Artist Information

Mrs. Lamb at William King Exhibition "Shaping the Earth" in 2008

Nancy Patterson Lamb (b. in Wausau, Wisconsin in 1927)

from Mrs. Lamb's eBay profile (as of Nov. 2012):
My name is Nancy Lamb. For fifty years I have been studying, working, and thinking about clay. Even so, the element of surprise is important in my work. I love the audacity of color, and by contrast, its absence. Mine is a deep commitment to all living things, inspired by the beauty and diversity observed in every plant, animal, and moment in time.

I love to laugh and with my work bring a smile to my world.

In 1954 I set out on a trip that took me around the world in seven years. On a scholarship I first traveled to Denmark, where I spent two years as a guest artist at the Royal Copenhagen Porcelain Manufactory. A year in Finland followed at the Arabia factory in Helsinki. I had an art studio there. Another scholarship permitted me to travel and study throughout Europe, the middle east, India, and Southeast Asia. Seven months later I arrived in Taiwan, where I was offered a job developing dinnerware for export. The ware was a unique product for it's time. Using native clays I taught the Chinese to produce some of the first stoneware dinnerware to come out on the market. In 1961 I returned to the US and with a native of Damascus, Virginia, Albert Mock, founded a factory in Laurel Bloomery, Tennessee, to manufacture hand crafted dinnerware, Iron Mountain Stoneware.

Iron Mountain Stoneware, with my NP signature, was manufactured until 1992. Joe Lamb, my husband and an engineer, worked with me for nearly thirty years. While I designed shapes with clay, created glazes and new dinnerware patterns, Joe took care of the rest of the business, the administration, and the sales. He also fired the kilns. Our three children grew up making forts out of packing boxes and constructing their own dreams with clay.

One of the fortunate people, I travel a path playing with fire, clay, and glaze. The present is so exciting that I don't have time to commit the past to writing. I want to do that, too, but not just yet.

My work is signed with a FLAME over the initials, NP, for Nancy Patterson, my name when I began working with clay in the Los Angeles studio of Albert and Louisa King. That was in 1949, the year before I graduated from the Los Angeles Art Center College of Design. In over fifty years between then and now, flaming NP clay pieces have been made not only in the US, but also in Denmark, Finland, and Taiwan.

Nancy with custom tiles from the Hite kitchen

More about Good Earth (the studio Mrs. Lamb started when Iron Mountain Stoneware closed in 1992)
Good Earth was begun in 1993. Painting with colorful ceramic glazes I decorate and refire ordinary red clay bricks and previously fired tiles. The colors are permanent indoors and outdoors. Decorative bricks are used for pathways, floors, garden walls, kitchens, baths, or any suitable building application.




James (Jim) Kaneko (b. Sacramento, CA in 1923; d. Sacramento, CA in 1999)

Professor James Kaneko

James Kaneko served with distinction in the art department of American River College for 43 years—the longest tenure of any ARC faculty member and was, in fact, the most senior faculty member when he died in March 1999. 

A widely recognized artist in his medium of ceramics, he also was instrumental in establishing and developing the ARC Art Gallery, which was renamed in his honor in 2001 as the James Kaneko Art Gallery at American River College.  According to the Ken Magri article (found below) he would take breaks from American River College to come to Abingdon, Virginia, where he would live and work with Nancy and Sally Patterson at Iron Mountain Stoneware. He also contributed to the art program at the University of Virginia and wrote a book about children's art.

from Ken Magri's article (a fellow art professor at American River College) describing James Kaneko

Who Was James Kaneko?

If any one human could exemplify the qualities of kindness, fairness and insight, which we hope, flourish inside all teachers, James Kaneko was that person. To us in the Art Department he was not just a ceramics teacher. Jim was more like an icon. His tenure at American River College was forty-three and half years, one year less than the age of the college itself.

Born Susumu Kaneko (Go Forth Golden Child) in Sacramento on November 26, 1923, Jim and his brothers were all renamed by a local matriarch who couldn't pronounce their Japanese names. Growing up in the rural pastures of nearby Lincoln, he graduated from Lincoln High in 1941 and Placer Junior College in 1942. Shortly after, however, Jim, like thousands of other patriotic, law abiding Japanese-Americans, was interned by the U.S. government. He was first sent to the Tule Lake encampment near Klamath Falls, then to a facility in Stockton. Stripped of his freedom, his possessions, his family, but not his personal respect, he never showed any bitterness.

