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2026 Berkshire Pottery Tour
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WHEN: September 26 and 27, from 10 - 5 each day
WHERE: 8 Venues around South Berkshire County
WHAT: The Berkshire Pottery Tour is a weekend-long open studio featuring 7 local studio potters/ceramic artists, with each potter hosting at least one guest.
Paula Shalan pottery
CBS Sunday Morning story on Michael Marcus and his pottery:
Harrison Levenstein Pottery.
Daniel Bellow Pottery.
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Pottery is Trending
Clay is “having a moment.”
So say the Berkshire County potter organizers of this year’s 13th iteration of the self-guided Berkshire Pottery Tour, taking place over the weekend of September 26-27. In the past few years ceramics have moved from the self-contained world of art school studios into the cultural mainstream, including reality television, celebrity hobbies and even toilet paper commercials.
The seven participating potters in this year’s tour — Daniel Bellows, Lorimer Burns, Ben Evans, Ellen Grenadier, Harry Levenstein, Michael Marcus, and Paula Shalan — will open their studio doors for visitors to see up close where and how the magic happens and purchase work directly from the artist. The tour this year extends from Richmond in the northwest to Monterey in the southeast, with eight stops along the way including Berkshire Art Center in Stockbridge. Each artist is also hosting a guest artist.
Harry Levenstein, new host for 2026, credits the TV show The Great Pottery Throw Down with educating the greater public about his craft and giving them insider lingo to use as they approach his stand at the farmer’s market.
“People come to my booth with this level of vocabulary that people never had in the past,” says Levenstein. “They’re like, ‘Look at the foot.’ Even if they’ve never touched clay.”
In South Berkshire County pottery’s moment in the sun is landing in particularly fertile ground.
Why the tour, why now
While this region has a long history of home-based artisanal handcrafts, the potters who started the tour — Paula Shalan, Daniel Bellow, Ben Evans, Lorimer Burns, Ben Krupka, and Ellen Krupka — were partly inspired by tours they’d experienced elsewhere. Ellen had done a pottery tour in the St. Croix River Valley in Minnesota. The idea, Ben Evans thought, translated naturally to a region that already had, as he puts it, “this little niche of wonderful ceramic art.”
Harry, Ben, and Ellen, in an interview about this year’s weekend, said that what makes the Berkshire tour distinctive is its creative range, since the local studios represent genuinely different approaches to the medium.
Harry uses a wood-fired process where the unpredictable chemical interactions in the days-long fire produce the only glaze the piece needs.
Ellen Grenadier works with natural materials — Queen Anne’s lace, ginkgo, ferns, willow — pressing them into clay to create pieces that carry the imprint of the local landscape.
Ben Evans finds that visitors are interested in being walked through his process, which includes mold-making, from “prototype to mold to piece. . . . You don’t typically see that in a beginners’ pottery class.”
Hunger for the handmade
Local potters have a theory about why ceramics are having a moment that has nothing to do with the spotlight shone by the reality show. They say they see a growing hunger for experiences that are tangible and uniquely human in a world that is increasingly neither.
“There’s also a response to the digital era,” Harry says. “There’s this rally against AI, and people are wanting to get back to more hands-on experiences and jobs and hobbies that are not digital.” He also credits the positive byproduct Covid era, when people were cooped up and were motivated to pick up new skills.
Ellen Grenadier is thrilled with people’s newfound “fascination” with ceramics” and their hunger to “see what’s being made and how it’s made, and hear the potters talk about their love, and why they do it, and their process.” Her clientele, she says, are mostly long-time, serious collectors who were passionate about the art form long before it caught on in the zeitgeist.
Ben frames the reasons for the public’s increased interest in his field slightly differently. He sees a piece of pottery as a small but powerful antidote to our culture of mindless consumption and waste.
Buying something that’s enduring, with which you have a personal connection, “adds these little moments of beauty to your everyday experience,” he says. The potters shared anecdotes about particular items — a small vase, a mug - which serve exactly that connective and enriching purpose.
The open studio model is also, for these potters, a refreshing alternative to the traditional craft fair circuit, with its expensive booth fees, exhausting logistics, and the anxiety of packing fragile things into a van and driving them somewhere far away, to interact with people you won’t see again. “We spend so much time schlepping. It’s great to have a chance to do this at home, in our community.”
More than one thousand people came through last year.
What to expect
The tour runs 10am to 5pm both days. It’s free and self-guided, and snacks and drinks of various kinds will be available at the studios. Children are welcome, and there will be some hands-on activities to engage them along the way, too.
The drive between the northernmost and southernmost stops is about 45 minutes.
Just follow the orange, white and black lawn signs.