Excavating a Legacy: CCA and the One Ton Pot

In 1973, CCA faculty Viola Frey and Arthur Nelson led students in building the One Ton Pot for the opening of the Noni Eccles Treadwell Ceramics Art Center. Decades later, it ended up under a blackberry bramble in Petaluma. Now excavated, it has returned to campus for its alma mater's closing.

After completion, the pot stood on campus until more space was needed. Alum Meg Walton rescued it, carrying it from Lafayette to a horse ranch in Petaluma, where she stewarded it for Nelson and Frey. It fell over in a windstorm over a decade ago and lay forgotten. Current CCA faculty and friends peeled back the brambles to bring the pot back for the Further Triennial. With students, alumni, and community members, we will rebuild the pot, sculpt new kiln gods, and tell today’s story.

The One Ton Pot's story is one of communal memory and support. Eccles' devotion to ceramics funded a state-of-the-art studio built to Frey's specifications. Alumni donated a ton of clay and let students and instructors run with it. Students inscribed inside jokes, encouragement, and talismans on its sides, while Frey and Nelson filled in technical gaps and sliced the pot into strata to fire the larger-than-life work. As Vernon Coykendahl put it, "I'll fight for anybody I think has the ability." As the pot inscriptions tell us, it is “a strange gift freely given to give”.

Excavating is a collective effort between California College of the Arts and the Artists’ Legacy Foundation. This exhibition is supported by the Deborah and Kenneth Novack Creative Citizens Series, an annual series of public programs focused on creative activism that spans the disciplines of art, design, architecture, and writing.