Andersen Design Vintage In Wiscasset Community Center Show

The entry road to the Center runs next to the sports field to the Wiscasset High School. Traveling on the road headed to Augusta from Wiscasset, the entry road is before on epasses the sports field. There is a red & white sign announcing the show.

The show includes work made by local artisans . We fit into both the vintage and local artisans category and will be displaying both.

For the last several months, I have been photographing our vintage work and publishing it in an Air Table data base. The data base is not yet ready for prime time and so is not yet publicly accessible but we will grant access by special request.

We have 467 pieces documented to date and a lot more to add. This includes everything from mint pieces to broken pieces. During the 65 years in which Andersen Design has been producing ceramic art and design, many one of a kind decorated pieces were created using our slip cast designs as a canvas. Back in the day, when there was no instant documentation technology. the best pieces were quickly sold without a record being made. We got to keep the broken or chipped works. 

Recently I found a box of broken rectangular trays completely blacked with soot, because they had been in a house fire. I washed off the soot and found underneath a jig saw puzzle of decorative ceramic drawings by my mother. They look like an artists sketch pad but they are not as easy to do in ceramics as they look. Ceramics is not a what-you-see-is-what-you-get technology. Colors after being fired look nothing like the un-fired colors. Ceramic colors are also very sensitive to teh weight of application. My mother ( Brenda Andersen)’s drawings looked so spontaneous that one can only presume that she had a very intuitive relationship to the ceramic decorating process. This kind of work is rarely done, especially not in production ceramics, which is why I often say that Andersen Design was doing production as an art form long before it was invented by Andy Warhol.

Although many of our retained works are broken, they represent a larger body of work that is out there across the American landscape, individualistic – one- of- a – kind artists work which has never been recorded for prosperity. This is one task we hope to accomplish through the Andersen Design Museum of American Designer Craftsmen.

So come to the show at WiscassetCommunity Center on Saturday and see what a historical perspective of one of America’s most unusual and classic ceramic design companies looks like. See you there!

Mackenzie