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Casey Whittier’s Project Cup is a public library of ceramic vessels housed at Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City. Twenty-five local ceramists contributed cups to the collection. Through an interdisciplinary public event series, ceramic cups were transformed into a platform for community creation and sustainment by potters, poets, and dancers. Adding to the art objects and public events are five paralleling public workshops, an ongoing podcast series, and a publicly accessible archive. Project Cup has fostered a coalescence of voices, enabling diverse communities to blend and interact, producing transformative results, and bringing to light the inherently social nature of making and using ceramic vessels.
Casey is a ceramist, teacher, and social-practice artist based in Kansas City, where she teaches at the Kansas City Art Institute (KCAI). While she works primarily in ceramics, the socially engaged nature of her work developed organically from a lifelong passion for working with others. Clay was a natural route for her to engage with her immediate community and the surrounding environment. But for a long time, she didn’t think of herself as an artist.
Casey grew up in Maine, surrounded by potters who spent most of their time working in rural studios to sell their wares at craft shows. The isolated and product-based nature of ceramics did not appeal to her. She went to college expecting to major in science or the humanities. And yet, the studio pulled her in. During an introductory class at Bennington College, she immediately fit into the team-like atmosphere of the ceramics studio. Her past experience of playing field hockey and basketball taught Casey how to work with others and was a natural parallel to the studio atmosphere. From firing kilns to group critiques, the ceramics studio was a place where her desire to engage with people met her love of creating with the natural world.
Casey soon transferred to the KCAI after receiving a strong recommendation from a professor, Barry Bartlett. In Kansas City, ceramics confidently claimed the full-fledged status of fine art. Art was no longer limited to functional objects; it was socially and politically relevant, with the evocative power to communicate. It was in Kansas City that she encountered social practice as its own concept for the first time. In “Education for Socially Engaged Art,” Pablo Helguera defines socially engaged works of art as those “that feature the experience of their own creation as a central element.” For example, in the creation of pottery, the user has an important role to play.
Casey was one of the first graduates from KCAI with the Community Arts and Learning Certificate, the predecessor to the Social Practice Minor Program, which she helped fully launch in 2020. After completing a BFA in ceramics, Casey moved to Boulder, Colorado, to attend the MFA program in ceramics. In graduate school, she worked with social art programs for youth through the public school system while mentoring high school students for careers in the arts. After that, she came back to Kansas City. That was when she reconnected with Jose Faus, a visual artist, performer, writer, and independent teacher/mentor. He and Casey worked together at a program aimed at youth development through community belonging and creative expression, combining theater, written word, visual art, and dance.
These experiences grounded Casey’s understanding of art as actively engaged with the community. A slurry of diverse influences was fermenting in Casey’s interdisciplinary practice when she was hired as a ceramics teacher at the KCAI. With a perspective grounded firmly in contemporary social practice, she returned to one of humanity’s oldest mediums.
The idea for Project Cup stemmed from a desire to celebrate the role of ceramics in daily life. She says the project aims to “highlight concepts and ideas present in studio ceramics that are accessible to all – but not always shared – and enhanced through interdisciplinary action.” Casey wanted to bring the magic ability of ceramics to generate community with people outside the field. By making the workshops free and the cups not for sale, Project Cup negates cost barriers and capitalist structures, delving instead into the realm of community. As a creative third space, the project serves as a vessel for the intersection of artists, writers, dancers, and community members. Within its collaborative structure, new forms of creativity emerge from a microbiome of interdisciplinary forces.
A Community Effort to Reinvestigate the Cup
Discarded fragments of cups were the source material for “A Community Effort to Reinvestigate the Cup,” Project Cup’s first workshop. Hosted collaboratively with Andrew Casteñeda, a ceramist, photographer, and art director, the free public event gave participants permission to reclaim the act of making vessels – using broken cups as the starting point.
Andrew has long been concerned with containers, whether spinning on the pottery wheel or shooting from behind a camera lens. In his work, vessels serve as sites for the interweaving of many disparate elements. In his project statement, he reflected: “Presentation never reveals everything. Something is always hidden behind the scenes – the outfit you clothe yourself in, the ‘best’ side of a round pot you photograph, the hidden part of the car they don’t pimp on Pimp My Ride.”
For Andrew, vessels are documents imbued with the unique power to contain and preserve reality. To contain or disclose, boundaries between real and fictional, self and other, and private and public are negotiated in each piece. Rather than containing in the traditional sense, Andrew’s cups are vessels for moments, stories, ideas, and identities.
