Paseo Pottery

Glaze test tiles hang together on one wall of the studio at 1273 Calle de Comercio. Kiln furniture of every size lies stacked flat for reuse, down to the “cookies” set beneath glazed pieces in the kiln. Paseo Pottery keeps a working studio and a gallery under one roof, in a warehouse in the Meow Wolf neighborhood of Santa Fe. By Tourism Santa Fe’s measure the studio floor is 60 feet by 30, with a 15-foot ceiling. On the first Sunday of October 2026 the bisque kiln was emptied to make room for pieces from a Saturday workshop called Objects of Devotion. A Cone 6 glaze firing was cooling, and the Cone 10 kiln was set to be opened Monday morning. The studio calls an unloading day Kiln Christmas, and students come in to claim what came out.

Wheels, kilns, and a lump of clay

Firing here covers raku, cone-6 electric, and cone-10 reduction, and the studio takes part in wood firings elsewhere in New Mexico. Some of its artists dig their own clay in the mountains outside Santa Fe, and more comes from New Mexico Clay. The studio closes for holidays and for an annual clay dig.

In May 2026 owner and creative director Angela Smith Kirkman counted four studio managers, thirty volunteers, twenty-five members, and forty students keeping the place running. More than a hundred non-member students pass through each month. The teachers are volunteers. Emma Jo Wych, a studio manager, took up ceramics in college in Flagstaff, Arizona. Izzie Kirkman, a manager since December 2023, leads the kids’ class. Joan Henderson has made pottery on and off for over 40 years.

For travelers the studio offers a two-hour wheel experience led by a local ceramic artist. It begins with a welcome drink, from the studio’s selection or brought along. A tour of the studio and a demonstration at the wheel follow, and then the students throw. At the end each student shows the finished piece to the class and may take a photograph. Then they take the piece apart and knead it back into the lump of clay it came from. The studio compares the custom to monks blowing away a sand mandala and calls the class “mud therapy.” Each student leaves with $15 toward a piece in the gallery. In the combination class, students spend an hour at the wheel and an hour handbuilding in air-dry clay, and they take the handbuilt piece home.

Painted pottery needs no reservation: pick a piece of bisqueware from the shelves and paint it. For Halloween 2026 the studio set two painted-pottery parties, October 24 and October 31, on pumpkin-shaped bisqueware, with a free canned Tumbleroot drink for adults who come in costume. The three-hour raku experience finishes pots straight from the kiln. Students can glaze a piece and finish it in a can of combustibles, or decorate it with horsehair and other materials as soon as it leaves the kiln.

Locals take six-week classes on the wheel, in handbuilding, or both. Each meets for two and a half hours a week. A teacher demonstrates for the first 30 to 45 minutes, then works with students one by one. Students begin with wet clay and move on to trimming leather-hard pieces. The last session is a glaze night and potluck. Ace Gabrentina, born and raised in Sorsogon, Philippines, makes work about Filipino and American cultures and the ways migration shapes identity. He began a Sunday wheel class on October 11, 2026. Michelle Perrin turned to clay after retiring in 2023 and began volunteering and teaching at the studio in 2025. She teaches pinch, coil, and slab building on Wednesdays. Specialty workshops have covered teapots, nerikomi, cruets, glaze chemistry, and kurinuki, a Japanese method of carving and hollowing a vessel from a solid block of clay. Children come to Mud Mates after school, alone or with a parent. Susan McDuffie leads the camps held over fall, winter, and spring breaks.

The gallery sells pots made by the teachers and hangs a rotating group show of regional ceramics, with openings on Fridays from 5 to 8 p.m. The 2026 shows began with Love of Kitchen, a show of tableware. Next came Waiting for Rain, about the long heat of a New Mexico summer before the monsoon, in blues, grays, and storm-toned neutrals. Wild Creatures, on animals, hangs through October 31. The annual 200 Mugs show opens Friday, November 6, 2026, and runs to January 29. A second outlet, Tumbleroot Pottery Pub at 135 W. Palace Avenue near the Plaza, combines a pottery gallery, a craft-cocktail bar, and a maker space. Kirkman runs it as well. Her husband, Jason Kirkman, is one of the owners of Tumbleroot Brewery and Distillery.

First Friday Throw Downs

On the first Friday of every month, from 5 to 8 p.m., the studio holds a party for a local nonprofit. During the first hour the nonprofit’s own staff take a free pottery class. From 6 to 8 the wheels open to anyone with a $25 ticket, and volunteers help newcomers at the wheels. Children 3 and under come free, and guests bring their own drinks. The studio’s notice for October 2026 promised wheel and handbuilding demonstrations, music, and libations. Every piece made that night goes back into the clay at the end, and the net proceeds go to the guest nonprofit.