Jim wound up settling in Stockton to attend the University of the Pacific, earning a bachelor's degree in 1951 and his master's in 1953. After a short tenure teaching math at Lincoln High, Jim was hired to teach ceramics at American River Junior College, then just a fledgling complex of buildings on the rural edge of Sacramento.

With Jim's guidance, the ARC Art Gallery put on countless exhibitions throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Each year he held student art shows and provided awards for the outstanding entries. He brought back alumni and gave them shows. He gave shows to full time and adjunct faculty. Jim showed out-of-town artists, traditional artists and emerging artists, demonstrating the spirit of cultural diversity.

During his breaks from ARC, Jim taught other teachers ceramics at his Abingdon, Virginia studio. Considered an expert at glazes, his pieces sold at Tiffany's, Marshall Fields, Nieman-Marcus, and Gumps in San Francisco. He was part owner and designer of Iron Mountain Stoneware. He showed works at the famous Candy Store Gallery in Folsom, at the Crocker Art Museum, the Davis Art Center and Jennifer Pauls Gallery. His pieces are in the Smithsonian's permanent collection. He was also a consultant for elementary art for the University of Virginia, and wrote a book on children's art. (In speaking with Nancy Patterson Lamb recently, these last two sentences were written in error.  Jim does not have a piece of stoneware or ceramics in the Smithsonian's permanent collection nor did he write a book on children's art.  Nancy has a piece in the Smithsonian's permanent collection and her sister Sally wrote the children's art book.  I actually remember seeing the art book while I was still teaching in Washington County Schools as an elementary classroom teacher in the days before we had art teachers in all of our buildings for art education.)

To celebrate the college's 40th anniversary, Jim created and gave to ARC the huge ceramic mural, entitled "Ecology", 1999, that currently rests on the south wall of the cafeteria. In characteristic modesty, Jim had to be tugged out from the shadows so the college paper could get a photo of him with the mural at its opening ceremony.

Jim loved ARC. In forty-three and a half years of teaching he never took a day of sick leave. In the end, when sickness got the better of him, he took a leave of absence. He loved his students and his colleagues, often in spite of ourselves. That's why we want his name to grace this gallery.

Kylikki Salmenhaara (b. 1921 in Finland, d. 1981)

Kylikki Salmenhaara

and her connection to Iron Mountain Stoneware and Nancy Lamb

KS are the initials of Kyllikki Salmenhaara, a famous artist from Finland. Kyllikki and Nancy were friends from the time that Nancy worked with Kyllikki in Finland. Kyllikki came to the US and worked in 1967 for three months with Nancy at Iron Mountain stoneware, where she designed the decorations for Huckleberry, Blacksburg, and Whispering Pines, While at Iron Mountain Stoneware Kyllikki made many hand-thrown one-of-a-kind teapots, which she signed. 

from the Designed-in-Finland.com website:
Kyllikki Salmenhaara is remembered first and foremost as a skillful pedagogue, and as a reformer of ceramics teaching in Finland. Salmenhaara began to study at the Department of Ceramics of the Central School of Applied Arts under Elsa Elenius. Her studies were interrupted during the Second World War when Salmenhaara served in a women's auxiliary capacity. She graduated in 1943 and went on to work for three years at the Kauklahti glassworks near Helsinki. Before entering the service of the Arabia factory, Salmenhaara spent a trainee period in Nathalie Grebs's studio in Denmark and worked in Sakari Vapaavuori's studio in Finland.
"Ceramics are not only to be looked at. They should be touches and felt". Kyllikki Salmenhaara's production shows imagnitive flying saucers, robust vases and jugs, some with a close approach to the utilitarian. Sometimes she used brilliant blue copper glazes, but more offen she left her objects unglazed or only partly glazed with lovely beauty spots in the fired clay. 
Kyllikki Salmenhaara worked as a member of Arabia team from 1947 until 1961.
Together with other designers of the Arabia factory's Art Department, Salmenhaara participated in numerous international exhibitions and was often awarded prizes, particularly at the Milan Triennials of 1951-1960. She received the Pro Finlandia medal in 1961. In the autumn of 1963, after Elsa Elenius became ill, Salmenhaara was appointed to carry on the teaching of ceramics at the Ateneum in Helsinki. One of the goals of that period was to bring teaching closer to professional practices and the needs of industry. Salmenhaara began to systematically develop material studies and the teaching of small-scale production methods. Kyllikki Salmenhaara was appointed to Finland's first post as artist professor in the field of design and applied art from 1970 to 1973. She died of cancer in 1981, but her influence has been passed on to later generations of ceramists.