On a windy October day in 2023, hushed chatter and the shuffle of footsteps filled Charlotte Street’s shadowy blackbox auditorium while forty people gathered in the center of the dark, spotlit studio. The front of the room was lined with a row of tables densely packed with heaps of colorful fragments. Participants had been encouraged to bring a cup they wanted to redesign.
“Today,” announced Casey, “We’re going to play.” Gesturing to the tables, she presented a strange vessel made from three pieces. The central cavity was a Rolling Rock Extra Pale Beer bottle sawed cleanly in half. The base was cushioned by a styrofoam ring. The plain earthenware handle was bound tightly to the glass cavity with a fuzzy pipe cleaner and black hot glue.
Equipped with gloves, goggles, towels, and a tub of water, Casey offered to dremel, drill, or hammer any of the objects at our request. We were free to source any material and/or attachment method from the heaps of broken cups and scrap art materials donated to the project for our use. Our only parameter was to make cups.
Across the tables were piled half-empty bottles of acrylic paint and glitter glue. There were crumpled plastic water bottles, stained QuikTrip cups, and takeout containers of odd shapes and sizes. Strips of fabric, strands of film, and clumps of fiber twisted like dense undergrowth. Ceramics had their own section: bubblegum pink melted glass, lumpy mounds of red earth, paper-thin porcelain tea bowls, a tiny terracotta arm, cracked stoneware cups, and opalescent shards of every size.
Everyone rushed to feast from the buffet of glittering objects. Quickly, glue met glass, wire-squeezed plastic, plaster-drenched cotton, and porcelain sprouted pom-poms. Paint flew, and Casey drilled at the tub. Transformed by the frenzy, piles of leftovers gave way to strange, sculptural vessels. With the immense quantity of donated fragments collected for the project, Andrew and Casey generated the perfect source material. From the wreckage of mass-production, Project Cup’s first workshop altered the vessels’ inherent function through the transformative act of communal reimagination.
During the workshop, cups became containers for fragmented and reassembled found objects and materials. Fueled by the desire to imbue discards with a new function, the negotiation between value and function produced works of unbound imagination. The audience, rather than passive consumers or even users of the cups in the traditional sense, were authors with the unique power to turn trash into treasure. The resulting objects reflected the time, place, and people captured by the container of the project. The vessels’ function was to form a community through creative empowerment.
Pottery and Poetry: An Exchange
In Project Cup’s second event, “Pottery and Poetry: An Exchange,” eight potters and poets explored the connection between language and ceramics through a public conversation. Potters Jana Evans, Joe Pintz, Bede Clark, and Margaret Kinkeade sent cups to poets Jordan Stempleman, Huascar Medina, Jose Faus, and Canese Jarboe. They, in turn, composed poems that they read at the November event.
Two chairs occupied the center of the Charlotte Street Library. A row of cups centered the room on a small table between them. The audience was packed in three rows behind and around it. For each pairing of potter and poet, it was their first in-person meeting. While they had come to know the cups in different ways, weaving in their personal experiences and reflections, each cup seemed curiously changed in this new context.
One by one, each potter/poet sat opposite each other at the front of the room, the cup between them. Jordan Stempleman and Jana Evans were the first to take the stage. Jana’s softly square white cup rested on the tabletop. An intricate pattern of teal and black cloaked the throat of its porcelain body. After simple introductions, Jordan read his poem "At Last to Know It," a meditation on the cup with thoughts and reflections of life woven into a flowing tapestry of thought. Written while grading papers from his literature class, On Death and Dying, Jordan now recited:
“Clumped in my office grading essays
on dead things – those innovations long gone
or forgotten, sometimes shown to stink, sometimes
that lost a step, or like most things, became something else –
but distracted by Jana’s off-white jawbone
and glacial flour blue tumbler, now connected
with me and so many by Casey, and that now foregrounds
Salad On the Wind and In God’s Hair.”
Joe and Huascar were next up. Joe’s simple, rough-hewn cup sat with an unassuming intimacy, the rich terracotta clay body sending waves of warmth through the white glaze’s thin, milky surface. Joe’s work revolves around the connection between functionality and our physical and emotional needs. Simply yet tenderly constructed, Joe’s small, palm-sized tea cups contain an irrepressible sense of presence, profound in their child-like honesty. Huascar’s poem, "Broken," begins with lemon tea brewed in Joe’s cup, meandering like a river heavy with thoughts of war running beneath the surface. Written shortly after October 7th, the poem ruminates on the early attacks of the ongoing Israel/Palestine genocide. Like Joe’s simple cup, Huascar’s lines of prose softly yet earnestly question the essential function of human life.
“A hospital is bombed in Gaza – both sides blame each other. What of the children inside.
