2024 Holiday Gift Guide: Puerto Rican Pottery Edition

The Anti-Consumer Gift Guide From A Bad Consumer

This is the fourth year that I’ve done my version of a gift guide. Which is more like an anti-consumer holiday guide. I’m a horrible consumer. I rarely buy anything brand new. Except underwears. Last year I started by giving you the tools I use to find vintage cookware. This year I’m gonna give you the tools to find vintage Puerto Rican pottery. Surprise, the tools are exactly the same.

When I was on set shooting my cookbook with the wonderful beautiful talented creative artistic Jillian Knox, who styled my cookbook, we spent a lot of time comparing our vintage treasures. We also spent a lot of time secretly trying to “one up” each other on just how far we’re prepared to go in order to seek the treasure. From 20 miles of annual flea market under the direct summer sun bouncing off asphalt, rain sleet and snow for the cutest Christmas trinkets, blindly wandering into “somewhere called The Valley.” In the end, Jillian won with her commitment to dumpster dive in order to resurrect a Wagner cast iron pan. One day she asked me how I found a little green vintage doily with “Puerto Rico” embroidered on it and she almost didn’t believe me when I told her, “eBay.” She laughed and said I didn’t have to tell her if I didn’t want to, but I was telling her.

There’s actually a pair of white Puerto Rico doilies available right now on eBay.

Some days I’ll just type “Puerto Rico/an” into the eBay search engine and look through the thousands of listings. Yes, it’s time consuming. It’s worth it, depending on the find, a lot of new online sellers are lazy. Reselling is a “turn and burn” operation for them where they don’t even want to include a description, just a brief subject title appeasing the SEO gods.

Sometimes I type in something I’m specifically looking for: Puerto Rican Pottery. But, even that has a niche. Over the years of collecting and learning and reading about art and art history in Puerto Rico, I learned about the pottery culture that monetarily and spiritually fed the island during the 1940s - 1960s. There were several specific pottery houses that lead the way. The eBay search would be: Los Artesanos Pottery, Isla del Sol, and Los Bohios Pottery.

Isla Del Sol is the most sought after, in my personal opinion. They have the most aesthetic of the utilitarian pieces, mostly large planters. Which I have yet to land my hands on.

Los Artesanos is in the middle range when it comes to affordability. Some of the pieces are extremely rare and finding a set even rarer. So rare that they can be seen in the “breakfast” shoot of my cookbook. This was the first thing I “splurged” on when I got the first installment of my book advance.

Los Bohios is a good starter investment because they’re extremely affordable. They’re not as sought after as the other two pottery houses, but if you’re just looking for the nostalgia and to the connection between having a piece of art from Puerto Rico, you could do a lot worse. You’ll mostly find vases and cups.

And it all seemingly (I say this because I have not been able to find any documentation) started with one man, Harold Lansky. While studying at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art, “Hal,” was hired by the Puerto Rican government to develop a ceramics industry.

In December 1947, Hal Lasky was asked by Teodoro Moscoso, architect of the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company's Operation Bootstrap, to come to Puerto Rico to manage a small ceramic operation the Puerto Rican government had recently established. The operation had been supervised originally by the husband and wife team of Edwin Scheier and Mary Goldsmith. In 1948, the operation was privatized and funded by a private bank.

The pottery produced a line of hand-crafted terra cotta dinnerware and artware. Common dinnerware shapes were mugs, cups, tumblers, plates, bowls (covered and uncovered), tureens, casserole dishes, trays, teapots, and pitchers. Artware shapes included vases of various sizes, ashtrays, hooded candle holders, planters, incense pots, candelabra, and lamp bases.

The most common design patterns are sgraffito—shapes, symbols, and stylized figures of fruit and animals. Less common are inscriptions in English and Spanish or contours of human faces.

Although all pieces were pressed, not thrown, each piece was individually designed, painted, and wood-fired—unique forms of art on their own. Lasky developed a one-step firing process that enabled him to produce pottery inexpensively and quickly.