On September 4, 2026, the night featured a blindfolded throwing challenge and raised nearly $700 for the New Mexico Wildlife Center. October 2 benefited Southwestern College’s Tierra Nueva Counseling Center. The posted calendar runs well ahead: Girls Inc. of Santa Fe on November 6, the Santa Fe Animal Shelter & Humane Society on December 4, Gerard’s House on March 5, and Solace Sexual Assault Services on July 2, 2027. By January 2025 the Throw Downs had hosted more than 40 nonprofits and given away over $100,000. In May 2026 the studio told Ceramics Monthly the total stood at over $125,000.

A tiny adobe on Paseo de Peralta

In 1991 three Santa Fe ceramicists, Janet Williams, Mike Walsh, and Ginny Zipperer, founded Paseo Pottery as an artists’ co-op. For decades they worked out throwing techniques and glazes together and sold their pots across the country. They started in a tiny adobe house on Paseo de Peralta, and the street gave the studio its name. In June 2021 Stephany Zambrano, a teen reporter for the Santa Fe New Mexican, visited the studio at 1424 Paseo de Peralta. She described a rustic adobe with shelves of ceramics on every wall. Kirkman put the building’s age at over 100 years. Williams owned both the building and the business.

Kirkman found clay at 18, as a freshman at college in Colorado. “It was never my major,” she told Zambrano, “but I wandered there when I was a freshman and just fell in love with it, and I’ve been doing pottery ever since.” By the studio’s account she had volunteered at Paseo for over 15 years before taking it over. At the start of 2018 Williams retired and sold the business to her, after the New Mexico Small Business Development Center had counseled Kirkman on the purchase. Zipperer retired the same year. Walsh stayed. In 2026 the studio called him “a guiding member of our community,” and the state potters’ association’s January 2025 profile of Kirkman names him as her guru.

Standing Rock, a lease, and a warehouse

The plan took shape in 2017 at Standing Rock, where Kirkman was donating a Thanksgiving meal to the Water Protectors during the protests. She would run a pottery business staffed entirely by volunteers that gave all of its net profits to local nonprofits. “Before that, it was just a straight up for-profit business,” she told the Santa Fe Reporter in January 2022. She takes no salary and pays her own bills through her translation company, Atalaya Global. “It’s a way to use my passion for clay to do something good for the community,” she said in April 2019. The studio has never been a 501(c)(3). In 2026 it described itself as “a socially conscious, for-profit business with a charitable component.”

At first the teachers, students, and customers voted each year on where the money went. The 2019 vote ended in a three-way tie among New Energy Economy, Tewa Women United, and CASA First. The pandemic closed the studio, and for a while there was no income. Kirkman used the time to build an outdoor classroom and start an online gallery. In July 2020 she began a Facebook Live series of 30-minute classes, and one of them carried the $2,000 donation to CASA First.

When Zambrano visited in 2021, the studio had a dozen volunteers, and about half its students were tourists. Claudia Hochverg had begun teaching handbuilding four months earlier, after training with Kirkman. “It’s kinda messy and fun,” she said, and: “I needed to do something for other people.” In the outdoor classroom Brian Crow, visiting from St. Louis with his husband and friends, carried his new piece toward the kiln. The donation totals for the early years vary by account. Kirkman told the New Mexican in June 2021 that the studio had given over $20,000 in its first three years as a charity. She told the Reporter in January 2022 that the figure was over $30,000. The 2021 donation went to The Food Depot.

That January the landlord declined to renew the lease after 30 years on Paseo de Peralta. Volunteers packed the studio while Kirkman looked at warehouses around Siler Road, the Railyard, and the Meow Wolf area. Someone had donated an electric kiln the month before, and she had bought a large gas kiln. The studio found its new location on the day the old lease ran out, in a space three times the size of the adobe. The first Pottery Showdown there, on May 6, benefited The Food Depot, with pottery demonstrations, clay for all comers, and dance music from DJ Chavo.

The Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce named Paseo Pottery its small business of the year in 2025. A state Creative Industries grant paid for portable wheels, and the studio has since set up pop-up pottery at the Canyon Road Summer Walk and the International Folk Art Market. In the May 2026 Ceramics Monthly, Kirkman was photographed holding a set of handbuilt plates of wild-harvested clay, bound for a five-day anagama wood firing.