Who thought they were safe? The ones lying outside, amongst the rubble, on the nightly news; set to a backdrop of apocalypse, between commercials.
What bomb does it take to explode a building into debris the size of broken pottery? What person launches that bomb into innocence? Phosphorus bombs burn at 1500 degrees Fahrenheit. This cup was born at 1950 degrees. Those children are dead today.”
Then, Margaret Kinkeade and Canese Jarboe faced one another. Margaret cups are known for their finely engraved patterns. Echoing quilt designs and folk art, their warm terracotta surfaces hold a wealth of information and experience. Her cups are meant for slow, careful contemplation. Like a poem, the raw yet refined surface embodies both the simplicity and complexity of daily life. In response to Margaret’s cup, Canese shared “On Rarity,” a reflection centered around their siblings’ uncanny ability to find four-leaf clovers in times of uncertainty and despair. The tender hopefulness that flows through Canese’s poem echoes Margaret’s determined etching of half-square-triangle blocks on every inch of the cup’s rough terracotta surface.
“Not even with three brains can we remember
One childhood Something about apricots
Always too green Too sour
Something about protecting themselves Our brains
I mean (My baby brain
Never understood
How you found 5 12
23 four-leaf clovers in an afternoon Sorry I
Am still impatient when you crouch down in Queens
For every green thing Finding one Despite”
Jose Faus was the final reader who shared “Cup Attitude” in response to Bede Clark’s lion-faced cup. Bede, unable to make it, represented himself in the creature rearing from his cup’s surface. Jose’s poem captured the fierceness of the cup itself, its squat grip and frenzied eyes:
“It’s stout and cops an attitude
feels more like a tumbler
like a brawler It will
take on any other cup
It’s gone a few rounds
and been the worse for it
If it were a face it would
have a broken nose
in many places
maybe an eye patch
If it spoke it would growl
menacing protective”
A poem – like a hot cup of tea on a rainy day – creates space for reflection and meditation. Writing poetry shapes the flow of our thoughts, just as making cups shapes the structure of our meals. Information is never neutral. The ideas we give language to have a direct bearing on what we think and how we behave. In the words of Audre Lorde, “[I]t is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are – until the poem – nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.” Poems, like cups, create space to focus the illumination of our inner thoughts, striving to capture truth from the murky depths of lived experience. It is only through this self-examination that we are capable of shaping new vessels to contain our existence.
Movement Workshop
Cups have always been a direct reflection of human needs and bodies. From terms like “lip,” “foot,” and “handle” to the way that cups are made to perfectly fit our hands, our vessels are our lasting self-portraits.
Project Cup’s third workshop featured an interactive dance workshop led by Óscar Trujillo, an embodiment doula and movement theater artist performing between Kansas City and New York. Twenty people in attendance were invited to participate in a series of movement exercises. In Charlotte Street’s warmly lit dance studio, a ring of chairs was encircled by ceramic cups placed carefully on the floor around them.
The room was dark, but for light emitting from ceramic cups, that were placed in a pattern across the floor. Óscar entered the room as the twenty participants gathered fell to a hush. With their back turned to the audience, Óscar lifted their arms and plummeted backward, gracefully turning to meet the ground, then assuming a kneeling pose. Steadily, their movements gained energy, spiraling up and around into a joyful dance around the ring of the audience. Óscar had embodied the process of making Cuban coffee, summoning childhood memories of a cherished family tradition.
Our first assignment was simply to walk. We began moving around the room, encouraged to vary our speed and intensity, make eye contact or not, get close to or move far away from the other people in the room. Suddenly, we became acutely aware of the distance between our bodies.
Next, we found a partner. Our task was to mirror their every movement. At first, we were uncertain, our movements guessing at our partner’s next step. But gradually, we gained confidence, building into a series of movements in sync with one another. The third exercise was collaborative, with each movement building from the last. Twist followed bend, swoop replied to bow, a raised leg acknowledged a raised arm. The final exercise established the direct link between body and vessel. Inspired by the cups lining the room, we interpreted the ceramic form through our increasingly free movements. Vessel volumes were expressed by twisted torsos, crooked arms, bent backs. With a room full of strangers, we had established a language of movement held in the vessels of our bodies.
The workshop culminated with participants split into two groups to choreograph a collaborative performance. The first performance allegorized the making of a large pot. Using a block of wet clay and several of the cups in the room, the first group encircled the raw material, pushing, twisting, and shaping the clay. Working diligently, they embodied the chaos and frenzy of creation, the transformation of raw material.
