When it comes to an open clay studio, Peacock Clay Collaborative in downtown Fort Pierce is “the only game in town,” says Victoria Beck, one of the gallery’s resident artists.
Beck is justifiably proud of the business that she and her partners in clay – Bridget Abernethy, Martha Cross, Eileen DiTullio and Ginny Piech Street – opened last fall.
There are few places on the Treasure Coast where seasoned clay artists can get some independent studio time, where students of the craft can take classes, and where the creatively curious can indulge in a clay workshop.
Other than a couple of places in Stuart and the classes at the Vero Beach Museum of Art, “I don’t think there’s anything else,” Beck says.
She and the four other Peacock owners – or resident artists, as they call themselves – were assembled around a work table at the North Second Street studio on a recent Saturday, the downtown space that was once the bead shop Baubles and Beads.
“This place is perfect for us,” says Beck. The artists share three adjoining work areas brimming with books, glazes, test tiles, finished pieces and works-in-progress, along the studio’s north wall.
With the exception of a small gallery behind the front windows, the rest of the space is a communal work area that the resident artists share with 15 member artists. Members pay a monthly fee (just like in a gym, says Piech Street) to work on their own anytime during the studio’s open hours.
Members are required to have their own clay tools, but everything else a clay artist needs is right there, including table space and equipment that everyone shares: potter’s wheels, slab rollers and an extruder. Members also enjoy the use of storage space for their in-progress projects. The firing of all clay pieces is done in-house by the resident artists.
The open studio concept works as well as it does because “we’ve been really lucky to have a nice group of members,” says Piech Street, a full-time artist who makes her home in Vero Beach, as do six of the members. The others come to the studio from Port St. Lucie as well as Fort Pierce.
It also helps that the studio’s resident artists have been active individually in the Fort Pierce art scene for years; together they are a tight-knit group.
The resident artists with the highest profiles in the community are Eileen DiTullio, who teaches ceramics at Lincoln Park Academy, and Martha Cross, an art teacher at John Carroll High School. They have been friends since the 1970s.
“If you walk down the street in Fort Pierce you will either run into a student of Martha’s or a student of Eileen’s,” Piech Street teases.
In addition to producing their own work at Peacock Clay Collaborative, the two instruct classes at the studio. Cross, whose forte is hand-built sculpture, has a painterly glaze technique that is particularly effective on her series of biomorphic forms. She teaches a children’s clay class on Saturday mornings. DiTullio, known for her elegant bowls, vases and boxes as well as her sea life-inspired sculpture, teaches a weekly evening class in wheel-throwing for adults.
Beck can personally attest to DiTullio’s teaching skills; back in middle school she was a student in DiTullio’s art class.
“That was the class from hell,” mutters DiTullio.
That prompts a protest from Beck. “But I was the golden child!”
Apparently, she was. “Vicky had a great portfolio in high school,” DiTullio says of Beck, who won a scholarship to the Florida School of the Arts in Palatka.
Beck went on to earn a degree in art education at the University of Central Florida, and a Master of Science in clinical art therapy at Long Island University. She is currently employed as a children’s art therapist at an in-patient mental health facility.
Beck’s art work tends toward fantasy. On display at Peacock are two stoneware female torsos decked out in savage clay finery. One of them wears a skimpy number trimmed with real feathers that a certain warrior princess might give her eye teeth for. Beck teaches workshops in clay at the studio.
Abernethy, who has a long history of volunteerism in the arts in Fort Pierce, acts as Peacock’s bookkeeper. Her work in clay features slab-built forms pierced with geometric shapes.
Piech Street admits to spending “pretty much most” of her time at the studio.
When she is not teaching a weekly hand-building class or working as its de facto facilities manager, she spends her Peacock time on her own work. In addition to completing private commissions, Piech Street is known for her large, semi-abstract totem sculptures and her current line of quirky bird figurines, each with its own open-edition number and “travel box.”
With the other resident artists and members, Piece Street exhibits and sells her work at Peacock Clay Collaborative. She is also an exhibiting artist at Flametree Clay Gallery in downtown Vero Beach, where DiTullio also showed her work for a time.
In Fort Pierce, the forerunner of Peacock was Wildfire Clay Studio, which DiTullio opened as her private work space in December 2012. It didn’t take long for the studio to go co-op, however; Abernathy, Beck, and Cross along with six others joined DiTullio at Wildfire, while Piech Street “kind of floating in and out.”
Wildfire closed a few months later. The present group reformed as Peacock Clay Collaborative in September of last year.
At that time the group rented second-floor space in downtown Fort Pierce’s art studio haven in the former Sun Trust Bank building. But that space proved barely workable for the group, which had to roll carts filled with fragile green ware out of the building and across the parking lot to the bank’s tiny drive-through, where their kiln was installed. And while some people knew about Peacock’s location – one flight up on the building’s mezzanine – the spot was not conducive to walk-in traffic.
The move to Peacock’s current location gave its resident artists everything they hoped for: a place to show and sell their work, offer classes, and have a kiln along with studio space.
Tucked between two home goods stores along a busy stretch of the downtown, Peacock Clay Collaborative is easy for shoppers and students to find.
“We fit right into that,” says Cross.