AACC club sells pottery to increase club funds

AACC+sculpture+students+raise+money+by+selling+their+artwork+at+a+holiday+ceramics+sale+on+campus+Nov.+16.

Daniel Nickerson

AACC sculpture students raise money by selling their artwork at a holiday ceramics sale on campus Nov. 16.

Sanyee Barjogar Jr., Sports Co-Editor

AACC sculpting students raised money in November by selling their pieces at a ceramics holiday sale on campus.

The ceramics sale, hosted by the Ceramics-Keramos Society, a student club, uses the money it raises from the annual sale to pay visiting artists to make presentations to students in the ceramics studio a couple of times a year.

This year’s show will feature 200 pieces from the collection of potter Ebby Malmgren, the mother of the club’s faculty adviser, professor Rick Malmgren.

The professor said his mother, 97, and father, 96, have moved into Ginger Cove, a retirement community in Annapolis.

Ebby Malmgren, who started working with clay in 1960, made many of the pieces, and friends made others, the professor said.

Until 10 years ago, his mother took printmaking classes at AACC in the printmaking program, Malmgren said.

Every couple of years the club pays for students to go to a large educational conference hosted by the National Council on Education in the Ceramic Arts. Their next trip, Malmgren said, will probably be in 2020.

Sculpture students who also sold their artwork at this year’s show said it’s a great way to not only get the funds needed to hire the guest speakers, but to sell their pieces for reasonable prices.

“I think it’s wonderful,” Ottilie Habercam, a seventh-year audit student, said. “Everybody who knows about it comes in, and it’s a great way to involve the entire community, so they can purchase something reasonably and something just handmade.”

“It’s a money-maker,” Bill Flohr, a ninth-year oceanography and ceramics student, said. “It pays for different tools that we need that we can’t get from the college. It also helps people that they bring in for lectures for everyone to demonstrate their ceramic work.”

After 28 years of teaching at AACC, Malmgren will retire this summer.