The second group began by spreading out across the room, completely still. Slowly, one person began to move toward the one closest to them. As they approached, the next person began to move – slowly becoming more animated until the two had joined in a joyful dance. They moved to each following dancer, their approach freeing each from stillness until the entire group had joined in dance, ending by coming to a rest in the center of the room around the clay block.
Enacted simultaneously, the two performances were an embodiment of the creative process: the focus of creation and the joy of collaboration. Like vessels, our bodies’ forms determine their function. By reimagining our bodies as containers, we can regain creative authorship. Our body is the space where we decide what enters. Like potters, we must decide whether we are airtight or porous, whose hands our handles will fit, what volumes we seek to hold. The way we move determines the way we live, and it is through togetherness that we achieve our full potential.
Draw! Sketch! Color! Play!
Drawing has long been an important first step in making pottery. The pot’s silhouette determines the volume and function it is destined to contain. Yet, with the materials, equipment, and technical skill required to produce ceramics, this simple process is often inaccessible to the uninitiated.
Drawing is perhaps the most democratic art form. Requiring only a mark-making tool, drawing was born thousands of years before we began making pots. Today, it remains an almost universal language, spoken throughout life from the gleeful scribbles of toddlers to the furtive doodles of daydreaming adults. In the simple act of creating lines, we take the first step toward constructing our own realities.
Project Cup’s fourth workshop was a drawing lab that explored “the role that the drawing plays in the research, design, and development of ideas and inspiration.” Nine local ceramists were invited to contribute pages that workshop participants could color, cut, embellish, and reimagine with an assembly of everyday drawing tools.
A crowd of forty people was packed into Charlotte Street Foundation’s wooden library. Across the tables laid scissors, glue, paint, colored pencils, crayons, and tape. A flurry of black-and-white printed coloring sheets decorated each place setting. Each coloring sheet contained a drawing submitted by a local artist.
In sculptor Adams Puryear’s drawing, a potter works furiously at a kick-wheel against a flat background densely patterned with cups. Marty Arnold contributed a foldable zine showcasing historical ceramics at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Contemporary Art. Bekah Bliss’s elegant cup silhouettes provide a canvas for color and texture. Mike Cerv’s angular GeoBowl could be cut and folded from the laserjet printout. “Create a cup that contains the world as you see it,” proclaims Chandra DeBuse’s sheet, with a foldable cup template and decorative elements to cut and paste. In “A Garden of Patterns,” Susan Flower invites us to breathe life into a world of dense and dreamy wildlife, including a tortoise, butterflies, mushrooms, and flowers.
The crowded room buzzed with activity, adults as engaged in their work as the young children. Each potter’s lines were brought to life through a variety of colorful interpretations. Some cut out the patterns and filled the silhouettes with color. Others took a more liberal approach, building abstractly from the drawings’ foundation. Central to the event was the transference of authorship from a small group of artists to the public. By providing tools and templates, Casey created a structure that connected people in and outside of ceramics, accessible to people of any age and skill level.
The Art of Drinking
The cup is the form that has changed the least since ancient times. Shaped as a mirror to the human hand, cups have been critical to our survival, giving us the ability to store food and water, share resources, and create community through those vital acts. Our vessels are mirrors of our needs and desires.
Pete Pinnell is a potter who knows this intimately. In his lecture, “The Art of Drinking,” the fifth and final event of Project Cup, Pete illustrated the link between society and the vessels we create. On a gloomy day in early December, Pete’s voice echoed through Charlotte Street’s wood-paneled library:
“Historically, ceramics has been intimately involved with the events and processes of life. It has played an important role in the celebration of births, coming-of-age ceremonies, weddings, and funerals, and it has been placed in our tombs to accompany us to the next life. It has been central to commerce and has almost always been a symbol of status and cultivated living.
"Ceramics has also been involved with the more mundane aspects of life, especially in the storing, preparing, and serving of food. While it’s easy to consider these practical applications of the potter’s art as purely utilitarian, often hidden within these mundane acts are surprisingly powerful aesthetic opportunities. Pottery has long been concerned with finding art in the ordinary.”
Richly textured and singularly crafted, Pete’s pottery is both a meditation on life and an active participant in it. Pete’s pots communicate to the user by pairing painterly, aesthetic language with functional design. By meeting a real need in everyday life, he aims to express a complete idea, designed as a multisensory experience that is both about life and part of it.
The ability to permanently transform mud into pots was discovered at the same time as agriculture, about 10,000 years ago. These two technological breakthroughs transformed everyday life, driving communities to transition from a nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a sedentary, farm-based one. With harvested food to store, kiln-fired ceramics became a fixture in everyday life. Ceramic cups were a reflection of permanent homes, places where food was kept long-term. Ceramics created space for community through rituals around the preparation and sharing of vital resources.
