WVC Speaks series to feature ceramics professor Sarah Sprouse on April 23

WENATCHEE — In a Wenatchee Valley College ceramics classroom, somewhere between a mug shaped like a sea creature and a carefully thrown bowl, Sarah Sprouse wants her students to feel something shift.

Not mastery, not perfection. Something quieter than that.

“I love the transformative power of art,” the Wenatchee Valley College ceramics instructor said. “Art is universal, and it builds bridges.”

That idea sits at the center of both her classroom and her upcoming lecture, “Modern Craftsmen: Women, Ceramics, and Community in the Pacific Northwest,” part of the WVC Speaks series on April 23.

The free public event, scheduled for 6 p.m. in the Music and Art Center’s Grove Recital Hall, will explore a chapter of modern art history that Sprouse says has often been overlooked, the role women ceramicists played in reshaping both the medium of clay and the broader idea of what art could be.

For Sprouse, that history is not abstract.

Her own path into ceramics began with a single class at the Grünewald Guild in Leavenworth, where she arrived as a painter and left with something entirely different in mind.

“I thought, this is the weirdest, coolest thing ever. I want to do more of this,” she said.

She would go on to earn degrees in art history and ceramics, teach across grade levels and eventually return to North Central Washington, where she now leads the full ceramics program at WVC and serves as director of the Grünewald Guild.

Inside her classroom, that sense of discovery is still the point.

“I really want them to take a playful explorer approach to ceramics,” Sprouse said. “To try something new or something they didn’t think they’d necessarily be able to make.”

The results are not always traditional. Alongside bowls and plates, students produce miniature houses, animal figures, expressive faces and forms inspired as much by social media as by art history.

“We encourage weird art in this classroom,” she said.

That openness reflects something deeper about the medium itself.

“Ceramics is inherently collaborative and community-based,” Sprouse said. “Everyone gets really inspired by each other. We get to witness each other’s wins and how resilient they can be.”

It is also what drew her to the subject she will present in April.

In the years following World War II, women artists who were often excluded from traditional painting and sculpture found space in ceramics, not just to create, but to redefine what counted as art at all.

“They were the teachers,” Sprouse said. “And they were asking, ‘Where can we show our work?’”

The answer, in many cases, was to build something new.

Across the Pacific Northwest and beyond, women ceramicists created their own studios, exhibitions and learning environments, shaping communities that operated outside the traditional structures of the art world.

That shift, from object to process and from product to practice, is at the heart of Sprouse’s lecture and her teaching.

She wants students, and now the broader community, to wrestle with questions that extend beyond clay.

“What is art? What is sculpture? What is craft?” she said.

Those questions continue to guide her own work as well. In recent months, Sprouse has presented at a symposium in Chicago and traveled to Cambridge, England to speak on craft history, with upcoming residencies planned in Mexico City and Japan.

But in Wenatchee, the work often comes back to something simpler.

Clay has a way of grounding people.

It asks them to slow down, to stay present, to make something with their hands and see it take shape.

“I hope that they feel more grounded in who they are and that they’re more capable than they think,” Sprouse said.

The April 23 lecture is free and open to the public, with a question-and-answer session to follow.

Andrew Simpson: 509-433-7626 or andrew@ward.media