American Craft
Ceramist Gregg Moore collaborates with chefs—and the land—to create custom dishes that reflect everything from sustainable farming to police brutality to the Chilean coastline.
NEW YORK TIMES T-MAGAZINE
“Together, the chef and potter conceived the purest distillation of the farm’s whole-animal philosophy: china made from the bones of its own cows. Barber would raise the cows on pasture, as always, and after slaughtering them for meat, he’d give the bones (mostly femurs, their marrow consumed) to Moore, who would transform them into tableware.”
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
“Two Philly chefs and a ceramics artist are collaborating for a New York restaurant series. Philly chefs Omar Tate and Shola Olunloyo tell food stories of West Africa and the Black American diaspora at the Stone Barns Center.”
by Craig LaBan
DAN BARBER and GREGG MOORE, interviewed by Glenn Adamson.
Dan Barber, a leading voice on local food and sustainability and the ceramist Gregg Moore discuss how their conversations and Gregg’s craftsmanship draw on the materiality of the farm landscape to provide a deeply thoughtful and aesthetically resolved dining experience.
Soil, Stone, Bone
Exhibition Essay by Kate Thomas
In early colonial America, when winter closed in, farmers and their cattle were shut inside. As the earth slept, the farmers swapped the plow for the potter’s wheel, making vessels from clay dug from their own land. What they made were basic earthenware forms, rustic enough for the British to turn a blind eye to their rule that ceramics be imported. And so the same hand that had cultivated the meat and plant-life on the farm, turned the pots that served and stored food. The farmer was a potter. The potter was a cook. The cook was a farmer. The farmer was a potter.