The same raw materials that gave birth to pottery also contained the first forms of writing. The first cuneiform records were etched into soft clay tablets. Words, when written down, had a massive impact on social structure. Like simple clay cups, the ability to contain language allowed us to create complex record-keeping systems, transforming the shape of community through the power of information. Ceramics served as a vessel not only for food and water but also as a medium that enabled trade, laws, religion, history, and poetry.
Pete’s lecture gently emphasized that we’re at a critical point in human history. Ten thousand years after the birth of pottery and agrarian civilization as we know it, our systems have evolved and will continue to evolve to meet our needs. But in that process, we have big decisions to make. What form will our vessels take? Will we be flimsy, unsustainable, and disposable? Or will we be porous, adaptable, and made to last? These decisions impact every level of our lives, and they start at the most basic components of our lives - our cups.
Conclusion
The final facet of Project Cup was a series of studio-visit interviews conducted across the Midwest. Casey visited nine artists’ studios in rural communities across Kansas and Missouri. The interviews were published as an online podcast series through Artaxis, an online community-run ceramic arts platform that Casey helps lead as a board member.
The first studio on her list belonged to Twiggy Cercy. Twiggy is a queer interdisciplinary ceramic artist based in rural Oskaloosa, Kansas. Their work challenges the conservative, unsupportive environment they grew up in through abstract, surreal sculptures and wearables. Clay is a tool to reimagine life experiences through outward self-portraits and a language to connect with a network of queer artists across the world. Momoko Usami-Cotter creates fantastical functional and sculptural work on a farm outside of Marysville, Missouri, with her husband, two children, and two goats. Kyla Strid is a Lawrence-based ceramist whose cups were an integral part of the experience at the coffee shop, Decade, and whose new work is likely to find its way into The Cellar Door in Lawrence, Kansas. Casey visited six other artists and recorded interviews published on an online podcast through Artaxis.
Unlike Casey’s conception of the pottery studio as an isolated space from her formative years, these artists demonstrated a multitude of ways that clay was used to create community. Project Cup represented the evolution of Casey’s understanding of ceramic arts: from where she began, seeing pottery at first as a mere product, confined to isolated studios and craft shows, to where she is now, using clay as a medium to communicate, reimagining art networks by connecting creators across the world. This trajectory is not unique to Casey. The evolution of pottery from a mass-produced object to a socially-engaged fine art reflects the critical role that art has to play in our collective futures.
Much of Casey’s work is fueled by a dynamic in which she creates a conceptual framework and then invites the community to bring it to life. This structure is the thread that connects her ceramics, teaching, and social practice projects. Through her collaborative project structure, Casey’s creative ethos embodies the concept of biomimicry.
Biomimicry is the idea that nature knows best. As a design framework, it encourages us to emulate rather than extract from the natural environment. Nature is modular: through simple, repeating structures, vast networks of living organisms develop into complex, interconnected communities. In the same way, Project Cup’s simple, repeating structure encompassed dozens of local artists and touched more than a hundred participants' lives.
The shape of our vessels reflects our lives, needs, and environments. They also have a reciprocal impact on them. The shape of our vessels – our cups, our homes, our clothes, our cars – determines their function in our lives. The physical objects we surround ourselves with determine the structure and function of our lives, bodies, and thoughts. To face the crisis of overconsumption, waste, and extraction threatening our existence, we must take a more critical – and creative – look at the objects with which we structure our lives. The power to shape those vessels is critical to our ability to recognize our needs and build systems that truly meet them.
With the conclusion of the workshop series, Project Cup will continue to exist as a physical cup repository available for public use at Charlotte Street Foundation, as a podcast hosted digitally by Artaxis, and as a book that provides an open template for other artists. In a society lacking accessible third spaces, Project Cup models the incredible power of art to shape open spaces for learning and connection. Like a fermentation jar, Project Cup’s free public workshops allowed many voices to coalesce, yielding transformative results. Rather than a vacuum-sealed container, the project’s porous structure allowed for the commingling of diverse local communities. By empowering artists and non-artists with the power to create, Project Cup is a vessel to imagine and sustain new forms of creative community.
Casey Whittier earned her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is interested in the metaphorical and philosophical power of visual art and the ways in which the ceramic material creates direct connections between the geology of the earth, basic human needs, and complex metaphysical desires. Whittier teaches ceramics and social practice at the Kansas City Art Institute and works from her home studio. Ceramics Monthly Magazine named her a 2020 Emerging Artist. She serves as board President of Artaxis.org.
To learn more about Project Cup, check out Casey's ArtAxis page here.