The Clay Art Center Cat Colony

The alleyway behind Clay Art Center is home to a colony of feral cats, who provide amusement and inspiration.

Here at Clay Art Center, we’re fond of our feline friends. The alleyway between the two buildings is home to a colony of feral cats, who come and go as they please, but seem fond of the Clay Art Center as well. While there have always been stray cats in the area, the colony coalesced on Beech Street around 2020 after Jessica Zeng, Program & Sales Coordinator, began to feed the cats in fall of 2020, after staff returned to working in the office full-time. The alley cats happily showed up for food, more and more. “Many other students started to feed them,” Jessica remembered, “and it started to get very messy and chaotic with leftover food in the alley the summer of 2021. Since the alley is part of Clay Art Center's property, this was when I worked with the studio to manage the feeding schedule of the cats, and limit who was able to feed them.” The cats get one meal a day, carefully managed by Jessica and other volunteers. Once the cats began to warm up to friendly faces, Jessica began to implement a trap and release program to get them spayed and neutered. While a few of the cats already had the mark of being spayed or neutered (the tip of one ear being cut), many still needed to go into the vet in order to control the feral cat population. The Humane Society of New Rochelle offers a free Trap-Neuter-Release program for stray cats, and Jessica has already brought six or seven cats to them to date.

After five years of feeding, several of the cats have gotten much more friendly with people, and many Clay Art Center artists and students enjoy interacting with them on a daily basis. Members of our community smile when they spot cats lounging in the alleyway between the two buildings, and for some students and staff the cats have become muses. Longtime student Margaret Beardsley created her Pug Mug in honor of her cat Pug, whom she adopted as a kitten from the alleyway. Margaret also adopted Pug’s sister, named Millie, and together the two Clay Art Center kittens are named for the pug mill. Her Millie Vase, pictured below full of flowers, was a gift to the vet who helped with Millie’s medical care. In addition to caring for the cats, Jessica also finds inspiration in their quirky antics, and enjoys posing her finished pieces in the alleyway with the cats who inspired them. Her entry in the inaugural staff exhibition was a clock entitled Memory of Egg, a memorial piece dedicated to an alley cat named Egg who had recently passed. Many more pieces featuring the cats have passed through the kilns, and many more are sure to come. As Jessica says, “The cats have become part of our community. They don’t belong to us, but they have a home here at Clay Art Center.”

Would you like to help support the alley cats with donations of dry or wet food? Email Jessica at jessica@clayartcenter.org.