Stories from Community Arts: A Successful Summer
As summer draws to a close, we look back on the stories that made the summer great, from Summer Camp to veteran clay classes.
This past summer has been a busy one at Clay Art Center. With warm, sunny days and school out of session, summer is the perfect season to slow down and unwind with clay. Our Community Arts team has made the most of it, from participating in beloved community events like Port Chester Day, to offering our first onsite, multi-week clay class for veterans. Clay Art Center’s annual Summer Camp was full of young students eager to try their hand at sculpture or the potter’s wheel, some of them for the first time, and a committed crew of summer interns and camp assistants got hands-on experience and valuable professional development. You can hear more about our successful clay summer below.
Summer Camp
Each summer, the classrooms at Clay Art Center fill with students ages 7-15 excited to learn about clay, make new friends, and explore their imagination. This year, 135 of those students attended camp with a scholarship supported by the Creative Access Fund. Younger campers worked on sculpting pieces inspired by animals real and imagined, scenes from their favorite books, and art cultures from around the world. They focused on learning bedrock ceramic skills, including pinching, coiling, scratch and attaching, and managing moisture in clay. Students in the ages 12-15 camp worked at the pottery wheel, learning to center their clay, throw even walls, alter their pieces off the wheel, and make considered glazing choices. Campers of all ages visited the Clay Art Center Gallery and Shop to learn more about exhibitions and to get inspiration for their own work back in the studios.
Summer Interns & Camp Assistants
This summer, Clay Art Center welcomed four interns and six camp assistants, all current Port Chester High School students or recent graduates. The summer interns helped keep many projects moving this summer, including studio maintenance and upkeep and large-scale community mosaics, while our camp assistants worked with teachers to make classes run smoothly. Their contributions make the busy summer season easier to manage, while they gain professional development and paid work experience in a field that interests them. Thank you to our summer interns Maria Garcia Ledama, Luis Diaz, Valentina Tapia, and Teresa Vincent for all the work they did reclaiming clay, packing ceramics for pickup, sponging and stamping pieces, and tidying studio spaces, and to our camp assistants Alexa Zhagui, Isaith Lucero, Ashley Gutierrez, Lindsay Buitron, Gabriela Suquilanda, and Evolett Carias for ensuring campers have individualized attention and the teachers are supported! All of Clay Art Center’s summer intern and camp assistant positions are funded in part by the Westchester Youth Bureau and the Common Sense Fund.
G.I. Throw
Clay Art Center also hosted its first onsite, multi-week clay class for veterans. As our veterans programming has grown in the past year, our Community Arts team has offered multiple one-time classes and multi-week classes at Veteran’s Associations and colleges across the region. This summer marked the inaugural class of G.I. Throw, a seven-week-long wheel throwing class for active-duty service members and military veterans. The course was completely free, and students learned to throw on the wheel, trim and glaze their pieces, and different ceramics finishing techniques, all while building a sense of community with other veterans. Community Arts & Offsite Programs Manager Brian Barry noted that the community feeling in the class was almost immediate: “In just seven weeks, they built a level of camaraderie that most classes take years to achieve. They were so encouraging of one another’s work, and joked around like they had known each other for years.”
Are you a veteran interested in G.I. Throw? Fill out this Google form - the next session begins October 5th!
Port Chester Day
Port Chester Day 2026 was an amazing community gathering and celebration of what makes this town so special. Between the live music, food trucks, drone light show, and all sorts of other activities and games, plenty of visitors made it to the Clay Art Center clay table, where they could spend some time sculpting a ball of clay and learn more about our programs. We also celebrated the day by opening registration for Around the World in Clay, our free afterschool program for Port Chester public school students. Thank you to everyone who stopped by the clay table, and we hope to see even more familiar faces back in the classrooms for Around the World in Clay!