who can’t afford to do a six-week class is really important to continue our mission.”
Her longer-term goal is something closer to an endowment: sustained funding that could bring class costs down across the board.
The studio also collaborates with the Yellow Springs Senior Center, offering programming for older adults — a natural fit given that hand-building, Smallwood said, is far more accessible for people with back issues or stiffness in their hands than wheel-throwing.
One of the more surprising recent chapters involved a Raku workshop gone sideways. A cable snapped on the aging kiln’s crankshaft just as Smallwood was preparing to fire it; the hood dropped, and the impact finished off burners that were already on their last legs. A small fireball followed — no injuries, but the kiln was done.
Chris and Havilah McGinnis, students who had been taking classes for over a year, were there to witness the whole thing. Weeks later, Chris McGinnis walked into the studio and asked for the shipping address. He had ordered a replacement — a new top-hat Raku kiln from Olympic Kilns in Georgia, valued at approximately $3,800. It now sits hard-lined to the studio’s propane tank, weather-independent and bearing a small plaque in the McGinnises’ honor.
The artist-in-residence program, which Smallwood has actively shaped, reflects the same philosophy of breadth and generosity. The program originated about 12 years ago when founding resident Bruce Grimes lost his personal studio to a fire, and the pottery community rallied. Grimes, now artist-in-residence emeritus, still comes in regularly. Current residents Cathy Mills and Robin Dakin were each brought in to fill specific gaps — Mills for her expertise in glaze chemistry, Dakin for his deep knowledge of primitive firing techniques, which dovetails with JBCP’s new pit kiln program.
“The world of pottery is just enormous,” Smallwood said. “I wanted to make sure that we had new people coming in, bringing new concepts, and ways of working and techniques to the studio.”
What ties all of it together, for Smallwood, is something harder to quantify. She described the studio as a third space — a phrase borrowed from urban sociology that describes somewhere that is neither home nor work, where people simply exist together.
“There’s nothing like finding a third space,” she said. “We have so few third spaces in our world.”
The students and members she hears from most consistently report that since starting pottery, their mental health has improved. The act of working with clay, Smallwood believes, demands a kind of present-tense focus that crowds everything else out.
“They’re able to come here and just set stuff down, leave it at the door, and go play in the mud,” she said.
John Bryan Community Pottery is located at 100 Dayton St. in Yellow Springs. Classes, memberships, scholarship applications and studio information are available at http://www.communitypottery.org or by calling 937-767-9022.
*Alissa Paolella is a local resident and freelance writer for the News.
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