There’s not much information online about Hal and his influence on ceramics in Puerto Rico. I did manage to find two interviews on an obscure website called VaseFinder. Unfortunately, the links are dead. If anyone can locate Hal Lasky: History of the Puerto Rican Pottery Part One and Two, you’d be doing me a solid.

Originally, Edwin Scheier and Mary Goldsmith, husband and wife, supervised the ceramics operation. But, whoever had the pocket book must have not been happy with the results. Edwin and Mary spent a lot of time in Oaxaca studying the techniques of the Zapotec. Their work would reflect this. This is when Hal was sent in to redirect things. When Hal arrived in Puerto Rico he said, “the first thing I did was to take away all the Pre-Columbian patterns they had been working with and in my halting Spanish told them they were now free to design anything they wanted at any time.”

“Little by little I began encouraging them to use 'found tools': a broken hair comb - I picked up from the floor in front of them, used and discarded pencils - showing them the faceted sides and rounded eraser end as options. One of the best tools turned out to be old-fashioned hairpins women wore in the forties. What emerged was an expression which can properly be described as a considerable leap beyond sgraffito.

…Each person signed their own design work and had the satisfaction of seeing their initials permanently fired into their pieces. They were free at any time to stop any work they were doing and create their own designs.”

This is why you might find different pieces floating around in the market signed “P. Ferrera Puerto Rico.” The person on the line was encouraged to take ownership of their creation, turning mass production into a somewhat faux individual identity. When you see the sgraffito markings in a Los Artesanos ashtray, just know it could have been a Puerto Rican woman expressing her creativity with a bobby pin from her hair!

Simultaneously, there was also utilitarian pieces of pottery being made in Puerto Rico designed to be used everyday at the kitchen table.

There’s a great book on all of this called, Caribe China: Window to Modernity.

B. E. Allen and a group of investors founded the Sterling China Company in Wellsville, Ohio, in 1917. During World War II, Sterling supplied a tremendous amount of dinnerware for the armed forces. By the 1950s, Sterling China was one of the three largest vitrified hotel and restaurant ware producers. Its commercial china was used by airlines, hotels, railroad companies, restaurants, and steamship companies.

Sterling China operated a plant in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, between 1951 and 1977. Its Caribe China was made there. Sterling acquired its production facility from the Iroquois China Company.

I have a lot of Caribe China. I love having a piece of history that I don’t have to coddle. I eat off my Caribe China Puerto Rico San Juan Santurce pieces everyday.

Between the utilitarian dinnerware for housewives and more creative pieces for the avant garde, two things came of it: it brought attention to ceramicists already living and creating in Puerto Rico, and it birthed artisans who became notable mid-century modern ceramicists creating their own tallers: Susana Espinosa, Manuel Pagan, Jorge Cancio, Aileen Castañeda…

FIND A CERAMICS STUDIO IN PUERTO RICO IN 2024

Pottery is still alive and well in Puerto Rico. If you find yourself wanting to test if clay runs through your veins like your ancestors, want a place to decompress and zone out, or find some local pottery to purchase…you’re in luck! There’s currently a taller in Guaynabo called House of Dirt. Owned and operated by Ezra and Sage, a Puerto Rican couple who self-identify as “queer, trans, Jewish/Puerto Rican…” who live there with their two cats, Maeve and Otis. They host workshops where each class is focused on a theme; mugs, Christmas ornaments, and monsters!

---

"During this period of time I made it my business to keep away from the work table area where they did the designing. I didn't want even my presence near them to interfere with their own self-expression. I would wait until they had left for the day to go into the damp room where the daily work was placed for slow initial drying to see what creatively had emerged. Imagine, if you will, the profound thrill I would experience as with each ongoing week the design 'personalities' of each would become more strongly expressed so that it was no longer necessary to look for each signature to determine whose work it was." - Hal Lasky