GALLERY ARCHIVES

1979

PINCH POTTERY was founded in Northampton in 1979 by local artists Leslie Ferrin, Mara Superior, and Barbara Walch. Established as a studio and store, Pinch Pottery grew to include the work of numerous artists, potters and craftspeople. 

“It was an incubator,” says Ferrin. It was also the first of many manifestations of Ferrin’s entrepreneurial and community spirit which, coupled with her love of ceramics, became her guiding principles. “We were artists who wanted to sell our own work and [the work of] others who worked in clay in our community,” she says of her goals at the time. “We were exploring what people were doing in the field.”

-Leslie Ferrin, Rural Intelligence, 2023

Pinch Pottery continued to show a wide variety of locally made functional pottery and decorative ceramic art as well as objects for the home by selected artists from throughout the country. A broad collection of contemporary jewelry by over fifty nationally known jewelers continually changed. During the course of a year, over three hundred artists and craftspeople became represented, some with established reputations, others introduced as emerging talents.

Click here to visit Pinch Pottery

2002

In 2002, Leslie Ferrin and business partner, Donald Clark, moved Ferrin Gallery to 69 Church Street in Lenox, MA. This move allowed the gallery to thrive along with the ever-growing cultural tourism in the Berkshires:

“The brick-and-mortar gallery allowed the duo to invest not just in their business, but in community initiatives as well as the bourgeoning careers of local arts professionals. “[Lenox-based artist] Maggie Mailer was our first gallery associate,” she says. Others came to work for Ferrin through the Berkshire Hills Internship Program (BHIP), a now-defunct program of the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. BHIP lured dozens of young, international arts administrators to the region at a time when student retention was low and the county was hemorrhaging young adults. Cities and towns across the Berkshires were leveraging the arts for downtown revitalization in the 2000s, and Ferrin played an important role in this movement — particularly in Pittsfield, where the gallery was located from 2007 to 2013.”

-Rural Intelligence, 2023

2014

In 2014, Ferrin Contemporary opened on the MASS MoCA campus in Building 13. At the time, MASS MoCA was expanding rapidly, the local economy was growing, and the tourism stream to Northern Berkshire County was about to BOOM. Ferrin Gallery became Ferrin Contemporary, and once again, the business adapted to meet the demands of the local and national art worlds. 

Ferrin Contemporary, Building 13 Exterior from Courtyard A

Ferrin Contemporary Building 13 on the MASS MoCA Campus, North Adams, MA

2024

A year ago, Ferrin Contemporary left behind our white-box gallery on the MASS MoCA campus to co-locate the gallery with our offices, library and archives all in one location. Well into our fifth decade working with contemporary ceramic art, Ferrin Contemporary is building on a foundation of curated exhibitions and ongoing projects that were incubated during the nine years we were embedded in the Northern Berkshire museum community. We are now settled in and open to the public at Project Art in Cummington, MA for regularly scheduled events and by appointment. When we left North Adams we turned our attention to focus on projects involving  artists, collectors and collections using our new found flexibility to travel and work remotely, something we could not do only a few short years ago.

The decision to leave the satellite gallery provided Ferrin Contemporary with newfound flexibility to adapt and focus on our primary mission and priority: to support artists to make new works. Without a traditional gallery space to manage, Ferrin Contemporary extended its reach to the wider world through curated exhibitions and specific projects on behalf of a core group of artists. Not only could our team attend and support more events and openings for our represented artists, but we were also able to offer and update the many curated group exhibitions in collaboration with institutions and commercial galleries. This past March, we brought our 2022 exhibition, Our America/Whose America?, to the Valentine Museum in Richmond, VA. The exhibition, installed in the Museum’s historic Wickham House on period furniture, overlapped with the NCECA Conference, ushering in a new wave of support and context for our gallery artists on view. Paul Scott’s New American Scenery traveled north to Shelburne Museum in Vermont where Paul was commissioned to create a new work. This piece was based on ideas developed during on-site research in the first of Shelburne Museum’s artist-activated “interventions” series.

On the road and at institutions in the USA and abroad, Ferrin Contemporary at Project Art also invites visitors to visit our galleries, showrooms, and studios by-appointment. Rotating recent and new works from Ferrin Contemporary artists are available to view and purchase.

We look forward to seeing you.

The Ferrin Team in 2024:

Leslie Ferrin (1978-present)
Alexandra Jelleberg (2014- present)
Isabel Twanmo (2021-present)
Samuel LaPell (2023-present)