Daniel Johnston: A Portrait of the Artist as a Potter in North Carolina by Henry Glassie
Daniel Johnston is not your typical potter, and Henry Glassie is not your typical writer. Thus, this is not your typical pottery book
t was back in March that, seemingly on the same day, I got three bits of news; George Ohr had pots at the MoMA, Svend Bayer had announced his retirement, and Daniel Johnston had just had a book published about him. George E. Ohr, the self-styled ‘Mad Potter of Biloxi’, was a John Brown-type figure of Southern Pottery, leading a one man revolution of avant-garde ceramic form, despite never being recognized in his lifetime. Functional Pottery rarely gets noticed outside it’s own small compass, and so for the granddaddy Mud Dauber to be shown alongside Van Gogh under the banner of Modern Art was a watershed moment for working potters everywhere. Svend Bayer, on the other hand, has had a career as monumental as his forms while living, and was idiosyncratically calling it quits well before he necessarily had to. Potters rarely take a formal retirement, and a star was passing from
